I never wanted kids

The ascent, and the fall

Where We Left Off Grey years, a motel, a paper route, a faith that frightened me, and a sunset in Paris that changed everything. Here’s what came next.

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Something cracked me open in those fourteen days in Paris.

We didn’t have much money and budgeted something like 30 French francs per day. Our newfound friend Eric worked for an agency within Gare du Nord. They found backpackers’ hotels and hostels at bargain prices. The only catch was each stay was limited to three nights. This meant we kept coming back to spend time with Eric, which was always fun. There was something about his easygoing French way that was both inviting and exciting. We walked everywhere, exploring everything.

On our travels, we met a very cute girl from Canada and told her how much we loved Paris. Her response lit a fire inside me. “If you like Paris for a week,” she said, “live here for a year.” It was as though she had put a key inside my locked-up heart and it clicked open. I now had a purpose to my life and began feeling hopeful again for the first time in a long time. I would live in Paris for a year.

I returned home, finished my degree with honours, and spent two years saving every dollar I could. There was a difference within me those two years. I was alive. The thing that held that aliveness was knowing I would go back, this time I would live there.

And I did. I lived in Paris for two years. I studied art history at the Sorbonne. I painted in an atelier. I travelled to Italy on cheap flights and lived La Dolce Vita with my friend Stefano in his wonderful town of Fermo. I fell in love with a delightful Spanish girl. It was my summer of love. For the first time in my life I was fully myself.

Then the phone calls started coming.

My parents somehow got hold of my thesis, hidden away in my desk at Mahler Industries — the one I left behind after I vowed to never return. They were about to buy a CNC machine from Japan. My mom called me daily. They wanted me to come back to the business to implement my thesis. After about thirty calls I relented. I said I would come back for six months.

Six months became sixteen years.

I don’t know why I did what I did, or why I chose the path I chose. Looking back, I see how I unconsciously created my future. Paris felt like a fantasy. At home I was bound by a sense of duty and obligation I had invented. I denied my own desires for individuality, creativity, and passion in exchange for the safety of having it all. I found myself an apartment in downtown Vancouver, bought a sports car with the good money I was earning, and started dating the woman who would become my first wife. Outwardly, I looked successful. On the inside I was withering away.

It took about a year for me to fall back into the doldrums of life in Vancouver.

Unable to fully connect with my wife, my parents, my staff, I created a lonely life for myself. I took on responsibility in my company that was not fully mine to bear. Over the years I am sure I became unbearable to my first wife. Somehow she put up with me, and so did the world. The sadness found me again. This time it was unforgiving. No one forced me into this dead zone. I brought it upon myself. There was no way I would ever want to force my sadness, and now my numbness on a child, let alone children. When I wasn’t at work I was thinking about work.

I was obsessed with work, on-time delivery, 100% quality, and looking good. By this I mean I fixated on results. I prided myself on getting things done: on time as promised, with zero defects, and took pride in our family name. I was on a collision course to an early permanent retirement — by this of course I mean death.

Fortunately my first wife and I made one powerful decision together early on. We both chose to not have kids. It was something we both knew. Perhaps it was that we knew we didn’t want kids with each other? This decision saved a mountain of hurt for us — and the kids we ended up not having.

I spent day after day existing.

We saved our money and put a down payment on our dream home, a three-level waterfront townhome in downtown Vancouver.

This was the beginning of the end.

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Epilogue:

In Part Three of this story, I will share what finally shifted within me and changed my heart from sadness into being fully alive. Eventually I did choose to marry again and chose to create a family with my wife. My purpose in this trilogy is to illustrate how deeply sadness and hurt influenced my life, and how small choices broke me out of the chains of feeling broken.

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Editor’s note: A quick hello from me, Karen Pery, Gary’s long term collaborator and friend. I have a unique vantage point of being in Gary’s life since he was a (second time) newlywed and young (at heart) father and knowing him as he is now.

We recently returned to a place we’d visited back in 2012. It was natural for us to compare who we were then to who we are now.

Gary has spoken about now being at the second summit of his life. Reflecting back, he acknowledged the fear that ran him in that era. What I see is a person who looked fear straight on and committed to facing it, decision by decision, even when those decisions gave him lessons and not blessings. He reminds me of the Japanese proverb, “Fall down seven times, stand up eight.”

We likened our personal, professional, emotional and spiritual growth to having a consistent gym routine. You don’t get stronger without doing the reps. There are no shortcuts. I’ve watched Gary transform without taking a single shortcut - in fact, he tends to go about doing things in the most rigorous ways.

There are no easy choices, but there are choices that align with the essence of your being that make the work worth it. I love that the next part of this story gives you the glimpse into the man Gary became that turned a life with Kanako, Koan and Kona into a dream that came true.