4. The Fixer-Upper

It was so long ago that I can hardly remember falling in love. And I'm not exactly sure how we fell out of love.

I had a student summer job as a guide for a federal government program for high schoolers visiting Ottawa. He was another guide, a good-looking, nerdy guy with glasses and a 100-watt smile, and soon enough we were going out.

Within a couple of years, life got real. I got a full-time job with a Member of Parliament, completed my final course, graduated, and started my Master’s while continuing to work. The only roadmap I had at twenty-one for relationships was that marriage was an obvious destination, with the added perks of a Mixmaster, a couch on credit, and white wedding dishes. It didn’t matter that I was young—the good-looking guy was Catholic, and my parents would be happy. I figured I could fix up the rest. The truth is I had no idea about marriage and should have realized that the good-looking guy and I weren't well-matched, but like I said, I was young.

At our meeting with the priest a few weeks before the wedding, he asked us a series of questions, reading in an expressionless voice from a list he had on a paper in front of him. Did we believe in God and the Catholic Church? Would we raise our children in the Catholic faith? We hadn’t even discussed children, but we both answered in the affirmative.

Throughout university, I never attended church except for on the occasional visits home to my parents. Yet here I was, about to walk down the aisle with my father to marry the man waiting at the altar in the Polish church in Smalltown, facing the same large, crucified Christ that I had faced every Sunday of my childhood.

I opted for a flower-child hippie look and wore a long, flowy ivory dress made by a seamstress friend of my mother’s and a halo of flowers in my hair. My dad’s firm hand on my arm steadied my nervousness. My mother beamed in the front row in a long chiffon dress of periwinkle blue as I got to the altar. Following the ceremony, the reception was in my parents' backyard, where my mother outdid herself in the culinary department. I left it all to her, and it was delicious. So far, so good.

Three years later, I left my job and moved to Montreal for a year, where the good-looking guy did his medical internship, and I planned to finish my master’s thesis. I spent my days at the kitchen table, hunting and pecking on a borrowed Brother electric typewriter. The quiet in the apartment at the top of Boulevard Côte-des-Neiges was punctuated by the staccato notes of the typewriter keys, the ding of the carriage return, and an occasional ambulance siren on its way to one of the nearby hospitals. Every time I made a mistake that I couldn’t fix invisibly with liquid Wite-Out, I cursed. It meant I had to start the page over because the university's rules for master's theses allowed no visible typing mistakes.

On Mondays, I took the Métro to the east end of the Green Line and picked up the typewriter left by a university friend with her mother. Then, on Fridays, I retraced my steps, there and back, to return the typewriter so my friend could use it for her school work on weekends.

Every time I trudged uphill to the apartment with that typewriter, facing another week of slow, laborious typing, I cursed my decision to take home economics in high school instead of typing. The ordeal lasted for months because I was too poor to pay someone the dollar a page it would have cost to have them type it for me. During winter evenings, I canvassed door to door for the Liberal candidate in the federal election. Saturdays, I sold china and stocked shelves at the Simpsons store in downtown Montreal to earn some much-needed cash.

The medical internship year ended, I submitted and defended my thesis, and we returned to Ottawa. I was hired by the Liberal candidate, Donald Johnston, who had won his election and was appointed by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to his cabinet as President of the Treasury Board. The first thing I did was buy a couple of good suits. My job was to work on correspondence—plenty of experience here from working with the MP—and ensure the minister had his briefing notes for the daily Question Period in the House of Commons.

After a few months, I was promoted to chief of staff. I was twenty-eight and went from typing my thesis at the kitchen table to a position with significant responsibilities, a secretary with a fancy word processor, and my own pass to the rarified atmosphere of the Parliamentary Restaurant. I succeeded by assembling a solid team of smarter people, by being good at asking the right questions, and by knowing when the answers made sense. Luckily, the job provided a little more financial security. With a loan from my in-laws and a mortgage, we bought a house.

Despite its dilapidated state and frozen-in-time condition since the 1940s, the fixer-upper was situated in a good neighbourhood west of Centretown, where I had lived as a student. With limited funds at our disposal, we took on most of the work ourselves, scrubbing the rooms from ceiling to floor and giving them fresh coats of light salmon or dove grey paint. The house remained in need of major renovations, but now, at least, it was clean and freshly painted.

Time passed...fast, fast, fast. Even in those days in my twenties, time flew by for me. Seven years after our wedding, three years after returning back to Ottawa and setting up house, the good-looking guy and I realized we probably weren’t going to make it. There were no heated arguments or long discussions; we were just giving up. I felt sad. Empty. Our feelings that we had different goals were mutual, but just in case the marriage was salvageable, we decided to consult a marriage counsellor.

The therapist, not much older than we were, came highly recommended by the good-looking guy’s best friend, who was completing his clinical psychology degree and would himself soon be counselling couples like us. In the second session—which turned out to be the last one—he asked me to describe my relationship with my mother.

“She’s never said anything about her life before coming to Canada. All I know is that she’s from a village in Poland, and she was taken from her home to work in Germany during the war.”

A floodgate of tears opened. “She has these expectations of me…now I feel like I’m disappointing her.” He handed me the box of tissues.

“I have seen similar emotional fallout in children of Holocaust survivors,” he said.

I was taken aback by his suggestion, given the little I had shared about my mother. What was he talking about? Generational trauma?

No, he doesn’t understand, I thought to myself as I abruptly gathered my things and rushed out, clutching the box of Kleenex.

I did not know enough to make the assessment the therapist did, but I knew that whatever it was, it made for a complicated mother-daughter relationship. I was in my twenties, juggling a busy and demanding job. My mother was silent about her experiences during her childhood and the war, yet the burden of it—her secrets—lingered in the air, subtly and profoundly. I wasn’t about to ask her about them at this point, even if I had time. While I did appreciate his observations that my mother wanted me to be happy and I didn’t have to measure up to anyone else’s expectations, I also remember thinking I would never figure my mother out, and I certainly didn’t have time to go to marriage counselling to try.

I couldn't will myself to love someone, even a man as intelligent, decent, and cheerful as the good-looking guy was. We continued living in the house, each wrapped up in our busy lives, making it easy to avoid one another until it was sold a few weeks later. Then we walked out in different directions, a moment that epitomized how mismatched we were. He took his share of the house sale profits, sold his motorcycle and bought a used pickup truck, put his half of the furniture in the back, and moved to a log cabin in rural Quebec. Reports from mutual friends confirm that he is still there, a much-loved local family doctor.

“I hope you’ll be happy, Alice. But I want you to know I’ve met someone else,” was the gist of what he said when we met to finalize our uncontested divorce. There was no one in my life, and those words pierced. We never spoke again. I put the wedding photos in the trash can and brought the dress to Goodwill in a green garbage bag with other items I no longer needed.

I took my proceeds from the house sale and bought my next fixer-upper landing back in Centretown. I poured myself into work and another home renovation project. The toughest hurdle was telling my mother that my marriage had failed and that her hope for me to live happily ever after was not going to happen, at least not in the foreseeable future.

But it was my life. Getting it together felt like my most grown-up moment to date. A universal coming-of-age moment, but epiphanic nonetheless.

It would be another four decades before the words spoken by the marriage counsellor came into focus again, bringing me back to memories of this other lifetime.