My Mother's Son: Chapter 20
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I sit in the corner of the room, cross-legged, staring at my reflection
in the mirror on the other side. My hair is a flame, my eyes wild, yet
I do not express any emotion. My are lips tight, my eyes are fixed, the
only thing that runs through my mind is how mundane my life has become.
Inside these four walls I sit, day after day, week after week, year after year. It's been five years now, I think. I don't really keep track of the days because they all seem together. Monday is just like Thursday, which in turn is just like Saturday. I sit. I stare. I think. I don't remember much from the last few years, there's been nothing to remember. The only thing that breaks up my time are my visits from Josée, who seems content to prod me with questions. She says she's only trying to gain insight into what I'm thinking, but the only thing I can think is that she's wasting her time. I tell her this, she shakes her head and tells me that she'll be back tomorrow. The next day I tell her the very same thing, and the cycle continues. I don't see anybody anymore; it's not that I ever did. But I never used to feel lonely because of that, now it's all that I ever feel. Lonely. Alone. Stuck in a room. Staring at a wall. Nobody ever bothers to come and see me, most have simply given up. Evangeline used to come every Sunday and sit with me, now she barely shows up once a year. She last came two months ago, filled with stories about how her life is going. After she's finished talking, she inevitably asks me how my life is going, and then there is a silence. I have nothing to say. A few months after the night that changed everything, she went into labour. Three months premature, baby Marie was borne. The proud mother chose the name of her sister, despite the fact she's tried to cut everybody from her past out of her life. The baby struggled at first, or so I'm told. Without fully developed lungs, she clung to life, almost succumbing to death a few times. But Evangeline sat by her side, day in and day out, praying to God that one more thing wouldn't be taken from her. I used to make those prayers, but lately I haven't had a reason. I have nothing left to pray for; everything's been taken away from me. My freedom, my happiness, my life, simply everything. The one thing that I used to pray for, my baby was even taken away from me. A year after Marie was born, Evangeline met another man in the university. She says they hit it off right away, laughing over the most mundane things, making sense of the most complicated matters. Unlike most men, he wasn't turned off by the fact that she was a mother; that she had a one-year-old by another man. Their courtship was a whirlwind, she said, describing how they went to church on Sundays as a family, went for picnics on Mt-Royal and took off to the townships on the weekends. A few months later he proposed, and she accepted. As simple as that. I'll never forget when she told me. I thought I would feel something, but I didn't. I should have felt a thousand daggers stabbing into my flesh, but I just didn't feel anything. I wasn't happy for her, yet I wasn't mad that she had moved on. She tried to hide her enthusiasm as she told me about him, so as not to make me depressed. But the truth was that I just didn't care. Her next visit was a more serious matter. She brought papers with her. Not a newspaper or an income tax return, but a paternity paper. She wanted me to sign over my paternal rights to Marie. I absolutely refused to at first. There was no way I'd give up my baby. I didn't want my child to grow up with the same feeling that I had growing up. Never knowing who her father was, much less why he abandoned her. Was she not good enough? I grew up with this constantly hanging over my head, gnawing at me day after day until I wanted to kill myself. There was no way that I'd inflict this on my own child. But then Evangeline turned nasty. She called me selfish for putting my own wants ahead of Marie's well being. She said that Gilles was a really good man, that he loved her so much, that he'd do anything for her. She said that he'd give her a really good life and that she'd never know that he wasn't her real father. But I still refused. Then things got ugly. Evangeline took the matter to court, basing her case on the fact that I wasn't in my daughter's life and I could never be. And even though I wasn't there to represent myself, she won. Legally, I don't have a child. When I found out, it was the hardest thing that I had ever been told. I didn't know what to feel at first. I felt betrayed, angry, but most of all, sad. I had failed my child. Before she was born, I made a promise to myself that I'd give her everything that I never had. She would be loved. She would be safe. She would never have to worry about anything because I would be the best father that ever walked the face of the earth. I lied to her. At first I cried, I tried to kill myself, I completely shut down. Constantly staring at a photo of her that Evangeline gave me, I wondered where she was, what she was doing. I wondered if her father was tucking her in, telling her that he loved her and that she would always be safe. Telling her that she'd never have to worry about anything. That was supposed to be me. After a while I simply resigned myself to the fact that I had no daughter. I started thinking about Evangeline's arguments, how good Marie's life would be, and I started accepting them. After all, I wasn't able to be a father to Marie, I would never be in contact with her. Maybe it was for the best that she had a father that could hold her when she fell, who could console her after a nightmare. One that wasn't a hundred miles removed. That's when Evangeline's visits started becoming more and more infrequent. I started believing that the only reason she visited me was to butter me up so I would sign over my paternity rights. I believed that until the day she brought me a father's day card, with a note she had written herself. Happy
Father's Day,
I read that card over and over until my eyes hurt. It made me angry at
first until I realized that she is the love of my life too. I will
never
forget her nor the times we spent together, the growing we did side by
side, hand in hand. She will always have a special place in my heart,
and
nobody will ever change that.
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