As I fumbled with the buttons on my coat, she knelt down beside me and spoke softly, her words burning into my memory.
“Lorraine, is there a reason you didn’t stand in the girls’ line?” she asked, her eyes warm and caring. I knew it was safe for me to speak honestly.
“I’m supposed to be a boy,” I answered. “I don’t belong with the girls.” She stayed like that, crouched down beside me for a few moments, her comforting hand on my shoulder.
“I understand,” she said. “Do you think that could be something private you only share with really good friends?” She nodded encouragingly. “I am very happy to be your friend and I think it would be best for you to line up in the girls’ line, but know in your heart how you feel.” She smiled warmly. “Okay?”
I nodded and forced a small smile. In that moment, a few months’ shy of five years old, I understood how it was. She was so kind to me. She knew I’d be pushed in a ditch if the other kids knew what was up with me.
MY PARENTS HAD braved a blizzard early one December morning to drive to the hospital for my birth. The evening before, as she’d sat in her sewing class, labor pains had gripped my mother. She and our next-door neighbor Sarah—her intrepid companion on various self-improvement courses such as Chinese cooking and knitting—had cut the night short and ventured home through the Calgary snowstorm, Mom wiping the fogged glass as Sarah drove, peering through the windshield. The sewing lessons never translated into any inherited stitching or mending expertise, but tales of Mom drinking copious amounts of stout while she was pregnant—thanks to a Dr. Spock recommendation for anemic expectant mothers—left me convinced I came by my love of beer and later alcohol troubles honestly.
I also credit my ability to fit in anywhere to Mom. Whether it was cooking or sewing classes with Sarah, annual summer family camping trips when my brother, my sister, and I were kids, or tolerating the eight-hour semiannual drives to spend a week with Dad’s mother and many siblings in rural Saskatchewan, Mom did it with aplomb, even if her apparent enjoyment may have lacked sincerity. Had she participated in these activities grudgingly or as if they were beneath her, I might have defined her as a snob. But she dove in, if not quite with gusto, then at least with a good college try at merriment.
She’d been born into the role of outsider—she grew up in a rural Alberta town among farmers as the daughter of the bank manager, accustomed to “visiting” without pretension among the locals in her formative years. Perhaps it was her generation’s awareness of manners, rendering her loath to rock the boat or draw undue attention to herself, but I believe she carried a comprehension of how unique she was and accepted that her differences would be more difficult to bear if she bemoaned her pedestrian life.
Occasionally, she’d lament a life unlived, telling me that she’d given up a lot for me, for us, without providing any specifics other than regret that she hadn’t pursued her own journalism ambitions and sadness that the only career options widely available for women of her era were nursing and education. She had chosen education. She’d taught for four and a half years—one of them at the school where she met Dad—and decided it wasn’t for her. Whatever dreams she may have had, she kept them to herself. The truth was, while we shared many traits, my mother loomed over me, a larger-than-life enigma. Much like a mysterious painting whose profundity I only superficially understood, I would spend my lifetime observing her, puzzling over her—sometimes squinting, other times with eyes wide open.
She was not warm, nor was she stone cold; my mother could best be characterized as English. She was born in Alberta to a sensitive, artistic Englishman and a genteel French woman who each were averse to overt displays of affection and self-disclosure. Mom towered in relief above the surrounding terrain, educated and well-read. A swan among hens, she settled right in at whatever farmhouse we were visiting, elegant even in shorts and a cotton blouse, sipping her rye and Coke with Dad’s sisters and the wives of his many brothers, making lunch or dinner for the men while chatting about the kids, who played outside in the late summer heat. If my Saskatchewan aunts were Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly, my mother was a hybrid of Peggy and Joan, pure Mad Men in style and bearing, as steely and smooth as they come.
Dad was the only one of his siblings to leave Saskatchewan. He was achingly shy, a quiet, sensitive man. As a youngster, he had stayed home to listen to the radio on Saturday afternoons while the rest of his family went out, tuning in to the Metropolitan Opera’s weekly broadcast. When he met Mom, she couldn’t get over his deep love and knowledge of the opera, or the fact that he’d developed it in his south Saskatchewan farmhouse kitchen. A moustache adorned his upper lip for almost his entire life, and I’d often get the impression it served as a curtain to hide the rare mischievous smirk he would allow himself. Thick glasses completed his look; his students were known to don joke shop Groucho glasses (complete with nose and moustache) en masse on the last day of school as a good-natured joke that never failed to crack him up. Our Calgary life stood in sharp contrast to the world of Dad’s farming relatives. He worked as a junior high principal in the Catholic school system and Mom worked at home caring for Jake and me—and three years later, our little sister Katherine.
My parents worked hard to help our young family make it to each payday, like so many others did in bustling 1960s Calgary. Many of our friends and neighbors worked in education, medicine, and the trades, while others formed the foundation of Alberta’s growing oil economy as company executives, lawyers, petroleum engineers, financiers, and rig workers. While we worked, played, studied, and lived alongside one another, families like ours never attained the kind of wealth our oil industry friends came to enjoy.
The blizzard long over, the four of us had driven home from the hospital that cold December to our recently purchased bungalow, tucked into the red Volkswagen bug that was soon replaced with a more family-sensible four-door Plymouth Valiant. Our neighborhood, Lakeview, was a new community perched atop the Glenmore Reservoir, a large lake on the city’s western edge. Our house had a postcard-perfect view of the Rocky Mountains to the west out of our front room picture window, from which we could predict the day’s weather by the state of the sky over the foothills.
The same year I began kindergarten, my father flooded our backyard to make an ice rink where my older brother Jake and I, age six and five, could play hockey. The surface looked huge to my tiny self, framed by two-by-sixes and lined with heavy plastic. I couldn’t imagine it ever filling completely. I stood out there beside my dad in the freezing starlit night, bundled in our puffy down jackets, his gloved hands gently waving the hose back and forth across the ice, which was forming layer by layer. We’d take breaks to go inside and warm up every twenty minutes or half an hour. Sometimes, if we were lucky, there would be hot chocolate waiting for us. After several evenings and a weekend, the rink was full, and the ice solid.
Two nights before Christmas, the late-afternoon winter sky was pregnant with the promise of snow, the grey-white glow not quite cloud cover but definitely not clear. Anticipation hung in the air. Jake and I wobbled around the rink on the soft ankles of secondhand leather skates, leaning on our hockey sticks for support, squealing excitedly at the prospect of Santa’s arrival. We jockeyed for the puck, tapping and wedging our sticks together playfully. Our parents watched us through the windows as they tended to Katherine. Jake and I played sports constantly and though each of us wanted to win, we were never rough or aggressive. But somehow, our skates became tangled and I felt myself falling backward, seemingly in slow motion, as the trees became the sky above me an instant before the back of my head struck the ice with a sickening thud.
No one wore helmets to skate back in those days. My woolen hat probably cushioned the blow to my head, but I don’t remember anything. I don’t know how many minutes passed before I opened my eyes, blinking at the sky spinning over me. Jake’s blurry form hovered off to one side. I couldn’t hear a thing. I lay there for some time, woozy, as a dreamlike revelation overtook me. I’m turning into a boy, I thought.
As I lay on the ice, oblivious to the cold and pain, I was gripped by a sudden realization that this was what I’d been waiting for, and I was awash with relief. Until then, I hadn’t known it was something I longed for.
I wanted to squeeze my various