I never wanted kids
Until I did
My last Substack post detailed a harsh 2 point loss for my son’s team last month. My son played that exact same team again this past weekend. They won by 29 points. My son shut down the 6’1” boy this time, scored on fast breaks off turnovers and rebounds, and hit a few three pointers. They lost one hard fought game and didn’t win the championship, but they had the best points differential of all the teams in the tournament.
I spent three full days with my son at his last four games of the season. Some of the best days of my life.
It was a weekend that 13 year old me could never imagine happening.
I never wanted to have kids.
Until I did.
The easy days of my childhood had dissolved into long swaths of grey sadness by the time I was 13. I think things started to turn for me the moment we packed all of our personal belongings into a van and travelled across Canada because the political climate in Quebec became untenable. There were six of us: my mom, dad, grandma and grandpa, my brother and I. We rushed that trip into 10 days that were nothing but a blur. My grandfather insisted on it. He was nervous and demanding like that. I hated every moment of that road trip. I was still grieving saying goodbye to all my friends in grade 8, knowing I would probably never see them again, all while cramped in a tight space with people I really did not want to be with.
At the end of that trip we had no home to come home to, my dad had no job to go to, and we ended holed up in a run down motel about 75 minutes outside of Vancouver. I had gone from carefree days in downtown Montreal to the grim township of Haney. I remember playing outdoor hockey on skates in the winter and skateboarding like it was endless summer in California as soon as the snow melted. Somehow life at that broken down motel led to boring days of doing nothing that grey summer. The first day of school didn’t offer much hope either. It rained like a typhoon and it seemed as if it didn’t stop until spring of the next year. No wonder they called it Rainy Haney.
My parents had become born again Christians a few years earlier. I guess I did too, but I didn’t give it another thought until we arrived in BC. As soon as we arrived we tried out a new church every Sunday. One Sunday it was a Pentecostal church where people danced and shouted in tongues. We left that one abruptly and never set foot there again. Another Sunday we went to an Anglican church, and then a huge Baptist one, before we ended up at an offshoot of that big one. The people at this church were nice enough but they were clear with me that unless I committed my life fully to Jesus, I was in for a dark eternity.
Once I understood the depth of the commitment I would need to keep out of hell, I decided to really try at being a Christian. Unfortunately for me, my understanding was influenced by the rigid doctrine, and quickly I began to see how lacking I was as a young man. I almost immediately began to have thoughts that were not edifying, and had me constantly fear I was going to hell.
I had always made friends easily in school. Grade nine was different. I missed my friends from Montreal deeply and did not want to get hurt again. It didn’t help that I had gone from grade six to a new junior high school, and switched schools again for grade eight. By the time I entered Maple Ridge Secondary School for grade nine, I just didn’t want to bother to get to know anybody. By default I hung out with kids from my church and was almost immediately ostracized. The other kids weren’t mean, but they just assumed I was a bible thumper. I had no reprieve at school, none at church and none at home. After a few months of that I began to swear and go back to how I used to be when we lived in Montreal. It was my only form of rebellion. People let me in, and yet I still kept things at a very surface level.
Grade nine to grade twelve were some of the saddest times of my life. I just felt like giving up. I worked four days a week, saved money for university, went through the motions, pretended to be happy and put on the mask of nice. I was nice at church. I was nice to my friends. I was nice to girls. I was nice to my parents.
I remember we didn’t have much money at all. In grade 10 my dad had to take a paper route delivering the Vancouver Province newspaper to 350 homes in his car to keep food on the table. I was the de facto delivery boy that put papers into mail slots. I remember the shame I felt when we arrived at a house at 3:30am and my classmate Bobby Shafer answered the door. It was his paper route we were taking over. He said something like “Lucky for you that your dad is helping you with this beast of a paper route! I wish my dad would have helped me.” I could not tell him we were so poor it was my dad’s paper route. We did that up until I graduated high school.
By the time grade 12 was ending, my dad and I decided to start a business together. I needed a job to pay for my upcoming years at university and my family were building a new home at the time. Somehow they had scraped enough money for a down payment by my dad renting machine time at a machine shop and making knick knacks out of brass which he sold out of a briefcase. Although we didn’t have money we were always industrious. We worked 14 hour days that summer. I was glad to leave behind the paper route, but working a lathe and milling machine in the heat of summer, 6 days a week, left little time for enjoyment. I remember working behind those machines gave me a lot of time to think. I didn’t think many good thoughts, most induced despair.
For some reason I chose a Christian university for my academic career. It was closer to home and much smaller than UBC and SFU. The only downside was that it was very expensive. I stayed on campus that year. I was excited to experience campus life and be with real Christians. Unfortunately my naiveté and desire met the harsh reality of the real world. I felt the sting of hypocrisy and bullying in my dorm. I could not believe that I was actually desiring my old high school days. I remember really wanting to fit in once and for all. I remember not being good enough for the super Christians, and too goody-goody for the rebels.
My brother and I planned a trip to the UK the summer between my first and second years of university. I hated the Christian university so much that I decided to transfer to Simon Fraser University and switch my major to business. This meant that I didn’t have to save up as much money for the year because I was going to take a reduced course load and SFU cost about half of Trinity Western. This meant that I could afford go to Europe for six weeks. I was 18 and my brother was 16.
We landed in England on a rainy June late afternoon. We found a hostel in Golders Green. We hated it. We decided to trade in our Brit Rail pass for a Eurail pass, and were on the Hovercraft to France the next day.
I remember hitting Gare du Nord later that day, and meeting one of my best friends Eric Josselin. Eric worked at an agency that found hostels for backpackers. He immediately found us the best hotel for the least amount of Francs. He was the first nice person we met on that trip.
We dropped our backpacks at the room, and I remember taking the metro and seeing the Eiffel Tower at sunset.
This was the first glimmer of joy I had experienced in almost five years.
No wonder I didn’t want kids.
Until I did.
to be continued