The Vinyl Café Notebooks (6 page)

Kathy was, he said, his
perfect
daughter—the kind of girl who did well in school, and was quiet, obedient, thoughtful and a delight to be around.

“Perfect, really,” he said, until she turned thirteen and started to misbehave. She stopped coming home at a reasonable time. She began to tell lies about where she had been. When she was pushed, she offered excuses instead of the truth—thin ones at that.

The man and his wife soon enough came to understand why their daughter was lying to them. She was going to raves. She was taking drugs. She was hanging out with inappropriate boys, including drug dealers. She was misbehaving in all sorts of ways. Doing things they never dreamed possible. Suddenly his perfect little girl was a disaster. And
he
was terrified.

“Completely terrified,” he told me.

I asked him what he did.

“I panicked,” he said.

His instincts told him he should make rules. He said he thought if he made enough rules, if he created enough structure, he could pull his daughter out of this mess. It didn’t work.

He
made rules,
she
broke them. Things got horrible.

At curfew time, my friend would find himself alone in his living room, staring out his living room window at a dark and empty street, pacing around his house with his heart pounding, convinced that he was never going to see his daughter again.

Other nights, he and his wife would get in their car and go looking for her.

“There we were,” he told me, “at one, two, three, in the morning, driving aimlessly around searching for our kid.”

They wanted to find her. They were petrified that if they did, they would find her beaten unconscious, drugged out or dead. She had immersed herself in a world of criminals, of danger, of tragedy, and one that neither my friend nor his wife had any idea how to navigate.

To make things worse, he and his wife began to fight—bitterly.

“Of course we did,” he said. “Our daughter was the most important thing in the world to us. We couldn’t agree about what we should do. Nothing we tried worked.”

They made an appointment to see a psychologist—someone who came highly recommended. They told their daughter they were doing this. She agreed to come with them, just once, to see what it was like.

The psychologist told them that their daughter was in
trouble. She said that their daughter needed rules and structure. Tough love, the psychologist called it.

Then she said, “You have to get yourself ready to lock her out if that moment comes. And it will almost certainly come.”

When the appointment was over, the man and his wife walked out of the room. They looked at each other, and one of them said, “That is just not us.”

The doctor’s advice struck them as cruel. They couldn’t do any of it. They agreed about that. They didn’t
know
the answer, but it felt as if the doctor were asking them to treat their daughter as an object, rather than a human, a human who seemed to need something and was striking out blindly.

They went to see another psychologist. The man described him as an extraordinary human being. He said it twice.

“Extraordinary.”

All three of them went. The psychologist met with them separately, the man’s daughter first. She had agreed, once again, that she would go that once.

The psychologist talked to Kathy alone, and then he sent Kathy out and called the man and his wife in.

He said, “I will see your daughter. She is full of big questions and she is having trouble with all of them. I will see her, though I don’t have much hope that I will be able to help her.”

Then he said, “I think I can help you.”

“What?” said the man.

The possibility that
he
might need help had never occurred to the man.

“What you have to understand,” said the psychologist, “is that your daughter doesn’t feel loved.”

“But I love her deeply,” said the man.

“Listen carefully,” said the psychologist. “You may love her, but she doesn’t
feel
loved. And she doesn’t hear it when you tell her. It doesn’t get through to her.”

“What should I do?” said the man.

“There are two things you have to do,” said the psychologist. “First, you have to keep her at home. Don’t put her into the position where she might stay out all night. Young kids can die on the street.

“Make curfews if you want to. But know that she won’t keep them. And don’t lock her out. She is going through a horrible thing. Let her do it at home where she is safe.

“The second thing you have to do is to communicate to her that she
is
loved. You have to
praise
her, and tell her you
love
her. And you have to do this
over and over and over again
. And you have to do it for a long, long time.”

“How can I do
that
?” said the man. “She’s sneaking around, and she’s lying, and she’s doing terrible things. There is
nothing
for us to praise.”

“Find something,” said the psychologist. “Don’t criticize her. Praise her. And do it as often as you can. Eventually she may hear you.”

The man looked at the doctor earnestly.

“What,” he asked, “if I can’t find anything to praise?”

The psychologist looked back at him.

“Fake it,” he said.

None of this made sense to the man.

“I thought it was ridiculous,” he said.

He went home thinking he was going to make some rules. And he did. And again, nothing changed.

Left with nothing else to try, he decided to try what the psychologist had suggested. But he couldn’t find anything that he could praise about his daughter.

“So I lied,” he said. “I said things like, ‘Your hair looks nice.’ Though it didn’t. And, ‘What a nice wallet.’”

The more he did it, the more the psychologist’s prescription began to make sense to him. If his daughter didn’t feel loved at home, it would make sense that she would look for love elsewhere. Maybe she had found a community that accepted her no matter how strange she was, or thought she was.

“It was amazing to me,” said the man, “that she couldn’t see herself as either loved or lovable. It was like she had a perceptual distortion.”

So he began. And nothing happened. But he kept it up—for days, and weeks, and months.

And then, things started getting better. Not right away, not even slowly. Slower than slowly. It was a year maybe. After a year, Kathy started doing things that the man actually
could
praise.

“It worked,” he said.

It took almost two years. But it worked.

Kathy went to university. She got a bachelor’s degree. She graduated on the dean’s list and the honour role as well. Now she is in graduate school.

“She grew up to be a kind, sensitive person,” said the man.

Then he shook his head and said, “God, it was so hard. She would bring people home. One night she brought a guy home in a blue bunny suit. I hated this guy instinctively. But I didn’t say anything.”

During the two hard years between the beginning and the end, Kathy saw the therapist irregularly.

The man said, “If you asked her, she would tell you that she doesn’t think it helped her in the least. She would also say that the things we did weren’t helpful either.”

“Maybe that is the case,” said the man. “Maybe all that stuff was only helpful to us. Maybe it just helped give us an understanding of what was going on and a framework that enabled us, at the very least, not to hurt her. It certainly made the dayby-day living easier. We avoided all the confrontations that we couldn’t win.”

Without the intervention of the doctor, the man is sure what he would have been doing.

“I would have been drawing lines in the sand,” he said. “And she would have been defiant. We avoided all that.”

The man said when all this was happening, he didn’t talk about it much.

“You feel lost, and embarrassed, and guilty, and frightened when your child is in trouble.”

I know there are people who might be reading this who are in the place that the man was in many years ago. If you are that person, if you are a parent who is afraid, and worried, and feeling alone, he would tell you that you aren’t alone. He would tell you that now is the time for you to talk to others. Now is the time to look for help. He would tell you that you do not have to be embarrassed or ashamed.

And if you aren’t a parent but are a kid who is doing things that you know aren’t right and aren’t good for you, it’s your time to find someone too. It is time for you to believe, as Max Ehrmann said, that “you are a child of the universe, no less
than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. With all its sham, and drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.”

There are people waiting to love you. You might not believe that, but that may be the truest thing I have ever written. If they aren’t around you now, believe me, they exist. You have a job too. Go and find them.

27 September 2009

SIGNS OF SPRING

It was midday. I was at my desk, working at something and listening to Jimi Hendrix. The sun, which was coming through the east-facing window, was shining directly into my eyes. For almost six months the sun had been too low in the sky to do that. I shifted into the shade and kept my head down. A few minutes later, I had to shift again. And after a few more minutes, a third time. I had now shifted so far that I was sitting a full arm’s length from my keyboard. Typing was getting increasingly difficult. I pulled myself closer to my desk and attempted to peck away with one hand on the keyboard and the other shading my eyes. After fifteen minutes, I decided I was going to have to deal with the sun if I was going to get any work done.

I would have closed the blind if there was a blind on the window. But there is not a blind on the window. I went in search of the next best thing—a hat.

I had seen a ball cap with a good peak a day or two earlier. That would have done the job, but I couldn’t remember where I had seen it. The only hat I could find was an old sou’wester—a black, oiled, broad-brimmed fisherman’s hat that I bought in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, years ago. I have, to
my children’s great embarrassment, worn it while walking the dog on wet November nights.

I was alone. There was no one to embarrass, so I slipped the hat on and went back into my chair. It turned out to be just the thing. I finished the piece I was working on. Shaded.

Outside in the garden, barely visible, the daffodils have begun their long climb back from their subterranean slumber; across the street, an early robin hops across a neighbour’s lawn. Inside, a writer huddles over his keyboard wearing a sailor’s storm hat to ward off the sun. The signs of spring are building.

15 April 2007

MAPLE SYRUP TIME

All this week, when Glenn Hodgins gets up in the morning, he has put on a pair of jeans, and then, before he heads outside, he has put on another pair of jeans
over
the first pair. Glenn has a maple bush in Hemmingford, Quebec. March is sugaring season.

Hemmingford is forty-eight kilometres south of Montreal and was at the epicentre of the great ice storm of 1998. Glenn lost hundreds of maple trees in the storm, and this changed the ecology of his sugar bush. The canopy, he says, is thinner than it used to be, which means more light reaches the ground. That is good news if you’re a hawthorn or a thimbleberry, but bad news if your job happens to be tapping maples.

“The thimbleberry bushes,” says Glenn, “are about seven feet high this year.” That’s seven feet of thorns.

Glenn says walking through them is painful even when you’re wearing two pairs of jeans.

“They cut the jeans to shreds,” he says. To protect his hands, Glenn has to wear thick leather gloves even on warm days.

There have been so
many
warm days this winter that some
of Glenn’s neighbours have been sugaring through January and February.

“One neighbour boiled twelve hundred gallons of syrup last month,” says Glenn.

Glenn is a traditionalist. Glenn sugars by the calendar, and that means the first three weeks of March. So Glenn has been spending the last week fighting through the thimbleberries with a battery strapped on his back, wearing a drill in a holster, with his pockets full of tools and splices, cutters and hose clamps.

Glenn gathered his sap in buckets until twelve years ago, which made him one of the last of the old-time producers. He swore he’d never switch to the vacuum tubing, but he saw the light in 1990.

“The buckets were just too much work,” he says. Besides, driving a tractor through the bush wasn’t good for the trees. With the tubes, Glenn does everything on foot, which is a lot easier on the tree roots and on Glenn too. If it wasn’t for the thimbleberries.

“My hands are completely scratched, and I have scratches on my nose and chin,” he says.

Glenn started tapping last weekend. Every time he drills into a tree to insert a spout, Glenn gets to do something not many people can do. He gets to peer backwards through time. With every hole he drills, he can see the growth rings in the creamy sap wood, back through 2000 and 1999, back into 1998. He says from what he can see, the trees that didn’t have their crowns mowed off by the ice storm, which went through his bush like a lawn mower, seem to have been doing well over the past four years. The light that is encouraging
the thimbleberries is also shining on the surviving trees.