THE SUMMER BEFORE GRADE SEVEN, I knew something was wrong in my family. One day my mother’s joy and spirit seemed to vanish. I remember asking her if she was okay, and she told me she was fine, though her smile seemed forced. A couple of days later my parents called a family meeting, and as we trooped into their bedroom, Erica and I found my mother with her head down, staring at the bedspread as though it was suddenly very interesting. It was clear we weren’t about to hear good news.
A lot of kids at school were dealing with divorced or divorcing parents, but I knew my parents would never do that. Fighting, drinking, affairs—none of that was ever a part of my childhood. I grew up with absolute certainty that my mom and dad would be together for the rest of their lives. They were clearly in love but also just obviously really liked and respected one another. They’d both suffered when their own parents had split up; I’d seen how tense and unpleasant it still was for everyone else when either set of grandparents had to be in the same room. I knew they’d never put me and Erica through that. But I knew what we were about to hear was serious. The mood in the room was grave.
The moment my mother said the words “multiple sclerosis” I knew exactly what she was talking about. One of her friends from Montreal had the disease. She was partially paralyzed, and when we visited her and her family, she’d roll out in a wheelchair; her children had to help her do basic things. My mother was always a little sombre leaving their house, and she’d explained to me and Erica how difficult things were for her friend, who’d once been so athletic and active, and how brave she was.
The idea that my mom had the same disease terrified me. My mind immediately raced to catastrophic scenarios: my mom in a wheelchair, no longer able to draw. Or drive. Or hug me back. I could tell by the look on Erica’s face that she was thinking along the same lines. MS wouldn’t just change our mother’s life. It would change ours, too.
Our parents quickly countered our worst fears and did their best to reassure us. They were getting a second opinion. There was medication that would help. Scientists were working to find more treatments, even a cure. My mom’s case was mild.
But the changes in her were not mild. She was weaker, more fragile, taking naps during the day and avoiding the sun because people with MS tend to overheat more easily. A matter-of-fact greyness replaced her customary joie de vivre. She’d been the steady centre point of our family, but after her diagnosis she turned inward. Sometimes I’d come into the kitchen and she’d be injecting herself with the medication that was supposed to help but seemed to make her feel even worse. Maybe she wanted to normalize this new part of her daily routine, and maybe she also wanted us to see that she had some control over the disease and was fighting back. But watching her stab herself with a needle made me squeamish and I usually left the room. I wanted my mom back.
One day that fall we took a family trip to Camelbeach Mountain Waterpark in Pennsylvania, and for the first time in a long time, my mother laughed, I mean really laughed, so hard she had to wipe tears from her eyes. Floating down the lazy river in inner tubes, we’d spotted a kid stuck under a man-made waterfall, flailing and sputtering as the force of the water spun his tube around and around. It looked like something you’d see in a cartoon, and my mom and I just lost it, too helpless with laughter to help the kid escape the current. I felt a surge of hope that this was the turning point, and now my mom would be her old self again. But once we’d hopped out of our inner tubes, she’d scurried to an umbrella to get out of the sun, spent.
Grade seven was the first year I didn’t hate school. I didn’t love it, either, but I was getting better grades and had a sense of purpose: I was going to be a scientist. My dad knew he wanted to be a journalist from the time he was twelve years old; now that I was the same age, I thought I should have a dream, too, one that would motivate and shape me the way my father’s had motivated and shaped him. Nothing intimidated the guy or threw him off track. When he encountered an obstacle, he just focused harder, worked longer and kept tackling it until he won. He’d sleep in the day and work all night, go to a war zone or cover a tragedy, whatever it took—and he never crumbled or showed weakness. He wasn’t a quitter, and one of the things he told me and Erica all the time was never to run away from something. “If you’re going to leave, just make sure you’re not running,” he’d say.
So I didn’t run after I took a career aptitude test at school and “scientist” came back close to the bottom of the list of professions to which I’d be well suited. I’d scored high on mechanical ability and three-dimensional problem solving, but had bombed the math portion. Apparently, I’d make a wonderful dental hygienist, electrician or animator. After a brief period of despair, I picked myself up and decided that I wasn’t going to change my life plan because of some stupid test. I didn’t like math or particularly care about English—my view was that I shouldn’t have to work at it, since I already spoke the language—or history or social studies, but I loved the beauty and certainty and precision of science. In my other classes I tended to sit mutely, praying the teacher wouldn’t call on me. In science, there was no shutting me up. Clearly, it was my calling. Once I’d settled the question in my own mind, it was easier to overlook the indignities of school and see it as a stepping stone to a brilliant career.
The main reason I was happier at school, though, was that finally, I had a group of friends. All underdogs, we’d found each other on the sidelines at gym or eating alone in the cafeteria. The composition of the core group was something a politically correct casting agent might cook up: there was the fat kid, the one Asian kid in the grade, the un-girlie girl, the boy who liked The Princess Bride, the obsessive kid with thick glasses, and Frank and me, who lived for computers and Pokémon. Occasionally other kids, refugees from some kind of social disgrace, would drift down to our clique for awhile then fight their way back to the mainstream or at least closer to it, and pretend they didn’t know us anymore. There were also a few floaters, kids with a near-miraculous ability to migrate from one social group to the next and be accepted by all, who occasionally sat with us at the far end of the cafeteria or joined us under the big tree where we gathered before the first bell. For the first time in my life, I wanted to get to school early every morning.
We were at the very bottom of the social ladder, but that was fine with me. I was happy simply to feel I belonged somewhere, anywhere. I was interested in the cool kids in the same way I was interested in exotic reptiles: they were colourful and entertaining, but it was best to observe them from a safe distance. Even from afar, it was evident that the income split in Summit created much clearer social divides in middle school than it had in elementary school. The popular kids from the wrong side of the tracks were now the daring ones who openly flouted authority. They were responsible for the bomb threat that put the school in lockdown until police uncovered the prank. The popular kids from the rich part of town were enthralled with designer clothes and wanted to run the school, not destroy it.
Both groups obsessed over who was going out with whom, and who might or might not have had sex. Apparently one trendsetting boy in our grade had actually done so—on school property, no less. Rumour had it that a girl had given him a blow job in the auditorium, and the scandal was big enough that even we caught wind of it. Maybe because our clique was co-ed, we never talked about sex or objectified girls. Even if everyone else had, though, I wouldn’t have joined in. My dad had taught me to hold the door, show respect, be a gentleman. My mom had taught me girls aren’t pieces of meat. Frankly, the auditorium scene struck me as gross. The guy in question wasn’t exactly a paragon of hygiene. I felt sorry for the girl.
I had a crush on a girl myself, Rhiannon, but my imagination didn’t stray beyond being liked back and maybe kissing her. The chances of this happening were non-existent, of course, because every guy in our grade had a crush on Rhiannon. She seemed older, wiser and distinctly unimpressed by the posturing of twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys. The year before she’d been in the choir with me and Frank—the main redeeming feature of that particular organization as far as we were concerned—and she was the kind of girl who’d acknowledge us in the hallway. She seemed not to care what anyone thought of her, and I liked the way she brushed off the cool kids as though they were dirt.
It didn’t occur to me to try to get closer to her. I was quite happy to like her from afar, and I would have been mortified if she’d figured out that I liked her. For years, most of my friends had been girls, but I had no clue how to interact with a girl on a romantic level.
The closest I’d come had been in gym class, when, for a hormonally chaotic week or so, we square danced. I’m not sure why this was still part of the curriculum a hundred years after the last un-ironic hoedown, but it was. The teacher would be calling out “do-si-do” and we’d all be rolling our eyes, but there was an undeniable charge in the air because you were holding hands with a member of the opposite sex. During one dance—I think it was the Virginia reel—each couple had to link arms and, one by one, promenade past a gauntlet of other clapping couples. I wanted to be in the spotlight, yet felt horribly self-conscious on the few occasions I found myself there. Waiting for my turn, my heart hammered with dread and my palms became slick with sweat. I didn’t want everyone looking at me. But when I was awkwardly dancing past my classmates, cheeks flushed with embarrassment, I felt a small blaze of pride. I was thinking, “Remember me? You haven’t crushed me yet. I’m still here!”
Maybe because I’d been the target of so many jokes, I didn’t have much of a sense of humour about myself. I was overly sensitive and quick to take offence—problematic traits now that I actually had friends. If kids in my group started snatching spicy fries off my tray in the cafeteria, for instance, I didn’t react well. Spicy fries were the rage that year, almost a status symbol because demand always outstripped supply, and I had to budget carefully to afford them. When a friend grabbed a few, I felt attacked, not teased. Instead of laughing it off or telling him to get his hands off my fries, I felt I’d been grievously wronged and then nursed a grudge.
I knew that my defensiveness made me ridiculous, but I didn’t know how to let things roll off my back. The previous year my parents had sent me to a therapist to help me deal with the emotional fallout of being bullied, but it hadn’t helped. I was reluctant to go, partly because I didn’t want to admit to my father that I could use some help, and partly because I thought it was a waste of time. Why not just send me to a new school, instead? My parents didn’t think that was a good idea, though, so each week I’d gone to see a therapist I’ll call Aaron. A genial, soft-spoken guy with jet-black hair and an office full of toys, Aaron was more about listening than offering advice. Because he knew I liked building with Lego, he asked me to bring a new creation to each appointment, which I did, though some of the things I built were so absurdly complex and flimsy that transporting them became a major ordeal. After I’d shown him my latest invention, he’d ask how being bullied was making me feel, why I thought it was happening, and so forth.
It was pleasant to be the focus of someone’s attention but he didn’t give me any insight into my problems. I felt I was talking to him more for my parents’ benefit than my own, so that he could explain to them what was wrong with me. At the end of every session I’d go sit in the waiting room and he’d talk to my mother behind closed doors; knowing that whatever I said would go right back to her wasn’t conducive to soul-baring. After four or five months I stopped going.
My second experience of a therapeutic nature came in grade seven when, in the middle of a class, I was summoned by the school counsellor. As I walked down the hall to her office I was freaking out, trying to figure out what I’d done wrong, but couldn’t think of anything. She sat me down in this weird little windowless room and got right to the point. “I want to talk about your mother,” she said, oozing sympathy. Everyone knew about my mom’s MS diagnosis, since it had been in all the papers. I hated the fact that private family matters were public, and had no intention of talking about them with this counsellor.
The truth was, my parents were getting third, fourth and fifth opinions, and even the doctors who thought my mother had MS said she might not manifest symptoms for years; one said that maybe she didn’t have the disease at all, and the lesions in her brain could just be scars from a very high fever when she was a child. I’d seized on that, and allowed myself to hope. After all, my mother was still mobile and she didn’t seem to be getting worse, though she was on red alert for symptoms of the disease. Whatever she had, it didn’t seem the same as what her friend had. I’m sure every kid whose parent is seriously ill is in denial, but this was a little different: I started to believe that my mother had wilted not because she was sick, but because a doctor had told her she was.
A similar thing had happened to me when I found out I had mono, right around the time she found out she had MS. Before I had the blood tests, I felt tired but also felt that maybe the real problem was that I hated school. As soon as the blood tests came back confirming that I’d had mono—my body had fought off the virus by that point—I retroactively embraced illness. I hadn’t just been tired; I’d been floored by fatigue, barely able to function. I wondered if this was what was going on with my mom, who was similar to me in many ways.
There was no way I was going to admit any of this to a stranger, though, so I just told the school counsellor, “She’s okay and I’m okay. Don’t worry about me.” She smiled indulgently, and continued to probe. “You’re not worried? Is everything okay at home?” I told her everything was fine, but she persisted. “It would be normal to be concerned about having a mother in a wheelchair. Have you thought about what that will be like for you?” The vibe was weirdly confrontational, given that she said she wanted to help me, and finally she scored a direct hit: “You’re scared she’s going to die, aren’t you?” On cue I started crying, but they were tears of rage. I saw the look of quiet triumph on her face as she pushed a box of tissues toward me, and wondered what she was getting out of the encounter. Was she looking for a juicy anecdote about a famous guy’s family or was she just the most inept counsellor on the planet?
For the rest of the day, I was distraught. Maybe I should have been upset because there was a possibility my mother was going to die, but I wasn’t. I was upset because I felt I’d been mentally assaulted by a faculty member. When I got home I told my parents what had happened and I’m not sure who was more furious, my mom or my dad. Something I love about my father: he doesn’t hem and haw when there’s a problem. He takes action. He called the school immediately. I didn’t hear what he said but I didn’t need to—I knew he’d be polite but also cold and cutting, the way he always was when he was really angry and expected someone to do something about it.
I braced for a similar reaction, this time directed at me, when I was suspended a few months later. The day began with a group of guys harassing me for wearing “the wrong brand of jeans.” Apparently my fashion crime had racial overtones—they insisted only black kids were allowed to wear these particular jeans, a fact my mother was likely unaware of when she purchased them. For her, I’m sure the main attraction was that they were on sale. These guys didn’t intimidate me, though their ringleader towered over some of our teachers, but later that day, they decided to ramp it up.
We were running around the school track, accompanied by the shrieking of our ex-Marine gym teacher, when the ringleader and one of his cronies started jogging right behind me. I picked up the pace. So did they. I ran a little faster, scared now. They matched me, then the sidekick passed me, sticking out his foot to trip me, while the big guy shoved me, hard, from behind. I hit the gravel face-first and they bolted past, laughing. When I limped to the sidelines, picking bits of gravel out of my cheek, the gym teacher went insane. “Get back out there! I’ll fail you if you don’t start running!” He was practically foaming at the mouth, but I stayed put, watching the other kids huff and puff their way around the track. No way was I going back out there. Walking down the hall afterwards, I spotted the ringleader drinking from a water fountain, not a henchman in sight. I saw my chance: his back was to me, he was vulnerable. I body-checked him, hard. “What the fuck?” he yelled. I laughed and kept walking. There! I’d made him feel the way he’d made me feel on the track. We were even.
Only, we weren’t. After the next class he and his posse cornered me at the top of a staircase, pushing and shoving, jeering about my jeans again. I tried to stand my ground, pushing back, and fortunately I had an ally: Frank, who had the “right” skin colour for the jeans, threw a punch, quite possibly the first of his life, and knocked down one of the loudest kids. Next thing I knew, a hand was on my back and I was tumbling down the staircase, completely out of control. As soon as I thwacked my head at the bottom and there was blood, the ringleader hightailed it to the principal’s office and said I’d instigated the attack, whereupon I was suspended for fighting. My mother was outraged on my behalf. Her attitude was, “My poor baby, you haven’t done anything wrong, how dare they punish you?” When my dad got home, I heard her talking quietly to him, dreading the moment when I’d experience the icy blast of his disapproval head-on.
But instead he bounded into the room all smiles. Elated, actually. It wasn’t, “Are you okay?” It was, “Good for you!” He pumped me for details as though I were a prizefighter, and made it clear he thought it was about time that I’d stood up for myself. Others must have thought so, too, because a few days later, I was named the school’s student of the week. Some of the teachers knew very well I hadn’t started the fight, and decided to make a point to the administration. That show of solidarity was the crowning achievement of my career in middle school.
One day when I walked into the cafeteria, my old nemesis Neil blocked my path. A couple of members of his entourage were lined up behind him, and he had a knowing grin on his round, red face. “So I heard your dad is a failure,” he crowed, then waited, expectantly. But I didn’t react. I had no idea what he was talking about. “He got fired,” Neil snarled. “I guess you’ll be deported back to Canada now. Good riddance. No one here likes you anyways.” The comments stung but I didn’t rise to the bait. I knew he was lying. My dad hadn’t been fired from GMA. He’d decided he’d rather do an evening show, so he left. He was always changing jobs. “Failure”? Please. He was still on TV—the very definition of success, to a kid. I shrugged off Neil’s idiocy and got in the food line.
Later, when other kids approached me and said anything about my dad, I ignored them. They were obviously getting their misinformation from Neil, who’d been torturing me for years. If I’d read one of the newspapers that was tossed at the end of our driveway every morning I would have known the truth, but I didn’t figure it out, not for three years. My parents’ spin control was so artful that both Erica and I were under the impression that Nightline was a step up, a promotion of sorts.
Our dad seemed less tense, happier somehow, so we had no reason to believe otherwise. Nightline filmed in Washington, DC, so he worked there during the week and came home on weekends. It was great not to have to tiptoe around during the day or worry about waking him, and he seemed to have a lot more energy. He was always doing something on Saturday and Sunday: sprucing up the yard, buying a new barbecue and, on one memorable occasion, showing us around Washington. We tore around the city to the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Smithsonian—a history buff, Dad could always explain what we were seeing and why. At the Air and Space Museum, he made sure I saw certain exhibits, like the model of the Russian space station Mir, which I’d been reading about and studying in school. A few months earlier he’d taken me to John Glenn’s space launch, and we’d got to go behind the scenes at NASA and sit in a real simulator that astronauts use. I’d felt like the luckiest kid alive and I felt that again in the museum, looking at all these rockets and planes dangling from the ceiling, with my dad there to explain it all to me. It was astounding, really, the depth of his knowledge, and I wasn’t the only one who thought so. The whole nation listened to him. People admired him.
All of which is to say that both Erica and I were a little shocked when we finally realized that our dad really had lost his job at GMA—and a little hurt that we were the last to find out. I’m sure his intention was to protect us, so we wouldn’t worry about him or our family’s future. But even now, it bothers me to think that Neil, of all people, knew something about my father years before I did.
As I write these words, I’m still not sure what really happened at GMA. My father has never discussed it with me. He’s a person who looks forward, not back, and both my parents believed in shielding me and Erica from adult worries and cares. They didn’t anticipate, I guess, that we’d wind up filling in the blanks with our own theories—or that these theories might create more harm than the truth would have.
In the absence of knowledge, I created a narrative that shaped—and misshaped—how I saw my parents and, ultimately, how I saw myself. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I think it would have helped me to know, when I was in seventh grade, that my dad had failed at something. In my eyes, he was unassailable and invulnerable, good at everything. It’s hard to relate to a superhero, and hard, also, to feel like anything other than a disappointment by comparison. It never crossed my mind that my dad had ever felt humiliated, or foolish, or like a loser. That was the kind of stuff someone like me worried about. Silently. I didn’t want anyone else to know, least of all my father, who couldn’t possibly understand.