1 picture = 1,000 laughs

A while back I set myself a goal: to listen to the testimony of one residential “school” victim every night before I fell asleep. Headlines were screaming their stories way back then. Let others call them survivors, a term that could mean anything, including making it through a force majeure. I’ll stick with victim thank you very much. I understand why we are supposed to use survivor, but the word in the context of criminal acts by adults against children infuriates me. Survivor neatly sidesteps the criminals. The word sugar-coats the crime. Victim on the other hand lets you know there’s a criminal lurking on the other side of the crime.

Why did I do this night after night?

Because I felt I owed these victims my attention. It’s the least I could do. Hear. Appreciate. Comprehend. Let the tears fall. A drop in the bucket next to the ocean they’ve shed.

And so, night after night, I listened to the voices of these victims tell the rest of us what happened. My dreams began to be infused with their accounts, and I usually awoke sad, hating police, hating clergy, hating the Canada I had grown up loving. Angry. Not a healthy way to start my day…

Then I heard from a friend I met over a decade ago when I went back for a second degree. They gave up trying to write about their own experience as a First Nations child in Canada 60-odd years ago. (They don’t insist on the third person pronoun; I’m using it as a handy way to obscure their identity.) In my friend’s early childhood there was a Catholic orphanage, there was sexual abuse, but there was also atonement and reconciliation. My friend is always moving forward. For my friend, the past is something passed through, like the vale of tears we all pass through at one time or other.

I asked my friend to write something to post on my website.

My friend said, “I’m lazy. Can it be stream of consciousness?”

“Sure,” I said. “Whatever you feel like sharing.”

Today I awakened with the latest testimony still fresh in the early morning dreams that seem to stay with me. I checked my email while drinking my first cup of coffee, and there was a message from my friend.

“You did it,” I thought.

I settled down to read. What they’d sent me made me grin. “How can that be?” you ask.

Because what my friend sent was, I calculated, the equivalent of 12,000 words.

They’d sent me 12 photos with funny captions and unwritten subtext as vivid as those captions.

Here’s what I think my friend was telling me: Hear. Appreciate. Comprehend. Let the tears fall. Then remember that most people are kind and that laughter is good for the soul.

I realize now that victims don’t need my tears. They want my understanding and appreciation. A helping hand if they ask for it. Maybe a good belly laugh or two.

They’ll take it from there.

HAWMs in the family

My 19-year-old grandson and I talk a lot. Our conversations are more often than not his idea. He is brilliant, with a knife-sharp wit, hardworking (he’s holding down 3 jobs) and his CV is packed with a long list of extraordinary accomplishments, unusual for someone so young.

A few days ago, this wonderful young man said something that saddened me. “Grammy, I hope I have at least 10 more years before the world as I know it ends. My buddies and I belong to the most despised demographic in the country. The way things are going, with everyone breaking up into tribes, gang mentality might take over, and we could easily be the targets.”

I figured he was kidding, so I chuckled. His expression remained grim. “I’m serious,” he said.

My grandson explained that the way he sees it he now belongs to a visible minority because of his skin colour, his age, his sex and his sexual orientation.

Is he Black, Asian, LGBT, Indigenous or Senior?

None of the above.

He’s a HAWM: heterosexual adolescent white male. I made up the acronym, but I think it fits though he tells me the “proper” term used today is CIS male. I have no idea what that means.

He and his peers make up 4.6% of the Canadian population. Indigenous people make up 4.9% (thank you Statcan) and self-reported LGBT people make up 13% (according to a 2017 Jasmin Roy survey). All indisputably minority groups, but not all minority groups are equal.

Some are more equal than others. Today you are favored if you are Black, Asian, LGBT, Indigenous or Senior. But if you’re a HAWM? Run and hide.

My grandson and I don’t dispute that it’s high time to recognize the rights of the other historically oppressed minority groups. We acknowledge that pendulums swing wide before centering. But what we can’t abide is that HAWMs, the group to which my grandson belongs, are in this time and place held to account for the sins of their forefathers. Let’s face it, from the perspective of all historically oppressed minority groups, boomer males of all colours still run the world, and their values passed down through generations pervade every corner of it. HAWMs are unfairly tainted by association.

My grandson despairs: “We never cared about who people want to be with. We don’t care about skin colour. We know about the abuse of Indigenous children. We would never rape. But we didn’t do any of the stuff the media is talking about every day. What are we expected to do? All we can do is say again that we understand and we sympathize. What’s next? We have to get a rainbow tattoo to show our solidarity with that cause? Why can’t we all just be one people. But everyone is breaking up into tribes. There’s no room for me and my buddies in this scheme.”

I see his point. The HAWMs had nothing to do with the legacy of male privilege. My grandson and his cohort are being reviled for the sins of their forefathers. It’s us, the boomers and our forefathers, who committed the atrocities. Our grandchildren were reared to revile rape, abuse, torture and prejudice in two-household families where single dads take on roles traditionally relegated to females in the antiquated past.

As my grandson turns to go, he adds, “And to top it off everyone thinks we’re superspreaders as if COVID started with us. So many guys my age won’t leave the house. They’re on anxiety meds and use their phones as pacifiers.”

He leaves me saddened that he should feel such despair for his future. I see the HAWMs have plenty to worry about. A planet that may be uninhabitable in 50 years, and social attitudes that condemn them for our sins.

We messed up the planet they will inherit, so why are we pointing fingers at them?

Starting now, I will expunge the expression “white male privilege” from my vocabulary because it hurts my grandson and his peers. Youth are not responsible for the historical legacy that has kept men at the top of the heap as a birthright since the beginning of recorded time.

The young are set to inherit what we’ve left them. I hope the planet and its people will be the better for it.

New mom

My 94-year-old mother has a lot going on in her brain that would have remained hidden had it not been for COVID.

COVID opened up cracks in just about everything related to human beings. For my mother, the COVID-enforced isolation at her Ottawa retirement home left her alone with her brain, widened cracks that were already there, made everything that was already wrong with my mother’s brain a thousand times worse. She has always been prone to furious outbursts, to crazy accusations involving me the accused that seemed to come out of nowhere. I told her one day after a particularly irritating session that I’d had enough. “Get help if you want to see me again.” I stood my ground and stayed away for 2 years.

Cue Dr. Walter Potocnzy, my mother’s psychiatrist. My sister and I think of “Dr. P” as our COVID silver lining.

It took Dr. P most of the 2-year COVID lockdown to figure out what was wrong. “Your mother is very very good at faking normalcy,” he tells us.

Tell us something we don’t know.

Dr. P stuck it out, saw through the “act”, witnessed our mother’s meandering, often violent, imaginings until he saw enough to tell us with a degree of certainty what the deal was with our mother’s brain.

“For starters, your mom is well into the steep downward slope of Alzheimer's decline. There’s no going back up that slope.” My sister and I nod. Even before COVID, we’d been driving ourselves batty re-explaining the simplest instructions (mom, push this button on your phone to call out…)

But Dr. P isn’t finished.

“Your mom also suffers from a form of bipolar disorder called cyclothymia. She’s likely been dealing with that her whole adult life. Unpredictable mood swings. Periods when she’s manic. Periods when she’s depressed. Periods when she appears to be what we in ‘the business’ refer to as ‘normal’. Her condition is often associated with high creativity.”

Our mother is a talented painter so all of that fit.

Then the punchline: “It runs in families. There is a strong genetic component.”

He goes on. “As if that isn’t enough for any one brain, on top of that she suffers from delusional disorder. Your mom is paranoid. Her delusions are real to her. In her imagined world, everyone and everything is out to get her. She’s living in a space the rest of us can’t imagine.”

“Like being on a bad trip,” my sister suggests.

Dr. P nods. “Pretty much.”

Everything Dr. P said made sense to me, the feisty daughter. My mother and Lady Macbeth share the same mothering playbook. My sister, the suck, got the other mother, the nice one from the Brady Bunch.

As a child I got used to my mother’s capricious mood swings. A child can get used to a lot. One moment we’re giggling at the same jokes and baking Christmas cookies, the next a demon only she can see is telling her to scream at me because I’m evil, a bad seed (after we’d watched the 1953 movie by that name) or stupid or accusations far worse that were beyond my capacities as a child to fully absorb, thank goodness.

When our dad died eight years ago, our mother gave up the Brady Bunch act with my sister and went full-on Lady Macbeth. My sister saw then what I’d been seeing since my earliest childhood: “I guess he was keeping her sane.”

This multiplicity of havoc-wreaking mental disorders explains why my mother had so much trouble letting go of the fantasy that one wintry night my 68-year-old arthritic self had scaled the outer wall of her retirement home, wriggled my way into her room through a small window and stolen her purse while she was asleep.

“How did I manage that?” I had asked her. “You live on the second floor.”

She raised a sardonic eyebrow then rolled her eyes: “Well my purse is gone, that’s a fact. Obviously you had a ladder.” As is often the case with the mentally disturbed, the premise is sound; the logic not so much.

Thank goodness for Dr. P, 2 years of talk therapy and 6 months of high strength Risperdal, a potent anti-psychotic. Our mother is now a stable and happy lady. She is a kitten so when the claws come out as they sometimes do they are kitten claws, easily retracted and leave no mark.

My sister lives near Toronto so I’m the one caring for our mother in Ottawa, and I must say we’re having fun. We’re working our way through her photos as I prepare to move her to a long-term care facility. We go down memory lane together, she telling me of her life before children, describing a woman I never knew but can now imagine, a rebel in her time, a rule-breaker who married my father twice. The first time to legitimize in their own eyes the pre-marital sex they were already enjoying. The second time to legitimize their relationship before family and friends.

Learning who my mom really is, the woman she’s always been, is a great way for us to end whatever time we have left to share. I feel peaceful now as I get to know her and I believe she shares the same peace getting to know me. I’m no longer her assailant. I’m her daughter. I will remember all of this on the day she no longer remembers my name and forgets who I am.

At 94, my mother deserves every kindness I can give, relief at last from the tumultuous mood swings that infected every part of her life with unfathomable periodicity.

At 68, I deserve the mother I now have, the funny tender-hearted woman who opens her door and smiles, astonished, when she finds me standing there. The mom who raises that sardonic eyebrow, gently shakes her head and softly giggles at the absurdity of our human lives, the mom who was always there though hidden from me in that terrifying space we once in our terrible ignorance called crazy.