Love Omen - The New Yorker

In 1990, when I was twenty-six years old, I decided to do a one-year journalism program at King’s College, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I brought my three-year-old son, my boyfriend, and our baby with me. I loved being a mother, but I was panicking a bit, thinking of a career, thinking that I should probably get one. We were broke. My mom was giving us money. I was worried about getting pregnant again. We drove across the country, from Winnipeg to Halifax. The baby was only three months old. We didn’t have a place to live in Halifax, but eventually we found one, on the ground floor of an old house on Agricola Street, in the North End.

At King’s, the director of the journalism program called me into his office. He’d found out that I had a three-year-old child. He told me that I was making a mockery of the program. How did I expect to complete this intense course of studies with a child at home? I told him that my boyfriend was taking care of the kids. Kids? Plural? He was so angry. He asked what line of work my boyfriend was in. I said that he was a juggler. “You have a clown at home taking care of your children while you study journalism?” I was determined, then, to prove this man wrong, to finish the year and get my degree. I started making short radio documentaries about laundromats and tattoo parlors and bingo halls, stories about permanence and luck.

One night, somebody broke into our house by climbing through my son’s bedroom window and stole our boom box and all our cassettes. After that, I slept with my boyfriend’s prop juggling machetes near the bed.

Not long after the break-in, my boyfriend and I decided that he should have a vasectomy. My boyfriend, now my ex-husband, remembers the details of that day differently. But, in my memory, we took the kids with us. We put the baby in her stroller and walked and then took a bus and then a ferry across Halifax Harbor to Dartmouth, where the clinic was. We all crammed into the doctor’s office. The doctor asked my boyfriend how old he was. He said twenty-eight. The doctor said that he was too young to have a vasectomy. He asked my boyfriend what would happen if he and I split up and he wanted to have more children with a different woman. My boyfriend said that he didn’t want to do that. The doctor sent us packing. He couldn’t take us seriously. We all made the long trek back to the other side of the harbor, on foot, on the ferry, on the bus.

My son, Owen, who had just turned four, was working on his letters. He had problems with some of them. He wrote postcards to the “hole family” back in Winnipeg. He signed them “love omen.”

My uncle wrote me a letter to say that I had been kicked out of the Mennonite Church, which I had grown up in. He tried to be kind. He was my favorite uncle. He said that it was because of my life style and my lack of attendance and the illegitimate children.

We were so broke. Once, the university helped us pay our rent. My boyfriend got a gig performing at the openings of new Ultramar gas stations. He had a blue cape and a sidekick, a clown named Dipstick. He was “Captain Ultramar.” My friend Carol came to Halifax to help out with the kids while my boyfriend toured. One icy day, we were all in the car and it started to slide backward on Sackville Street. It was a street that sloped steeply down from the Citadel all the way to the harbor. Carol and I screamed, but the kids were calm. The baby stayed asleep in her car seat. We slid backward, screaming, sleeping. I remember Carol yelling, “Counter-steer, counter-steer!” At the last minute, we managed to avoid plunging into the sea by spinning out into a snowdrift. We laughed.

The year was over. I got my degree. I flew home with the baby. My boyfriend and Owen drove home, passing through the States, with a U-Haul hitched to the car. I had to get a notarized letter saying that my boyfriend had my permission to take my son across the U.S. border. The border guards stopped the car, pointed at my boyfriend, and asked my son who he was. Owen said, “That’s my mom.” He thought it was funny. They asked again, “Who is this man?” My son said, “He’s my mother.” The border guards kept asking. My kid just resolutely stayed in character, never breaking, eventually wearing the guard down with a silly joke, a four-year-old’s joke, and, out of pure exasperation, the guards allowed them to cross. It’s funny to think how, back then, we, my family, assumed that things would always, sort of magically, comically, with some luck, work out in the end.♦

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