My mother saw Pierre as a workaholic, a man whose identity appeared defined by his devotion to his country. In a manner, of course, it was. But his devotion to his kids was equally strong. For her part, my mother missed the highly social environment she had thrived in as one of five daughters in a vibrant and gregarious West Coast family. Throughout her childhood, the Sinclairs’ West Vancouver home had been a social hub, with friends and family dropping in for impromptu drinks and dinners followed by hours of laughter, storytelling, and sharing recipes. She grew up among people whose personal goal appeared to be harvesting as much joy from life as possible, seizing the day in the manner that marks so much of life in the West.
Such a lifestyle proved impossible at 24 Sussex, a huge and drafty house that Mom called “the crown jewel of the federal penitentiary system.” At other times, she compared the residence to a convent and herself to its mother superior, presiding over seven often lonely female staff who carried out cleaning and cooking duties, plus a succession of wonderful nannies assigned to help raise my brothers and me. (Among them, Diane Lavergne, Leslie Kimberley, Monica Mallon, and Leslie’s sister Vicki were delightful women who cared for us boys with an affection and wisdom I will always appreciate.)
As I would learn from growing up in Ottawa, political leaders and their families are surrounded by people whose job it is to make life easier for them. It’s one of the reasons that politicians sometimes develop a sense of entitlement. (I’m not immune myself. I once distractedly handed a buddy my coat as we arrived at a social gathering. It was draped back over my own head mere seconds later. He was a true friend.) My parents did their best to insulate my brothers and me from any assumption of special entitlement by making sure we appreciated everyone around us for the real human beings they were.
Despite her resentment over some of the strict traditions that life at 24 Sussex appeared to dictate, my mother valued many conventional, even stereotypical, aspects of being a wife and mother. She was a talented cook who often made her own bread and even, at times, delighted in performing the domestic chores of doing laundry and cleaning house. More than once, if the mood struck her, she instructed the domestic staff at 24 Sussex to take the day off and she would do their jobs herself. “I’m a nester,” she would describe herself, while bemoaning the fact that few places existed where nest-building was more challenging and less appropriate than the prime minister’s residence.
My father’s life was strictly regimented and almost monastic, working as he did from eight thirty in the morning until six in the evening, when he would arrive home to eat dinner and spend time with his children. The balance of the evening saw him hidden away in his office, reviewing cabinet papers. Those trips to the theatre or the ballet, cultural events that my mother treasured, grew rare to the point of being almost non-existent. When they did occur, they tended to be drenched in such heavy protocol and formal obligations that much of the anticipation and joy was lost.
Once, shortly after I was born, my mother grew so desperate that she dashed out of the house with me in a stroller, leaving her security detail behind, just to spend some time free of the restrictions of being the prime minister’s wife. When Pierre found out, he was both furious and fearful. Her behaviour exemplified exactly the sort of spontaneous, free-spirited, seize-the-day attitude that had first attracted him to Margaret. But the life they were leading at 24 Sussex didn’t permit that sort of spontaneity. An unprotected prime minister’s wife and small child were a ripe target for kidnappers, or even terrorists. My birth came just a year after the October Crisis, when the FLQ kidnapped British trade commissioner James Cross and murdered Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte. The idea of someone seizing Margaret and me was hardly unthinkable.
My parents dealt with the collapse of their marriage in different ways. The effect on my mother was centrifugal: the emotional impact flung her away and outward, to other countries and other people. My father turned inward, accepting in his Jesuitical way that a normal family unit was not for him. In its place he focused his monastic perfectionism on his work and his children.
As for me, I remember the bad times as a succession of painful emotional snapshots: Me walking into the library at 24 Sussex, seeing my mother in tears and hearing her talk about leaving while my father stood facing her, stern and ashen. Discovering she no longer called 24 Sussex her home. Seeing headlines in newspapers about my parents’ breakup. Trying to deal with the reality and often failing.
Many children of divorced parents will say they felt guilty about the end of their parents’ marriage, because they believed it was their fault that their parents couldn’t live together under one roof. I don’t think I ever had that guilt. I knew, even then, that the demands imposed by the life my parents were leading affected them far more than the ordinary stress of parenthood.
What I felt instead was a sense of diminished self-worth. A part of me thought I should have been reason enough for her to stay. Sometimes, hearing my parents yelling at each other, I would escape into an Archie comic. I would dream of growing up in mythical Riverdale, where none of the parents divorced, and where my biggest problem would be choosing between Betty and Veronica.
During this period I truly got the reading bug, and the habit has stuck with me in my adult life. Escaping into the printed page was one of the few ways I had to block out the dark drama in my parents’ marriage. I quickly advanced well beyond Archie. Before I turned ten, I had discovered how to travel to Narnia, laugh at Le petit Nicolas, explore Le Guin’s wizard isles, and poach pheasants with Danny, the Champion of the World. I tore through books as fast as I could get my hands on them.
At thirteen, I went to my mom and told her I wanted to read something adult, and she responded by giving me a copy of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. I devoured it, somewhat to my father’s chagrin, as we toured around the Gaspé Peninsula with my brothers the summer he left politics. From that point on, my reading tastes through my youth could best be described as eclectic, running the literary gamut. I was a sponge. I read everything from Tolkien to Tom Clancy, from la Comtesse de Ségur to Jilly Cooper, from Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin to the cheesepulp ninja novels of Eric Van Lustbader. When my grandmother handed me Jean Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear and The Valley of Horses, I immersed myself in a prehistoric world of discovery and adventure. From there, it was on to the classics of science fiction and sword-and-sorcery that my friends were pressing on me: Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein, and, of course, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, whose opening paragraphs I have committed to memory. Every one of these books remains with me, lining my library shelves until my own children are old enough to learn about tesseracts, the Three Laws of Robotics, and the unique qualities of Vogon poetry.
Like many compulsive readers, I began to see the world through a narrative lens. Reading fiction alerts you to the realization that everyone around you is the hero of their own story. It’s the kind of revelation that can change a young person’s view of the world around them in ways they don’t expect, and open their eyes to a new awareness of humanity. It affected me that way.
While travelling to the 1983 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in New Delhi, my dad and I stopped in Bangladesh to inspect a dam project being built, in part, with Canadian foreign aid. On the way in from the airport with the Canadian delegation, we drove through the Bangladeshi capital city of Dhaka, where we became hopelessly snarled in traffic. I was in the back of a government car that was frozen, like the rest of the motorcade, on a main road outside one of Asia’s largest and most bustling cities. Everything and everyone around us had to wait until the traffic could move again. I looked out the side window of the car to see an older man standing with his bicycle waiting for the motorcade to move so he could cross the street. His face lined with age, he wore the weary expression of someone resigned to this kind of disruption. I remember watching him for those seconds that our paths intersected, and feeling an od
d pang to realize that I would never know his story—where he had come from, where he was going, what his life was, with all the events, dreams, and anxieties that made him every bit as real and as important as I was to myself. And it struck me suddenly that he and I were just two among billions upon billions of people on this planet. Every one of us deserved to be seen as an individual, and every one of us had a story to tell.
It’s not unusual, I imagine, for twelve-year-olds to have these kinds of epiphanies. Some may forget them in the next instant while others recognize that their view of life has changed within the last few moments. I had this second response. Of all the lasting memories I have of that voyage, and many other incredible trips with my father, that one—glimpsing the narrow but deep chasm between myself, the product of a privileged childhood, and the elderly man whose most valued possession may have been the rusting bicycle he had been forced to dismount—has stuck. I have never looked at my life and my circumstances in quite the same way since.
During this period I came to appreciate the widening difference between my personality and Sacha’s. My brother was then, as now, a faithful intellectual disciple of my father—a man who rarely read a novel unless the author happened to be a famous French philosopher. My father even looked down on modern classics such as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Such books were, in his words, “something less than true literature.” The works of Alexandre Dumas and the detective stories of Arthur Conan Doyle were the closest things to popular fiction he ever suggested I read. Once, when he upbraided me for reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan stories, I protested that the work was a classic. He retorted that it was classic crap.
It may have been an act of rebellion, but I refused to accept his view of literature. To my teenage mind, it was beyond comprehension that anyone could be anything but enthralled by the novels of Stephen King. Sacha and my dad disagreed with me. To them, books like The Stand and the novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption were catalogues of things that someone had made up and nothing more. When Sach asked for books from my parents on his birthday, his choices were encyclopedias and atlases. We should have had an inkling, even then, that he would go on to become a documentary filmmaker.
Sacha and I argued often about the value of different kinds of literature, which forced me to articulate what it was about fiction that I loved so much. I would agree that encyclopedias could teach me facts, but only a great story could transport me into the mind of another person. These stories taught me about empathy, about good and evil, about love and sorrow. My tastes covered many different genres, but the books I loved most proposed the idea that ordinary people (not to mention hobbits) are born with the capability to do extraordinary, even heroic things. The realization came as a sort of coda to all the lessons my parents had taught me about looking beyond wealth and appearances, and appreciating the worth of everyone I met.
It’s a lesson that sticks with me to this day. No real leader can see the people around them as static creatures. If you cannot see the potential in the people around you, it’s impossible to rouse them to great things. That may be one of the reasons why, even now, I always make time for a novel or two every month, amongst the mountains of serious works and briefing notes. Facts may fuel a leader’s intellect. But literature fuels the soul.
My mother’s mental health deteriorated as I grew older. And there were times that I began to feel that I had to take care of her, rather than the reverse.
One day, a few years after my mother had moved out and was seeing a nice guy named Jimmy, she arrived at my school while I was in gym class saying she had to see me, she needed to talk to me, I must listen to her. In the school hallway she seized my shoulders and through her tears said, “Jimmy’s left me! He’s gone! He even took his TV!”
I did my best to console her, giving her hugs and patting her back and telling her it was all right, that things would get better. I was eleven years old.
These were painful episodes. I loved my mother as much as any child can, and seeing her in agony was as distressing as you can imagine. But it was also enlightening. It allowed me to realize that she, and parents in general, are fallible, that grown-ups aren’t perfect. Within ourselves we remain children in many ways. The fears we experience early in life may be overcome with age and maturity, but they still remain, like skeletons locked in closets. During the worst stages of my mother’s illness her fears and her nightmares were in many ways those of children. I don’t believe she was that different from other adults her age, only that her symptoms unlocked all those closed closet doors, permitting the skeletons to stumble out and wander through her mind unescorted.
And here was another startling contrast between my parents. My mother’s challenge was to deal with her emotions, and I became caught up in that process. My father’s approach, which he encouraged me to practise, had little or nothing to do with emotions. It was exclusively intellectual. This was the frame he allowed for his own problems—thinking them through intellectually. At one point, he handed me a copy of Alice Miller’s classic The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self.
If you’re not familiar with it, the book examines children who take extraordinary steps to adapt to emotional agonies they experience. It made me realize that I had dealt with my parents’ breakup by constantly seeking their approval. I had looked for ways to please them by being the good son, in hopes that this might make everything better. But it didn’t, of course.
In the tabloid version of events, our mother abandoned Sacha, Michel, and me so she could turn her life into one endless party. The reality was far more complicated. My mother did not vacate our lives totally; rather, she moved in and out of our lives for an extended time. She would often stay overnight at 24 Sussex, sleeping in her old sewing room.
She and I shared a close mother-child bond, and I appreciated that she treated me in a special way—not because I was the firstborn but because she sensed that I had inherited much of her personality, including her zest for adventure, her joy in spontaneity, and her need to connect emotionally with the people around her.
Whenever I knew my mother was on her way to visit 24 Sussex, I could barely contain my excitement, and began planning my welcome. On one occasion I decided to mark her arrival with a musical theme.
I had received a small record player as a gift and enjoyed playing the hits of the day—“the day” being the early 1980s—Kim Carnes’s “Bette Davis Eyes,” Hall & Oates’s “Private Eyes,” Juice Newton’s “Queen of Hearts,” and especially Journey’s romantic ballad “Open Arms.” (Don’t laugh: that Rock ’82 album was pretty much the only non-children’s music I had. But I will admit, Raffi’s music has aged much better.) I had heard my mother say how much she liked the Journey song, and I decided that this would be the soundtrack to her entrance at 24 Sussex after one particularly long absence.
I waited for her to arrive in her VW Rabbit before cueing up my tiny, tinny record player in my room upstairs. As she opened the door and entered the foyer I cranked up the volume and rushed to the top of the stairs. “Listen, Mom,” I yelled down to her. “It’s our song!”
Her reaction was to stare up at me, happy to see me but a little confused because she couldn’t hear the music at all. The volume on my record player was about half the level of a modern cell phone. I remember being crushed by that, so desperate was I to inject a sense of magic into every moment that we did have together as a family.
My mother tried to maintain the magic from time to time, with varying success. Whenever she was in New York City she would visit FAO Schwarz on Fifth Avenue and load up on great toys for all three of us. And in July 1981 she took me to London to join in the wedding celebrations for Prince Charles and Lady Diana. We stayed in the flat of her sister, my aunt Betsy, who was living in London with her husband. It was all very special, up to a point.
The evening Betsy and Robin took me to Hyde Park to watch the fireworks with a fe
w hundred thousand other people, Mom went off to a celebrity party. The next day she described all the people she had partied with that evening: the actor Christopher Reeve, who was starring in the Superman series of movies; members of the Monty Python troupe; and, most impressive of all to me, Robin Williams.
“Oh, you really would have enjoyed it,” she said to me airily, then added, “I suppose I should have brought you.” It was a casual regret to her, but I, on the other hand, spent much of my youth thinking that I could have met Mork from Ork if only my mom had remembered to take me.
Eventually, my mother found her nest: a modest red brick house on Victoria Street in Ottawa, a place she could literally call her own because she had made the down payment from the proceeds of her first book, Beyond Reason. Sacha, Michel, and I stayed with her there on weekends and sometimes for whole weeks at a time. Free of the glamour and restrictions of 24 Sussex, she began to bloom, to reveal all the finest qualities of her personality, her intelligence, and her creativity. My father acknowledged that she had found her natural environment when she invited him over to inspect the house for himself. Stepping inside and looking around, his first response was to blurt out, “Margaret, you have . . . a home.” It was one of those rare moments when my parents had a flash of true understanding for one another.
Every divorce has its casualties where children are involved. Our parents recognized this and, to their credit, made every effort to minimize the pain and sense of loss. They maintained a very loose form of joint custody, never arguing about the amount of time each was able to enjoy with my brothers and me. Everything involving Sacha, Michel, and me was done in our best interests. Our mother has described her relationship with our father by saying, “We didn’t work as a couple, but we worked beautifully as parents.”
Common Ground Page 4