Who's Your Daddy?

I was born in the fall of 1952. My mother was an elementary school teacher and my father worked for the city. He was a wiry little man with a brilliant sense of humor, as I recall. He could light up a room just by thinking about the room. He could also light up a cigarette and then do magic tricks with it. One of his tricks was particularly brilliant. He would first light the smoke and then grip the unlit end between his tongue and his lower front teeth and pivot the cigarette back, open his mouth wide, rotate the burning end back and inside his mouth, close his mouth and blow smoke out of his nose and his right ear. I know this sounds like I’m making it up, but he really could do it. The nose part I got because I could do the same with a glass of milk. My dad taught me how to do that one. He figured, at the time, that I was too young to be performing cigarette tricks so, he showed me how to take a mouthful of milk, close my lips tight build up some pressure and blow it out through my nose. Much to the chagrin of my poor mother, my two older brothers and my three sisters could also perform the same trick. On a good night at the supper table, my mom would consider herself lucky if only a couple of us spewed a white stream of dairy product back into our glass before we drank it. Eeewww! I know. Gross right?

Anyway, back to my dad’s right ear. Apparently, when he was just a kid, he got a really bad infection in his nose and throat. Some fluid built up in his inner ear behind his ear drum. In order to relieve the pressure, doctors had to operate and remove his right ear drum. They also inserted a metal ring where his eardrum had been, in order to stave off tissue collapse and maintain an opening for the drainage of any fluid that may have built up in the future. Because his eustachian tube was now an unobstructed conduit from the inside of his mouth to the great outdoors, he could send smoke out of his right ear when he closed his mouth and established a pressure gradient. As a kid, I was so used to seeing this trick performed by him, that I thought everyone who smoked should be able to undertake it. I like to imagine the first moment when my father first discovered that he could blow smoke out of his ear. It must have been like finding a 20-dollar bill in an old jacket pocket. If my grandmother (dad’s mom) was in the room when he performed this trick, she always put her two hands over her heart, tilted her head and sighed. Then she would exclaim, “I am just so proud!”

As I mentioned, my mom was a grade two school teacher in one of the two neighbourhood schools in our part of the city. One of them was a Catholic school and the other was a regular public school. She taught in the regular public school. She would probably have been my grade two teacher had she not died the year before I started kindergarten. She had already seen all of my older brothers and sisters pass through her little classroom and I would have been the one to complete the line for her. In the spring of her final year she developed a cough which led to a thoracic congestion that she just could not shake. She was admitted to the hospital on a Friday night when she could not catch her breath. By Monday morning, she was gone. She also had a sense of humor (probably out of self preservation), and her dying words were apparently, “Well, at least I got one last long weekend and I won’t have to worry about any more Mondays!”

Needless to say, my brothers and sisters were devastated. The oldest of them were mature enough to know that her end was coming and, they were able to prepare in their minds, for my mom’s death. But my youngest sister and I could not get our heads around the fact that she was gone. That sister was actually in Mom’s grade two class when mom died. My father could not be consoled. He lost his sense of humor. He didn’t seem to light up any rooms, or cigarettes, for a long time after that. He had a brother who came to stay with us for awhile after Mom died. He was gay, I think. He showed up to look after Dad and to make sure he got up for work and did all the things he needed to do to keep things going on a daily basis. My Dad’s brother looked after us kids too. He made meals and cleaned the house and did the laundry and the shopping. He made sure we all got off to school on time and he provided each of us with a wonderful boxed lunch, that he stayed up late for every night to prepare. I really loved my uncle. He knew just how to make life easier for all of us. He stayed with us for nearly two years and even eventually got my dad to start laughing again. One day another man drove up in front of the house and talked to Dad’s brother for awhile and then they carried some suitcases out to his car. They both got in and drove off. When I asked my father where Uncle had gone, my dad said that he had eloped. I was six years old at the time so I had no idea what that meant. I asked Dad what ‘eloped’ was and he said it was sort of like getting married without having a wedding ceremony. I asked if that meant that I was going to have another aunt. My dad said, “No, you will likely be having another uncle!”

I think my dad managed to recover pretty well emotionally after my mom’s passing. It helped having my uncle around for a couple of years. My older brothers and sisters also did their best to keep things in order around the house. The year that my sister – the oldest in the family – graduated, she left home, got a job, got married, had a baby boy and moved to the West Coast. It was kind of a shock for everyone – me especially. I had become an uncle myself but I really wasn’t that much older than my little nephew whom I watched grow up in pictures mostly. Because my oldest sister had been in charge of so many of the household jobs, duties and responsibilities, her leaving created a bit of a void in our home, both practically and emotionally. Dad decided that it might be best for us to get someone to come in and do the cleaning and a few of the chores so that he could go back to work full-time and not leave the house and the smaller kids unattended. He finally ended up hiring a maid. He interviewed a few men and women from the TEMP Agency before finally settling on an attractive young girl, just out of high school herself. She was really good. She worked hard and ran a tight ship which was sort of surprising, given how young she was. She looked after all of us kids and put her foot down whenever she needed to, to keep everybody, including Dad, in line. At first she commuted to our house every morning, from her family’s home on the other side of the city. She had to get up in the wee small hours and catch the first morning train in order to get to our place as early as she did, which was just after 7:00 am. She would make breakfast and then wake everyone up and feed us. She made sure that we were all dressed appropriately for school and that each of us got out of the house on time to make it to school or work or wherever. When my oldest brother graduated and moved away to university, my dad thought that it might be better if our housekeeper moved into my brother’s room – so she wouldn’t have to get up so early each morning, through the week anyway. She did that and lived with us every five week-days and then went back to her home on the weekends. It was great to have her around. When she wasn’t busy doing all the chores, she was funny and sweet and truly interesting. We all loved her and really thought of her as part of our family.

By the time I was in Grade 11, I was the only kid left at home. I noticed that Dad and the housekeeper were now spending quite a bit of time together. She was often staying at our place for weeks at a time without ever returning to her place. One Saturday morning, I got up early and went downstairs to get breakfast and she came out of Dad’s bedroom, obviously just having gotten up. I looked at her, and she looked at me, and we both kind of smiled at each other, and that was all there was to it. A few weeks later, Dad announced to all of us kids that the two of them were going to get married.

During Christmas-break in my senior year at school, I got a new mom. I was actually quite happy to have a mother again and to have her around all the time. She was young and cool and all my friends agreed that she was very “hot”. It felt normal to have her around but slightly different to see her as the main audience for my dad’s jokes and magic acts.

About a month after Dad and her were married, Dad was killed in a car crash. It was devastating to lose my father. I was indeed sorry for myself but I also felt bad for my new mom. It seemed cruel that they really didn’t get to spend much time together as a married couple before everything ended. My brothers and sisters all returned home for the funeral. During the time they were back, we had a big family meeting. My step-mother was, of course, included in the meeting. Everyone begged that she would remain in the house as our mother as long as she was alive. She was overjoyed and said she felt so grateful to be considered a part of the family even though she had only been married to Dad for such a short time. At the meeting, she also announced that she was pregnant and that we would all have a new family member in about seven months. She started attending birthing classes and since Dad was no longer with her, I consented to going along as her partner. At first, I felt a little uncomfortable with everything that went on at the sessions, but eventually I got to know her a lot better. She was so conscious of the fact that I was just a kid myself and how all of this might be affecting me. Pretty soon, it felt really normal for me to be helping her.

Because of all the time I had spent with my new mom at her birthing classes, being present at the actual birth of my new brother was almost expected. I wasn’t really as much help as one might have imagined though. I held my mother’s hand and sort of acted like a cheerleader as the doctors and nurses did all the big jobs. The whole birthing event, brought the two of us very close together emotionally. I did a lot of work around the house to make sure that Mom had everything she needed in the early months of her new baby’s life. I became quite good at feeding and changing diapers and bathing my little half-brother.

After graduation, I remained at home to continue with helping to raise the baby. I could sense that my feelings toward my mother were changing. I started to look at her more as a partner than as a mother. My little brother seemed more like my own than like a sibling. I worried that my feelings were not appropriate and certainly not being felt by my mom. And if they were happening to her as well, that something may arise to consummate those feelings. I decided one day to talk to her about it all. Indeed, she was having similar feelings toward me. We now worried together that what we were thinking, and what may end up happening between us would be deemed as weird by our family members and our friends. Worse yet, the growing affair may be seen as illegal in the eyes of the law. We checked into the latter, and as it so happened in our state, the consummation of our feelings would not have been illegal or incestuous because we were not related in any way through a blood line. We breathed a little easier after finding that out, but we still had to break the news to our family and friends. To our surprise and relief, our families were very okay with our relationship. That support eventually led to the two of us getting married. On our wedding day, I quickly realized that the literal definitions of my relationships with the rest of my family and my new wife’s family, were about to change forever.

A year after that, my new wife and I were blessed to celebrate the birth of our first daughter. And now, eight years later, we have two daughters and a son. Technically speaking, my wife’s first son (with my father) was, as well as being my half-brother, also now, my step-son. My brothers and sisters were not only my siblings – they became, by virtue of the fact that I was married to their mother, my own children also. My own three children are, without question, my wife’s children because she is their mother and because she is my mother too, they are really my brothers and sisters. My older brothers and sisters have had a total of six children and at one time I was their fun-loving uncle. Today I am also their fun-loving grandfather, with my wife / mother being their grandmother.

All of these changes have certainly required me to make some modifications to the practices and protocols I once used for purchasing Christmas gifts and birthday cards, each year on special occasions. But, the biggest difference in all of this is the thought that I am now, as the husband of my own mother, something that to most of us, would likely seem quite unimaginable. The significance of this, really hit me the other day when my four-year old was sitting on my knee. He looked up into my eyes and said, “Daddy, you’re my papa right? Who’s your daddy?”