Today I realized I havn't spoken to my daughter in 8 years and I don't really know why. I have no idea what she is doing with her life. If I have grandchildren or anything.
I never raised a hand to her or touched her inappropriately or anything like that. I might have shouted at her, of course, but even then, that was Andrea - her mother - my wife at the time - her job. I was thankful for that, I couldn't bring myself to. They say you're not supposed to but, if that's the case, what can you even do when you can't get them to do what you want them to do, when you can't control them? Are you supposed to just let them?
Off the top of my head I can't even point to any one time when it came to that or when it got that bad. Andrea - her mother - my wife at the time didn't even really do that, she sort of just sort of, raised her voice, I guess. It just didn't make any sense. The way she treated us after. Absurd as it might seem and I'm certainly blindsided by it - all I can trace it back to is that one incident that night.
For the first five odd years she was an angel. I can't really describe her. I had braced myself for screaming, colic, terrible twos, all that but it never really came. That's why I just reacted the way I did, or more aptly put, didn't. I had thought I was in the clear because of how well behaved she was.
Just to clear something up here, I want to say for the record that in no way do I blame Andrea - her mother - my wife at the time - for what happened. Lord knows it wasn't in the least her fault. She was only trying her best and there's no possible way she could have predicted it. She never could have known what would happen.
Andrea - her mother - my wife at the time was an amazing cook, and always very health conscious, far more than I ever was at any rate. All that just made it so much worse, that really damaged their relationship more than ours. I know how much harder it is for women. What with all they have to do. I tried to help out, i really did, but I was so busy with my job and everything. I was a chartered accountant, we both were. Well, technically I was a program evaluator with the CRA and Andrea quit her practice after we became pregnant. She really wanted to be a stay at home mom and I know those early years are very vital. As a feminist I think it's the choice that's important.
And she tried, she really tried. I tried too. I was there to support them whatever way I could. How I wish the bad memories didn't shadow the good ones. I know there were some good ones and I just wish it wasn't so hard to remember them without the others flooding in.
Anyways. Andrea - her mother - my wife at the time, she really took pride in that. She read all the books and had me read them too, whatever ones there were at the time, The Birthing Partner, Lemaze, all that. She even quit coffee. She always had to have that before but she even threw out our French press. She had some excuse like, how it got grounds in it, but I think she was too embarassed to admit that she was just getting rid of the paraphenalia. She really was that strict. I didn't care, I just started going to the Starbucks anyways when that first opened. It wasn't anything fancy back then, just decent coffee.
You can pretty much imagine how she was when it came to food. Absolutely none of that Gerber strained peas, formula, whatever. She had a La Leche League Tote Bag. I made a joke one time about how crazy it was that they had a league for breastfeeding like it was a competitive sport. Like, who could produce the most volume and all that. She really didn't like that one. It was strange but at the time, it was my way of expressing my unease at how competitive they were. With women and childbirth there was a bizarre competitiveness that I'd only ever associated with men. Like, "oh I would never have a c-section" or "it's got to be a homebirth" and "oh yeah, well I'm having a waterbirth" or "I'm having my baby on top of Mount Everest". One upmanship. I remember thinking how nuts they sounded. If it were me in that position I'd probably want to be in the Mayo Clinic zonked on a cocktail of pills.
I remember the day my daughter was born, of course. I had to persuade her, nag her even, that the whole water thing would be too much... because I think it was, come on. A little gross even. And would you believe it, for years I kicked myself and felt guilty. . Who wouldn't? No matter how ridiculous it seems, right? You just fixate on every little thing that might have been where it all went wrong.
Well, we had hired a world class midwife, doula, whatever. Some really granola lady called Monique. She was the one who turned her on to a lot of of it. She would always go around with these "Boycott Nestle" fliers and tell horror stories about babies who had died after they had some formula that was contaminated with melamine. That was enough to get you to buy anything she was selling instead. She had all the products, tea tree oil, hemp, you name it, plus two kids who you never heard a peep out of unless it was to say "please" or "thank you".
That's how Briar was the first few years, a tiny adult. I still think that's because I don't fully remember, being two busy trying to put food on the table and all. It was simple then, because that's all I had to do and Andrea always knew what to make. I never had any problem with it, it was amazing, and besides, how could I? I remember my mother always had this sign in her kitchen that said "Menu: 1) Take it 2) Leave it". Not like me and my brother were ever real picky eaters. I mean, sure sure, we must have whined about spinach or broccoli or asparagus but we just got the usual "think about all those starving kids in China" guilt trip or the old "no tv until you clear your plate" quid pro quo. That was all it ever took.
But we didn't have TV, obviously, and as far as I could tell those children in China weren't really starving anymore. The children in Africa on the other hand, not so much. But I couldn't just explain that. I trusted Andrea, she was the one who did all the research. She seemed like she always knew what she was doing way more than I did. Who was I to tell her what to do? I know she tried so hard and I respect her so much for that.
She did all the shopping. Checking the ingredients of anything that came into our house, no matter how small. I said she should have been a customs agent and she used to quiz me if I "knew all the chemicals in what we ate". We even had this fancy European cusinart device. . The "torture device", I called it. "Morticia, where do you want me to put your torture device?" I asked. It cost an arm and a leg, of course, but the alternative was feeding our own flesh and blood some toxic garbage soup from a jar, I had little choice. We even had a glass top stove, nowawadys the only thing they're good for is cooking meth in some trailer park, but back then, they were really something.
If there was some new vegetable. Andrea had to have it. I had never heard of a starfruit or avocado before that but I was always grateful. to be coming home to a home cooked meal every day and let me just say that it was actually really good. I appreciated it, I really did. I was never big on red meat to begin with. When I was young, it was just an occaisional treat, but, with Andrea it had to go. It was just fish and chicken, grain fed and free range, of course. It was always the best. Andrea always wanted to like the French from France where they go to a different store for every ingredient insofar as that was possible here. The funny thing is I don't remember those little hole in the wall hippie health food stores she frequented having much in the way of fresh produce, just wierd bulk grains like couscous and bulghur, tofu, tahini, all that. She never set foot in a Maxi or a No Frills if she could help it and IGA or Sobey's very begrudgingly because that was there they had the fresh produce you didn't have to drive downtown for and that was where she found her squash.
She must have read about it some where of course or heard about it from one of her friends at any rate. I never asked. It was her who picked all the ingedients and prepared everything after all, putting all that time and energy into it. All I asked when I got home was "Chicken and rice with kale" she said. I didn't even ask what that was, I didn't wanted to sound stupid. I thought a kale was some kind of potato thing like a yam or something. I was eager to try it. I liked it even because it was a dinner like any other at the time. We sat and ate and talked about nothing in particular like we always did. "Did you go to the park today?" "Did you see the birds? "Did you see the doggy?". Try to stimulate her mental development. Get her feeling like a person without distracting them. Get them to express themselves. Open up. .. and we were done.
It was just a passing remark. "Honey, eat your kale". I was done of course and I looked over and I saw my daughter and she had finished and her chicken and rice but the steamed kale was there by the side, untouched. My daughter just sat there, fidgeting uncomfortably, swinging her legs, like she didn't hear anything or she was prtending not to.
"Finish your kale." Andrea said, more firmly, a bit louder.
"Noo. " She whined with an ugly look of pure disgust on her face.
I had never heard my daughter say that before and it just took me by surprise. She had disobeyed a direct order.
"Don't you want to eat your lovely kale?" Andrea said in her manipulating way that's supposed to trick kids into doing what they don't want to do.
Then my daughter screamed, like full on tantrum screamed. I almost jumped out of my chair. I was just really taken aback. It was just not something she did. And we just stood there in stunned silence. My daughter who had been this little adult always so mature, sedate and behaved had let out this freakish, frankly inhuman, squeal. Like nails on a chalkboard. It didn't sound like her, it sounded like some scared, hurt little animal... My heart just sank, almost like I could feel what was about to happen and how it was all going to end.
"EAT. YOUR. KALE." Andrea said through clenched teeth. She wasn't yelling, just commanding, letting her know there was only one way out of this situation -and it was through. No choice. No punishment or negotiation. No consequence she could accept instead. And she just screamed, piercing, louder than ever before. God, the neighbours must have thought we were branding her or something. It's a miracle the cops didn't show up at our door after that.
I remember thinking "Well, god, if she doesn't want to eat her kale, I will, jesus" or something like that. but it was just in shock and I knew enough to know you just couldn't reward that kind of performance by just giving in - that would only encourage them. The way she made it sound every day was like a battle and if you let your guard slip for a single second you were done for. You had to have your wits about you and you always know exactly what to do.
...and I trusted her, of course, I couldn't have done anything different. Because without even pausing to take a breath from that ungodly piercing screaming she started flailing and banging her little arms on the table. Then Andrea's hand shot up and grabbed her wrist in an iron vice grip.
"EAT." I'd never seen her like that either. I had to excuse myself. The screaming was still wringing in my ear as I went to take my plate to the sink and it didn't stop ringing while I was lying in bed waiting for her, reading Into the Wild or Into Thin Air. it had to be one of those because I was on a big Kracauer kick back then though I couldn't even remember the book much less make sense of what the pages were trying to say.
When she finally came up after running Briar's bath and putting her down (silently) I half expected her to be mad at me for some reason - perhaps that wasn't the thing that good, loving, supportive parents were supposed to do, even though it was all I could do after drawing a blank. But she just came up and got undressed.
"So did she, uh, survive?" I risked. A little joke to ease the tension.
"Yeah" Andrea sighed as she crawled into bed next to me. "Just overtired."
Sex was the furthest thing from my mind. I think it was the first night since we started dating in school I could swear definivetly there had been absolutely not even any attempt at fooling around whatsoever.
If it hadn't been for what would happen a few weeks later, I wouldn't even have remembered it.
We were driving to Westmount for Christmas to visit my Aunt Bet and my parents. She lived in a very fancy retirement home and she insisted on entertaining. She came from money, and a different time but she was always such an angel. She had a very out gay man as her caretaker. He had AIDS too. She was always so great with Briar and bought her nice things like a parrot Beanie Baby.
In the drive up Andrea had briefed Briar that Aunt Bet was very old and basically not to get scared when she saw her, or if she was scared, not to make a scene. For a minute I wondered by Andrea was doing that but I was suddenly reminded of the kale incident. We couldn't really trust her anymore. There was this other side we never knew that might surface at any time. But she didn't let on like it was something she even needed telling. I think it only puzzled her.
She gave Terry(Aunt Bet's gay manservant) a big hug when he came to meet us at the door. She always adored him. Right away Mom and Aunt Bet were asking all about The First Grandchild - she was so much to them. Of course, Andrea told her about the Kale Incident.
"Oh I've heard of that" said a silver hair aquaintance who was listening it "never tried it though".
"Isn't that the stuff they use to decorate the salad bar at Pizza Hut?" a guy who might have been her husband said so he could laugh at his own joke.
"It's supposed to be really good for you." said Andrea matter of factly in a strangely uptight way.
"Oh, is that so?" said Aunt Bet. She always did a magnificent job of feigning interest.
And Aunt Bet looked at her then, without any condescencention, god
bless her.
“So your mother
and father have been telling me all about how you’ve been quite the
adventurous little eater.”
“I. WAS. FORCED.”
My daughter had
yelled so loud I thought at least one of the septuagenarians in the room might have a
heart attack.
Fortunately they
were no more than visibly shocked. Of course, good nature saint of a
woman she was, she only gave a polite chuckle while Andrea ushered
Briar out of the room to give her a good talking to in the privacy in
the foyer. Everyone looked at me and I could only raise my eyebrows
and tilt my head as I winced inside. I couldn’t imagine what they
were thinking of us in that dreadful silence. The conversation turned
to investments.
We didn’t see any
need to give her a debrief after. The drive home passed in silence.
She was still just a little kid then.
But Andrea would
keep on making kale. I personally wouldn’t have after such a
violent reaction and all the supposed benefit aside, it just wasn’t
worth it. It wasn’t like one of those things that vanished from
your memory unless it’s right there, the mere mention of it had
provoked something so indignant and serious. If we forgot the
outburst had happened while making it clear that kale was a part of
life that she had to accept, we would break her will.
Briar would begin
to make a show of eating everything else but the kale on her plate
and doing it only after she had been forced to. Giving Andrea a glare
that said “I don’t want you. You are making me do this. I have no
choice”. She would contort her little face into a grimace of pure
hate and rage that it was disconcerting to see on a small child. It
was her way of showing she wouldn’t bend. Even if we could have her
body, we could never have her soul. I once told her “Briar, if you
make a face it might just stay that way.” to lighten the mood but
nobody laughed. This was serious time, and I a bystander.
So I usually just
left the table early.
While drying the
dishes I once made the mistake of asking Andrea why she didn’t just
cook something else.
“Who do you have
no appreciation for anything I do?” she said in a voice that went
from 0 to 60 in 3.5 and told me that was that on that.
Besides that one
time at Aunt Bet’s it never spilled over the dinner table until
Briar started preschool.
While I was paying
5,000 dollars a semester (not counting the uniform). Briar was
learning to write letters back when handwriting was still important and follishly I took pride in helping her with her homework. It was my duty as a
father and serious business. Back then, if you so much as wrote your
letters bottom to top or something like that it might suggest a
“developmental delay” - a pass for the short bus.
I recall the assignment was to tell the class something about yourself. Easy enough. This must have been after one particularly taxing mealtime episode because she was showing me the handout with the instructions and some lines and awful clip art of smiliing multicultural kids. I read it out to her. "It says to tell the class one thing about yourself"
"My Name is _________" it said.
"So you'd put 'Briar' in the black space here." and she she wrote Briar like she'd learned how a month before.
I congratulated her.
Next would be the hard part, the part you needed a parent's help for (because they were such important co-partners in the learning journey). It should have been the hardest part, but for her, it was all too easy, so gutwrenchingly easy.
I didn't even say a word. She was up and away before I even had time to think and I felt my heart sink as I knew exactly what was coming. She pressed that brand new little crayon against the sheet so hard it so hard it snapped and flew right across the room ricocheting against the wall and without pausing for even a second she rammed the blunt stump that was left against it and in a second of pure loathing and rage the letters "I HAET KAEL" appeared in an instant. She looked up at me blankly and sullen.
When I was younger I had read in some article on stamp collecting that prisoners during the Second World War would write letters home to their families with instructions to steam the stamps off of the envelop for some young relative. They would do so and beneath they would find in tiny writing underneath describing the tortures they had suffered.
I had also read somewhere else, at someother time, of the Roanoke community of early American settlers who had vanished without a trace, leaving only the word "CROATOAN" carved in a wall. In my English homeroom I had seen a mimeograph posted on the wall where all the letters in the words of a paragraph except the first and last ones were jumbled up with the point being that you could still comprehend the meaning of the text. "Typoglycemia" this phenomenon was called.
Not to be a mite melodramatic but all this was how I felt and when I came to, out of that frozen moment of horror I didn't even know where to start.
First, "hate" (or "HAET") was a strong word - a four letter word. It was a word we didn't use in the house. It was simply too "negative". It was not part of our vocabulary but it had somehow come, unbidden, into my daughter's range of emotional expression.
I don't think it matter because as soon as I opened my mouth - "Well, honey, I don't think..." she screamed that blood-curdling possessed shriek I'd heard on the night when Andrea had first served her the dish. Well, for you fans of word games and anagrams out there, pa's a sap either way you look at him. I just threw up my hands and made the rest of what was supposed to be homework time with daddy about getting her to simply shut the fuck up. I couldn't resolve the dilemma of telling her how to spell a forbidden word.
I drove her to school the next morning with the assignment tucked in her bag. I accepted my fate and braced myself for some nasty phone call about how things were at home. I had to explain to her teacher that I did not in fact beat my daughter but that she simply did not like eating her vegetables. Of course, to a private Waldorf outdoor academy where the kids weren't allowed to use black crayons, this was hardly better, as the terse "... I see" from her teacher at the end of our conversation indicated. Of course, she had politely left the details of the volcanic shitfit tantrum Briar pulled at school to fester in my imagination until our conference later that week.
The avuncular teacher with the bandana around her hair and the wooden beads had picked up as a paid educator where I a parent, had left off. Her attempt to gently demonstrate the correct spelling was met with a disturbing escalation - with Briar screaming at the top of her lungs and throwing her belongings across the classroom.
I probably looked like an idiot trying to convince them that my daughter had some sort of psychotic break that had altered her brain chemistry because of a simple leafy green plant.
After that, she was a problem child - a cherub to a changeling - and there was no going back from it. This was before our patriotic shrinks had conceived of Oppositional Defiant Disorder and evolutionary psychology explained to us how young children avoided green vegetables for fear they might be poisoned, but something like an answer occured to me as I was watching a VHS of Mary Martin's Peter Pan with Briar by my side when she was 9 and scowling, unimpressed.
During the performance of " I Won't Grow Up", John corrects Peter's "not me" with the grammatically correct "not I" and Peter counters with an insistent "not me" and in that moment an insight it dawned on me, in the state of emotional distress she was in when we were making her eat that kale, only the shriller "ae" would have served to articulate. "Hate" likewise, was contorted into the primordial anglo-saxon "HAET" ending in a higher vowel exactly like the sound of a small child screaming.
As a civil servant, I must have some semblance or fragments of a classical education and as I recall the protagonists contending that all knowledge was innate in contrast to Rousseau and others who conceived of the mind as a blank slate to be written on. Instead I can offer my observation that children come to us out of an abyss of animal stupidity which must be shaped into humanity and can only be imprinted on through trauma, which (being entirely subjective) is inevitable. Our attempts to give our daughter a life without pain or hardship resulted not in the abscene of misery but of minor discomfort taking its place. Try to curtail their range of emotional expression and another concept will just spring up in it's place.
The range of your emotional expression IS supposed to be curtailed, it IS to be pruned like a fine
bonsai. Emotions make trouble and get people killed. Emotions make you brutish and animalistic - they make you poor. That's the last I really remember of her before she became a teenager and I dove headlong into my work. I wrote her off as someone who couldn’t delay gratification and can’t foresee the consequences of her actions. Everything follows from the rule of three. Every pleasure you feel, in the drinking, in the drugs, in the bedroom, all the
sensations fortes will come back to you, three times as worse. Sometimes when the meetings end and the governance staff pulls up the blinds off the I just sit there wondering what kind of life she's living. Sometimes I even wonder if it's her in the porn I’m watching.
Wherever she is, I know she’s poor. The poor, their lives are filled with more emotional distress than we can fathom, everything is over the top and dramatic with them. They love more passionately, they swear more, and above all their pronunciation of words is further from the written form, perhaps because it has never served them, because they are chafing at their yoke, chomping at the bit with every fibre in their being, their spirit striving to be free.