I loved being with my girlfriend Grace. Her personality, her intelligence and her easy warmth with others both inspired and challenged me.
At the beginning of our relationship, I found myself often saying something callous or selfish to her, causing tears, which only caused more anger on my part when I couldn’t understand the wrong I’d done wrong or couldn’t deal with the shame I felt upon realizing I’d hurt her feelings.
It would take me many years before I understood how emotionally obtuse I still was in my twenties, and how much like my own father my reaction to tears must have been. Looking back even earlier to my primary and tween years, I remembered my Dad hitting my mother and my sister, using his temper as a weapon (via his fists). I hated violence. My mother was passive and gentle and my little sister was innocent – they deserved none of that shit.
Whenever my mother cried, her grief was never her own fault. That only seemed to make my father angrier – probably to fight back against his own shame in the moment (often, he was the cause of her grief, or had a major hand in it). Dad knew when he had been the perpetrator, but not once did he ever apologize to my mother or to my sister, or try to make unspoken amends after hurting them. He never admitted to his faults. It was old-school male pride and hypocrisy.
I hated my father for his selfish and cowardly behaviour, and as I got older I slowly understood that I’d absorbed some bad behaviours of pride and insecurity from him. He hit me once or twice too. I was too afraid to hit back. As I got older and became my own man, I swore that I’d never use my fists on anyone else unless it was in defense.
During my first year dating Grace, I was still self-consciously protecting myself and hiding my faults. She was my best friend and I loved her dearly, but I was young and rough at the edges, and I didn’t always express my feelings well. My biggest weakness had to be that I had a hard time admitting my faults. That was indeed how I was raised, indirectly taught by the old man’s example. Shame and guilt were such strong deterrents to genuine honesty. Deep-down, I may have been afraid of opening up my heart fully to Grace.
At the time, I probably didn’t even consider myself to be an angry young man, but in reality I’m quite sure that I was still angry about my upbringing. Through little painful lessons of unintended hurtfulness, tears, and apologies, through my stupid, snide little remarks or self-centered thinking, I began to see my shameful selfishness exposed.
My times with Grace gradually taught me how to be gentle and considerate, how to let go of my anger, and to allow myself to grieve for old wounds in order to heal. I usually had good judgement, but I’d been a loner for much of my life, and I suppose I really needed to learn to share my life with someone else and to put their needs above my own. Grace stood with me patiently as I slowly matured. More than anyone in my life, she’s helped me learn and to heal, nudging me towards the answers I needed to find, or waiting while I searched for them myself.
By the fall of 1987, I’d been going out with Grace for about a year. During that time, she’d lived in a small bachelor suite in a house in North Vancouver, and I’d been sharing a two bedroom apartment with my sister Kim and her boyfriend Michael in East Van. When Grace and I talked about looking for a place together, I was uncertain and passive about the idea (my version of helplessness), but it did seem like a natural, exciting, and practical change. Living alone had its benefits in terms of independence and solitude, but I think those ideas seemed like benefits when compared to living in a crazy family situation. This was different: being with her gave me more structure, socialization, love, and fun. We loved each other and wanted to live together, and save on living expenses. Moving in together was just the right thing for us to do.
Grace found us a one bedroom apartment in East Vancouver, in an older low-rise building near Main Street and Broadway. It was a top-floor corner unit with a big balcony and a hardwood floor in its big bedroom. It was bright, large, newly painted, and a perfect start for us as a couple. Our landlady was a lovely little old lady named Mrs. Miller, who had curly brown hair (usually in hair pins) and might have stood five feet tall if she’d been standing on a box. We liked her straight away.
A lot of the furniture that had belonged to my family and which I’d had in Park Place, I’d either abandoned or given away. Old furniture or knick knacks, like a coffee table from the sixties, or an armchair from the fifties, or various old quilts, throws, or pillow cases – they all had somehow travelled down from my mother’s mother’s family, through to my Mum, and on to me.
I felt like preserving some of their objects was like preserving pieces of my family’s past. I never asked myself why many of those old possessions mattered to me – I just kept whatever I could manage, as I moved from one place to the next.
By the time I’d left to live with Grace, I think I finally abandoned the big furniture. I think I left a chesterfield and my bed behind (maybe Kim and Mike kept those), but I kept Poppy’s old upright dresser, a small table, some plates and cutlery, and my bedding and clothes.
Grace and I furnished most of our new apartment in cheap bolt-together shelves and a pine kitchen table from Ikea, and a pine Futon couch that could fold down into a bed. It was fun buying new furniture, all in affordable, unfinished pine that smelled like newly-cut lumber. It felt like a fresh start.
(Grace’s father was a devout Catholic, and wouldn’t have approved of his daughter living with her boyfriend, so she never told him. As far as he knew, it was Grace’s apartment – which I visited a lot.)
