MY EARLIEST MEMORY OF MY DAD, I must have been about three years old, is of him returning from a trip with a toy car. He knew I loved cars, and this one was red, a Ferrari I think. I remember feeling excited about the car and happy to see him, but also a little hesitant and shy, as though he were an uncle coming to visit, not my father. In my mind, our house was my mother’s, not his or even really theirs together, because she was the one who was always there. He was away so much when I was really little that he was more of an abstract idea to me than a real person. It probably didn’t help that I’d turn on the TV and there he was, real but not quite real.
To explain what my dad was doing when he wasn’t home, my mom drew a wordless cartoon for me. Her grandfather and father were both cartoonists, and when I was growing up she drew in the same way that other people write in journals, filling up sketchpads with what she called “scribbles” about our family. In the first panel of this particular cartoon, my mom, my baby sister and I are on our front lawn, waving cheerfully to the plane overhead, while Dad grins back at us from one of the windows. In the next frame, a cameraman is filming my dad, who’s interviewing a balding, beaming guy. In the final frame, Dad is pointing authoritatively to the editing monitor, where the balding, beaming talking head fills the screen, while an editor fiddles with knobs and buttons, cutting the clip for public consumption.
That cartoon explains a lot not just about my father’s job but about my relationship with my mother. She always built my dad up in my eyes, put a positive spin on things, and taught me to view his work as important and his absences as inevitable; she also always seemed to know exactly what I needed, and was able to provide it in exactly the form I could handle. Her sketchbooks are what I’d save if a fire broke out at my parents’ house and I could grab only one thing. They show me who I was and still am to her, and reveal my own history to me in a way photos never have.
I used to think my dad was her muse, because she always draws him looking strong and in control, at the centre of things, even when he’s just sitting on the couch reading a book. But looking through her sketchbooks recently I realized I had it wrong. Most often, the central character is me (poor Erica—my mom had much less time to draw once she arrived). There’s a polished, whimsical watercolour of various characters from Beatrix Potter books, working together to set up my nursery, then pages and pages documenting my first year: waking, eating, crawling, crying, standing alone for the first time, trying to escape my crib, admiring my brand-new shoes. In most of these cartoons, she’s the only other character, the one who hugs and changes me, saves me from potential disasters and is driven slightly crazy by my antics. Then there’s me as a toddler, standing on my head on the couch while my mom blearily nurses Erica and watches my dad on TV. And me as a little boy, pushing a toy boat back and forth in the water, completely immersed in an imaginary game. Most of these are line drawings in black ink, but occasionally my mom used colour. In one of her favourites, I’m in a green jacket, brandishing a stick and stomping on an iced-over puddle; Erica is in a pink coat, her back to me, trudging through the snow. Over my head floats a thought bubble, full of stars, rockets and spaceships, while Erica’s bubble is filled with horses, butterflies and flowers.
No wonder our mom was the person we both felt most connected to in the world when we were growing up: she really understood us, even knew what we were thinking, and delighted in us. It doesn’t get much better than that, for a kid. Her warmth and compassion may also explain, though, why neither of us had much of an ability to roll with the punches when we were younger. At home, we never had to. Our mother was almost endlessly accommodating, even during the preschool phase when I was convinced that every speck of herb or chunk of onion in my food was a bug. Her response was to turn down the lights so I couldn’t see what I was eating. We ate in the dark.
But she isn’t so sweet that she has no personality. She’s sharp, very funny, and musical, always composing a song for someone, even the dog. And she’s crazy about birds, forever rescuing hurt ones and nursing them back to health. There was always a bird or two flying around our house when I was little. The one I loved best was a green parakeet, a little terrorist called Flapper who dive-bombed everyone except me and my mom. She taught me to pick him up like an ice cream cone, my hand over his wings, and he’d happily perch on my head or my shoulder.
As happy as I was at home with my mother, I was just that unhappy at school, pretty much right from the start. The first thing I remember about kindergarten in Ottawa is being in a big playroom where a couple of other kids were building a fort out of blocks. I wanted to play, too, but they said, “No, you’re not allowed,” and started teasing me. I didn’t know how to respond other than knock their fort down, so I went with that. Beautiful friendships did not blossom as a result of this incident.
I didn’t really know how to interact with other boys, but I was eager to be liked, which made me an easy mark. Another kindergarten memory: I eagerly handed over the dessert in my lunchbox to a kid who promised, in return, to bring me a toy plane the next day. After school I told my mother about this incredible deal I’d made, and when she gently explained that I’d been conned, I freaked. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t getting the airplane. It was a feeling of grief, almost, like I’d somehow diminished my mother. She’d lovingly packed that dessert for me, and I’d given it away.
We moved just about every year, so there was always change in the air, and she was the one constant: always there, always caring. When my dad started hosting Midday and we moved to Toronto, I remember going with her to a store in our neighbourhood one summer day, and staying outside right in front while she shopped, playing at a bright blue water table with boats that had been set up on the sidewalk so the shop didn’t get overrun with screaming kids. I played for what felt like a really long time, then went into the store to look for my mom, but couldn’t find her. I panicked: Why did she leave me? Then I realized she’d have to go back to her car eventually, so I found my way back to the parking lot, where the car was unlocked, and climbed in. My mom had always been anxious about my safety, so now, all alone in this gigantic world with kidnappers on the loose, I did the obvious thing: hid from them, on the floor. I was that small, the smallest kid in grade one. I curled up, uncomfortable and sweaty, wondering what would happen next. At the same time, of course, my mother had exited the store, looked for me, then panicked and immediately called the police, who were now urging her to check her car. She resisted, certain I’d been snatched by a kidnapper. I wasn’t the type of kid who wandered off! I was dependent, not an adventurer. But the police weren’t willing to launch a manhunt until she checked her car, and when she did, I remember feeling that she hadn’t found me so much as rescued me.
I was the kind of kid who didn’t want to get in trouble, the kind who almost hyperventilated when someone suggested breaking a rule. The world outside my home seemed like a dirty, dangerous place, where your only protection lay in following the letter of the law. The playground at school, for instance, was a death trap, as far as I was concerned. There was this one really tall, rickety play structure, and every once in awhile someone would fall off it and get a head injury. I’m not kidding, this actually happened to a friend of mine. Weirdly, there was never any sound. You’d just look over and through the sea of bodies, make out some kid lying motionless on the ground and think, “There goes another one.” I avoided the play structure. The concrete covering the rest of the actual playground had buckled, and there was one perilously steep section that would get slicked over with ice in the winter. Kids loved to slide down it, out of sight of the teachers, but the flat area below was riddled with trees, and to me it was a scene of impending carnage, and any minute kids would be crashing into the trees, bleeding, crying. I avoided the hill.
I didn’t have to explain any of this to my mother. She knew all of it, just as she knew that my friend Emma* had a crush on me, and one day we got married, with a twist tie from my sandwich bag as a ring, under the big tree on the playground. She knew that my friend Brad had a fish named Oscar with weird, bulging eyes, and his kitchen had an old-fashioned gas stove that you lit with a match, and she knew I was dying to have a bunk bed like his. I told her everything—it must have been exhausting, this stream-of-consciousness pouring out of a second grader—so she knew when anyone picked on me, which seemed to be happening more and more. I’d never been popular, but being teased and taunted was a new development. Half the time I couldn’t figure out why it was happening. Once, in grade two, someone called me a lesbian. I had no idea what that was, only that it must be a terrible thing to be. I raced home, near tears, to ask my mother whether I really was a lesbian. She laughed and hugged me, saying, “Oh honey, it’s not possible for you to be a lesbian!”
She was very concerned, though, when another kid in my grade started sneaking up on me and grabbing my crotch when no one was looking. She spoke to teachers at the school, the other boy’s mother and finally, because nothing else had worked, to the crotch-grabber himself. She was a lunchroom supervisor at my school and I remember watching from a distance one day while my mom, possibly the most nurturing individual on the planet, held the bully’s wrist and did her best to look stern and scary, telling him to leave me alone. Unfortunately, this inflamed the kid and he redoubled his efforts, but I didn’t tell her. I figured she’d done all she could.
I’m sure my dad was also concerned that I was being bullied, but I don’t remember talking to him about it, then or later. By that point he was around much more—he was hosting a show in Toronto rather than reporting from the field—but he wasn’t part of the texture of my everyday life in the way that my mother was. He was always incredibly busy, reading something or rushing off to the studio, is how I remember it. There was a distance, somehow, an absence of the intimacy I had with my mother, so I was embarrassed to tell him what was going on at school. I didn’t want him to think less of me.
My dad was an important person, in the news, in the know. He wasn’t full of himself—once when he took us to see the studio where Midday was filmed, he forgot his security pass and was falling all over himself apologizing to the guard and explaining that he worked on this show, would it be possible to take his kids in to see the set? It would never occur to him to say, “I’m the host, let me in or I’ll get your ass fired.” He’s the opposite of self-important. But I knew he was important because I could see how much his being on TV impressed teachers and my friends’ parents. Kids, too, though I learned not to mention it. On the few occasions I did, my classmates were either blown away by the coolness of having a dad on TV or convinced I was lying. If he’s so famous, how come you’re not rich? It didn’t make a lot of sense to me, either. Money was so tight that there wasn’t enough for a battery-powered mini-Jeep, like all the cool kids had. If my father was famous, why did I have less than they did?
My dad cast a large shadow, even if he didn’t mean to or want to, and I didn’t feel comfortable in it. I wanted to be special in my own right. I looked up to him, of course, but not because he was on TV. He just seemed incredibly strong—physically, since he always worked out, and also in the everyday way of having all the answers and knowing what to do in any situation. I wanted him to think I was strong, too.
Admitting that I was being picked on, and that it made me feel horrible, and scared, and angry, was therefore right out of the question. I tried to take care of things myself. My main strategy was avoidance: just steer clear of boys, especially the alpha-male types. I never got the impression that my mother worried about that, though she may well have. But I knew my father did, or at least didn’t think it was normal, because he signed me up for one male bonding opportunity after another, including father-son activities that were meant to bring the two of us closer. They didn’t. But he persisted, no matter how much I resisted. He’d enroll me in some sport or other, though I was the kind of kid who could be counted on to score against his own team, so I’d hate it and be terrible at it, and he’d respond by signing me up for something else.
I was kind of dreamy, happy to live in my own head, and I just didn’t like the physicality and forced bonhomie of group activities. But my dad had been a Scout, and he wanted me to be one, too. He sold it to me as an opportunity to earn cool badges, and told me that one year he’d even built a lean-to out of branches or something, and had been given a special badge for that. I could tell by the sincerity of his enthusiasm that I was supposed to get excited about this prospect, but all I could think was, “What do I need a lean-to for?” Dad was so gung-ho that he even became the leader of my troop, but at meetings I’d run off and hide; he’d find me and coax me back to where the other boys were all busily doing Scout-like things, and I’d burst into tears or refuse to participate. I knew I was embarrassing myself and him, and that made it even worse. After the third or fourth time, I just flat-out refused to go. So, intent on honouring his commitments as a Scout leader, he went alone. He was that kind of father: fiercely moral, a man of his word. Not a quitter.
To be clear, my dad is not some unreconstructed macho idiot. He’s aggressive and determined to win when it comes to his career, but he’s always been tender and loving with me, Erica and my mom. However, because the activities he signed me up for were so far from my own interests, I could only assume they spelled out his expectations of me: apparently, he wanted a son who scored goals and thrived on rough-and-tumble play. Instead, he had me, an artistic kid who lived in his own imagination and panicked if a ball came anywhere near his face. I was hungry for his approval, but often felt I was letting him down.
I longed for a deeper sense of connection with my dad but couldn’t figure out how to create one. I do remember happy times with him, playing cars on the floor and splashing around in the lake at my grandfather’s cottage, but his job was usually looming in the background. Or foreground.
I wanted to do something to eclipse it in his eyes, something that would command not only his attention but his pride. I remember the excitement I felt when I got a good grade on a test or drew something particularly inventive, how I’d make my mother swear she would let me show my father myself, then that pent-up anticipation and impatience, waiting for him to walk through the door. When I did something good, my mother’s approval was a given. But my dad was around so much less that his approval seemed harder to earn and, perhaps unfairly, became all the more highly prized.
* I’ve changed my friends’ names throughout the book.