I shouldn’t have been surprised, though, as I’d been quietly working very hard downstairs at home by myself to get my body into shape.
Less than a year later, our team was in Bloomington, Minnesota, for a tournament, and one of the billets we were staying with had a weight room set up in his basement. A couple of guys on our team who were there couldn’t believe it when I went over to the weight bench and effortlessly pressed the entire set. And the thing is, they were shocked that I even went over to the bench, let alone pushed the weights with ease.
Barry Melville, one of our hockey coaches when I was eleven and twelve, later saw me at one of my football games and didn’t realize it was me. Once he found out, all he could comment on was my changed shape. He had been so patient with me, so encouraging, so dedicated to helping me improve, and I felt proud to make him smile at the athlete I had become.
I was also lucky to have had a remarkable gym teacher, Mr. Warkentin, in Grades Seven through Nine at Ness Junior High School. He was always so kind, patient, and supportive of me as I grew into my body. There was nobody happier than he was as I went from being a kid who couldn’t hold myself up to the chinning bar to one who excelled at the flexed arm hang, a rite of passage for all Canadian kids of a certain vintage who had to complete the Canada Fitness Test.
When I look at pictures of me from back then, the change in my physical makeup through those early years was dramatic, more dramatic than I realized. But the image of that eleven- and twelve-year-old heavy, uncoordinated boy persisted with all of us, myself included, despite my new body. We saw only what we had once seen, not what was really there.
I SEEMED TO have it all. I was a star student, an athlete, and a nice, friendly kid. Athletic success came easily. When I played baseball, I was a pitcher, and I threw harder than the other kids the very first time I tried without knowing a thing about baseball. When I played football, I was voted one of the captains. I didn’t know it, but I was in the process of becoming me. Yet, I was different from my athletic peers because school was even more important to me than sports. I liked sports but I loved school, always in that order. Kids like what they are best at, and no matter how good I was at sports, I was always even better at school. I was, in effect, a teenager cast as a jock among the geeks and a geek among the jocks. But underneath it all, I was a jock who hadn’t always been physically solid, who was in many ways anything but.
And if you dug just a bit deeper into my family situation, you would also have seen something that was different from what it likely seemed to be. Families are like that, and mine was no different.
My mom, as much as she appeared to be loving and caring, and as much as she was loved by others outside our home, was incredibly cold and demanding. She was a closet alcoholic, one only we could see. She most definitely was not a happy drunk. She scowled at us, snapped insults, always had a demeaning comment about how we could be doing more or doing better than we were. I grew up thinking that white Bacardi rum was a cleaning supply because I always found bottles of it under our sink—and that’s what my mom told me it was when I was little and asked her what was in the bottle and, well, she was my mom, so I believed her.
Somewhere along the way, somebody or something had taken away her sense of life and fun. The joyful mother she appears to have been in a journal she kept after my birth quickly gave way to an overwhelmed mother of three who struggled to cope. Drunk and belligerent at dinner, or passed out on the couch after drinking to try to escape, life was just too much for her.
That made her incredibly difficult to live with. The sad thing is that every once in a while, maybe twice, three times a year, she would become the person we didn’t usually see, happy, carefree, laughing, and just really cool to be around. I remember her helping me build a crystal ball radio, just the two us, and it was as if she was a different person as we bantered back and forth until we sorted everything out. She joked that if we could figure this out then we could probably build a television and maybe we should just get rid of ours so that we would have to get right onto that next project. It was such a simple moment, yet because such moments rarely happened with her, that conversation is etched in my memory. And those few moments of joy with my mom kind of made it worse, because after seeing her so full of life, it hurt even more to see her the way she usually was around us.
At her funeral, I heard all about the person she had been before life got the better of her. It was like listening to stories about a complete stranger. I wished that the woman who others had seen had been my mom—someone warm, kind, open with her emotions, helpful, encouraging.
And I know this is awful to say, but I never believed she really loved me. I mean, of course a mother loves her child, and of course I must have memories of loving moments stored somewhere, right? But even as I write this I struggle to find memories of any loving moments. The truth is, I have none. She wasn’t wired that way. Maybe she was a product of her generation, maybe a product of her stern farm upbringing, maybe a product of her alcoholism, but whatever it was, she could not show love.
Of course, if anybody outside the family had said, or were ever to say, a bad thing about my mom, I would be livid. That’s the way it works. You keep it within the family. I did, until now. But I loved her, and I tried so hard to be as loving as I could.
Now my dad, he was a good guy. I have no idea how he survived as long as he did with my mom. They clearly loved each other at some level, and they were each other’s best friend, but after my mom started drinking, she became stubborn and cold and ruthless, and it wasn’t easy being in the house with her. My mom would be in a conversation about something, anything, and would always find a way to lash out at my dad.
“Michael, if you’re so smart, how come you have your crappy job and your crappy car and your crappy clothes? See, you’re not smart. You’re not smart. You’re crappy.” It wasn’t exactly Shakespearean iambic pentameter and it most definitely wasn’t nice. Mom did have standards though. She would not swear in front of us, so “crappy” was the go-to word.
She would withdraw into herself, cut short or dismiss any interaction by reflexively turning her back to us to hide her drinking, I guess thinking that if she couldn’t see us, we couldn’t see her. She would go silent to try to hide her slurring. And on the nights when she lost the ability to hide herself, she would just go on and on at my dad about the same thing, whatever the complaint may have been, until everybody sought refuge somewhere in our tiny bungalow, though we were never able to completely avoid what was going on. We never talked about it with each other. We just tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. Yet, my dad never fought back or argued with her, he just accepted her for who she was. I always admired him for acting like a gentleman with her in the face of some of the worst things imaginable. He loved her to the end, for better or worse.
But the thing is, my dad had to take his frustrations out on somebody, and that somebody was me. I’m not talking about physical abuse or beatings or anything like that. First, that just wasn’t in my dad’s make-up. Second, he simply wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of me physically after I got to be a certain age given my size and strength—he was a big man for his generation 6' 2" and strong, but nothing compared to me in my teens. The abuse was verbal, and something our entire family had to witness.
His mantra with me was “book smart, worldly stupid.” It started when I was about nine or ten years old, when it became apparent that I was more than just academically gifted. I’d give my view on politics or current affairs. “You always have been and you always will be book smart and worldly stupid.” I’d fetch him a Robertson screwdriver when he’d asked for a Phillips. “Book smart, worldly stupid.” I’d finish mowing the lawn and not coil the electric cord properly. “Book smart, worldly stupid.” In a certain sense I guess it was sort of a cute, almost endearing way to approach me, because he was actually acknowledging that I was smart. Except it wasn’t cute, because it came with much more.