Rob Ern grapples with the meaning of his parents divorce and his dad’s sudden change in hairstyle.
In October, I noticed my dad growing out his hair. It was just shaggy then. It didn’t look deliberate, more like one forgotten appointment. I still teased him about mercilessly. He had just retired, took an early package from work. I was worried that, after his first couple of weeks off, he was losing touch. So I took it on myself to reintroduce some societal norms via barbed quips. The last thing I wanted was to picture my retired father wandering the streets of Calgary like some mountain man coming into town to restock his larder after a particularly difficult winter.
“Hey, Bieber. Why don’t you get a haircut?” I asked, handing him a beer.
“I don’t work anymore. Why should I?” He opened his beer.
“Jesus. Is that why you we’re doing it?” I laughed.
He was in town visiting my older sister and I. He certainly had the time. My mother and younger sister didn’t so they stayed home., My future fiancée Alex, my older sister, her boyfriend, my dad and I were all having supper together and watching Flight of the Conchords. My father didn’t seem to be paying a lot of attention but I didn’t think anything of it. When the show was over, and the plates were cleared, my dad looked over at me.
“Ben? Can I get a hand with something outside?” The tone hinted at serious conversation.
Well shit, I thought. Grandpa is dead. Dying. Grandpa is dying.
I shuffled outside, dreading any kind of real discussion. My dad was waiting by his car.
“Ben…”
“Yeah…”
“Help me carry these inside.”
There were two plastic bins in the back of his Rav4. We carried them into the living room. I whistled with relief despite the strain of the heavy container. When the last one was in, my sister and I popped the lids.
“My god, are these…”
“…the memory boxes,” my sister finished.
The memory boxes are the personal Smithsonians of the Ern children. They contain every report card, every class photo, and every mediocre art project we ever did, from kindergarten to graduation: a complete record of everything we’ve ever done. Until now, our mom curated the boxes. She did her best to protect our history from everything, including us, for preservation sake In high school, I tried to edit some embarrassing photos out my box. You would have thought I wrapped the car around a streetlight based on her wrath. Now, she was returning the collection to us.
While I wasn’t excited about the responsibility, I had no problem diving into the box to investigate. Wine was opened and we all dug in, Alex looking for clues about what a theoretical son might be like, while I did my best to hide the worst bits. I had a little trouble when she found the artwork from my infamous “snakes-are-easy-to-draw” period. But, if memory serves, it was easier to explain it to her than the school counselor.
My sister and her boyfriend were waging a different kind of war: her pulling out a never-ending string of accomplishments like a magician pulling rabbits out of an Ivy League top hat. He was having trouble keeping up. My dad sat at the kitchen table, laughing when appropriate and filling the gaps in half-remembered stories.
When it was time to go home, my dad volunteered to drive us. Drunk on nostalgia and pinot noir. I treated the car to a healthy drunken rant that covered everything from my old report cards to inconsistencies in the city’s urban growth agenda. When we pulled up in front of our house, I began to thank my dad and unbuckle when he turned around and asked Alex if he could “talk to Ben alone for a moment.”
Shit. I knew it. Grandpa was dying.
I wandered into the house a few minutes later and sat on the bed. Alex sat down next to me.
“Is your Grandpa ok?”
“Yeah, uh, my parents are getting divorced.”
♦◊♦
I suppose my parents’ divorce was shocking because they had never done that before. I’m not sure I even saw them fight. Well, not with each other. They had three teenagers so they were too busy with us to fight each other. They seemed to get along. After the last of us, my little sister, left, my dad was transferred and they moved the nest to Calgary. I conceded the possibility that fights could have occurred there without me noticing. I briefly wondered if my sisters and I dropping the ball on a thirtieth anniversary party was a contributing factor. That touching power point I thought about making might have made the difference.
This was the only such thought I allowed myself. Hearing your parents are getting divorced when you are twenty-eight is a lot different than it is when you’re fourteen. As a teenager, I would have had no trouble making it about me. But, at twenty-eight, I was mature. Every truly selfish thought I had was scuttled by reason. Shocking, yes, but I had to concede it didn’t make sense for two people who didn’t want to live together to do so for the sake of my bi-weekly phone call. Suddenly, my often-repeated threat of putting them in separate old folks’ homes when they got older carried considerably less weight.
My parents’ divorce undermined marriage significantly at a time when I had a ring burning a hole through my back pocket. But part of me knew that their marriage was different than mine would be. My family was an oopsie family. I made that discovery embarrassingly late. I was sitting at the table, musing out loud to myself as I wrapped a gift about what a coincidence it was that my parent’s 20th anniversary should happen fall in the same year as my sister’s 20th birthday. Of course, I immediately confronted everyone involved but I was breaking old news. The most I got for a reaction was an annoyed eye roll from my mom.
I didn’t mind being an oopsie family. I’m sure there have been proud oopsie dynasties. What are the chances they planned every Kennedy? Nevertheless, the timing of this new development was suspicious. Of course, in the light of my paranoia, everything cast a sinister shadow. That was the first time in a long time that all the Ern children had their shit together. I was finishing my master’s, my little sister had just finished her nursing degree, and my older sister was an actuary. We were all in stable, loving relationships. Had they stayed together from a sense of obligation to their children and now that they were ok, they didn’t feel it anymore? Perhaps my dad felt like he had just gotten out of a thirty-two year cellphone contract.
That first night, there were many phone calls. I called my mom. She sounded fine; once again, I was breaking old news. My dad told me it was mutual; my mother hinted it was not but declined to say more. Now the “growing apart” hypothesis had to be thrown out for something more sinister. My sisters and I compared notes but came up with more questions than answers. The flurry of phone calls and emails represented a drastic spike in our communication levels but it yielded nothing substantial. I would grill my dad when we went to breakfast the next day: have the sunrise skillet with a side of confession.
I couldn’t though. The clever bastard had brought hostages, human shields. With my sister’s boyfriend and my fiancée at the table, any serious conversation was not on the menu. We sat there talking about the new buildings going up all over the city since my parents left. I couldn’t stop getting annoyed at my dad’s hair, the mid-life crisis he had to keep brushing out of his eyes. But it was all together too easy to ignore the elephant in the room. The eggs benedict helped quite a bit. There is no hurt that hollandaise cannot help. Eventually, we said goodbye. I went back to not thinking about my parents.
The rest of the semester passed quickly. I was too busy to think about my parents for very long. That’s not why I was busy, but it was a nice bonus. The only time I really noticed was the bi-weekly calls. It wasn’t the conversation itself. In fact, the only time we came close was a few passing references my mother made about putting the house on the market. No, what made it apparent was that I now had to make two calls. Only a few months in and my phone bill hurt. Even more painful was having to teach them Skype. Separately.
Alex and I decided to spend the entire break in Calgary. The whole family approached the Christmas season with trepidation. We were, the children and significant others at least, completely unsure of how it would work. We stayed at my mom’s, which had been my parents. My father invited us to his, but I had no interest in seeing my divorced father’s sadness apartment. Most likely, it was fully furnished with the latest from Ikea’s “At-least-you-tried-to-make-it -work” furniture line. My little sister only lived ten minutes away and even she had declined to make the trip.
So we stayed with my mom and sometimes visited with my dad. He hadn’t cut his hair yet. Now, he had to brush it aside every couple of minutes. It seemed like, in the absence of ridicule, his midlife crisis blossomed. I took it on myself to provide at least enough jabs to get him to sit in a barber chair for a few minutes. Tiny jabs. Things like, “you know, you’d make a much better ringette player if those things weren’t in your eyes all the time.”
♦◊♦
He took us to the science center. Based on the crowd, we realized it was a rite of passage for divorced fathers and their kids. Both of us were trying to kill as much time as possible in order to spend as little of the Saturday at the sadness apartment as possible. He’s a scientist, so he was able to supplement the information on the plaques with all kinds of facts. I’m a prick, so I was able to look him in the eyes and say “I don’t Beliebe you. Get a haircut.” Yes, I was getting a little cranky. We’d been there for a couple of weeks and I still had no idea why I was watching my dad turn into a long-haired version of Kirk van Houten. All the fathers playing at the water table, asking their children if mom had any special sleepover friends didn’t help.
I had theories about what happened. Like the InGen dinosaurs and frog DNA, you fill in what you don’t know with what you do. In my case, I filled it in with infidelity and depression. I’d dabbled with both a couple of years before. His evasiveness evoked mine. Sometimes, I caught him using the same tone of voice I used to answer my ex when she asked how the staff party was. A tone that claims to have slept on a couch but that smells of hotel shampoo. Maybe my parents had just gotten sick of each other. Maybe they had checked the actuarial tables and realized how far they still had to go. Maybe my dad was fucking a twenty year old. Maybe that twenty year old was pregnant. My father would be ill equipped for the guilt. He would probably leave as I did. Maybe he did it to make sure he would leave. I didn’t know and I didn’t want to.
As I said, none of the children had any idea what Christmas would be like. We found out my dad would be there because my mom, in passing, asked me to remind him to bring some cheese. My family always shoves the message to the edge of what we’re saying. It’s a way of keep everybody informed without leaving room for a discussion. I passed the news along to my sisters et al. over beers. “One Christmas everyone, we’re doing one Christmas.” My poor little sister who had her in-laws’ dinner to think about, and who had been stalling them as best she could, got on the phone to scramble her plans. We were anxious about how Christmas would work, but we were all relieved we wouldn’t be drinking box wine and eating Chinese food in the sadness apartment.
Christmas ended up being like any before, on the surface at least. My dad came over early in the morning and spent the entire day. The only clue that something was different was the speed with which the obligatory mimosas disappeared. We opened gifts that still had “from Mom and Dad” written on them. Clever me, I threw a pair of scissors in a gift bag and handed it to my dad. He smiled like a champ and set it aside.
We spent the day drinking and playing games, eating and napping. My parents were in the kitchen, helping each other make supper. The gulf between what we were doing and what was happening was grating. The more my parents laughed in the kitchen, the worse it got. Worse yet, I was complicit. My family has always been good at avoiding what was happening, but this, this was our masterpiece. Nobody wanted to be responsible for ruining the day by pointing out what was ruining it. The blame would fall squarely on whoever cracked the illusion, shoddy as it was. By Boxing Day. I loaded the car and left before my father got there to say goodbye.
♦◊♦
I, like the rest of my immediate and extended family, spent most of the next semester worried about my father. Nobody was talking about why he was now living alone in a one bedroom downtown. If I tried to talk to him, we’d talk about me. If I tried to ask him questions about how he was doing, he would just tell me not to worry, that he was keeping busy. If pressed, which he always was, he would say he was doing errands. Errands. I pictured my dad filling his days like some pensioner dutifully going from the post office to the bank to the store and then home. He wasn’t working and now what would have been lunch hour annoyances had grown like goldfish to fill the tank that was his day. God help you if you asked about his job search. A firm “none of your business” usually ended the conversation.
The depression rightly worried me the most. A man in a dark apartment by himself can start believing many things that don’t make sense in daylight or with friends. The twisted logic that I thought had coopted my dad was familiar. I’d try to talk to him so I could get him out of it, like some kind of sorrow Sherpa, but I couldn’t get him to talk about anything real. Once, in frustration, I texted him, “You should come to visit next weekend” to which he replied “why?” I threw the phone across the room.
The next weekend, , I was coming out of the movie theater when I got a phone call.
It was my sister.
“Where are you? Dad’s here. “
“What?”
“He’s here. Why aren’t you here?
“No one told me he was coming.”
“I’m sure I told you.”
“I’m pretty fucking sure you didn’t. No one called me. This is bullshit. He can’t even communicate basic travel plans now?”
“Sorry, calm down. Are you coming?”
“No, I’m not dropping everything I’m doing for him. I’ll see you later.”
I caved by morning. So once again, we all found ourselves sitting in Smitty’s talking about generalities. His hair had continued its trajectory towards teen pop star, but by now it had overshot Bieber and was heading for Hannah Montana. Everyone who grows their hair out has to endure the awkward stage my dad’s hair was in now. When it’s shorter, mousse controls it; when it gets where it seems to be going, a ponytail might do the trick. But for now, it existed in a stylist’s no man’s land. It was the teenager of hair length, controlling it would only backfire; you just had to let it mature.
I didn’t know what he was going for. I hypothesized that he might think this was cool. I remembered all the old vinyl in the basement, all the seventies rockers on the covers with their long hair. Was my father, suddenly free from responsibility, trying to return to a cool no one had the heart to tell him didn’t exist anymore? Thinking that made me sick. Not with him, but with myself. I was skulking around looking at my father’s albums for clues into his thought process like some bored seventies housewife blaming her son’s behavior on Alice Cooper.
I resolved not to care and then broke that resolution the first time he tossed his hair out of his eyes.
Then, I resolved again.
Fuck it. Let him live in his shame loft with or without the intern or restaurant hostess who might or might not be pregnant with a half-brother or half-sister I would never see or have to see at every holiday while he lives on a pension or gets a job and calls me to talk about the latest chinook and nothing else. The man I thought I’d known was gone.
He’d read to me every night, never missed a basketball game, was a scout leader all while working his hardest to protect the environment and leave the world a better place. He was in every way my moral superior. I’d aspired to his heights and found him wallowing in my depths. He was turning…shitty. And what was this?
Egg yolk in his fucking hair.
He reached for a dropped fork and got egg in his fucking hair.
Jesus.
We left the restaurant and walked to the parking lot. Alex and I got into our car, my sister and my dad got into hers. I was about to turn the engine over when I looked over at them. My sister was pushing him encouragingly out the door of her car. He slid out and walked over to me with a letter in hand. This time something told me grandpa was fine. He told me to read it when I got the chance. Terrified, I just nodded, took it, and pulled out.
The ride home was the only time in my life I have ever prayed for a red light. I drove, barely aware of anything besides the envelope. At the first red, I ripped into the envelope, tearing the letter into two pieces I held together on the steering wheel. My eyes raced over the text, impatiently scanning for answers.
…an image of me over the years that isn’t…”
Then the light turned green. I continued on, glancing sideways at the letter, which was now on the console. I slowed down enough to make sure I hit the next red.
….never regretted having a family and I love….
Green.
Red.
….transgendered, a condition that…”
Green.
Red.
… either transition or die, and I’m rather fond of living…”
Home.
I sat in the driveway and handed the letter over to Alex to make sure I’d read it right. I was sure I did. The letter was eloquent, succinct and detailed. He hadn’t been fucking a twenty year old; he had been drafting this. Alex nodded and the dam broke.
Relief poured in.
I’d thought he’d been sitting in his apartment alone and depressed. He wrote about an entire community, a progressive church that embraced him. He wasn’t alone, and that meant more than anything else in the letter. He wasn’t running from anything. He never had.
Sure, there would be many questions in the future. However, for now I was happy he was not the shitty person I thought he was until breakfast. Being a man was never part of why I considered him a good one, and finding out he wasn’t did less to undermine my image of him than a twenty-year-old waitress or intern I made up.
I called him to tell him so. It was the most honest conversation I have ever had with him. We didn’t talk for long. We’d hit a quota for hard truths, especially for a family that is used to looking at them through the periphery, and I needed some time to digest before I heard any more.
I was about to hang up when the second wave of realization hit.
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“Sorry about the hair stuff.”
Photo credit: Flickr / flattop341
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