When a bunch of us were at the family lake house in Nova Scotia this summer, my nephew, Conor, decided to bring home all of my mum's CD-ROMs of old pictures to put on a Google drive for everyone to access. And of all the old photographs (mostly of dogs and family scenes from the lake) that Conor digitised, this one of me and my brothers left me gobsmacked: I had never seen this before in my life (I assume one of my aunts must have taken it and thought to send it to Mum at some point over the years), and as there are really very few pictures of us as kids, this felt like a real treasure.
Our parents were so young when they had us — three kids by the time they were 22 — and we were so poor and everything just felt so strained all of the time, that as very young children, my brothers were about all the stability that I felt I had. Dad was always angry and storming, Mum was flailing and checked out, but I always had my brothers with me in our sad little boat. I don't even know for sure where this picture was taken — I assume it was one of our houses in Saint John — and when Dave (who has plenty of pictures of himself and his family from when he was young) saw this and tried to say that he grew up in a similar neighbourhood, I pointed to this porch and said, "Yeah, but I bet your parents had some pride in their home and would have slapped a coat of paint on this mess." And he had to agree with that. Messy is how I remember everything about my childhood.
We moved from New Brunswick to Ontario when I was in the middle of grade three, and from Ontario to Alberta at the beginning of grade ten, and both moves were incredibly hard on me. As an approval-seeking introvert, I have never had a knack for making friends and have spent long, lonely stretches in which my only friends were my brothers. This changed when we were teenagers — as they ran wild and I was tightly controlled, we spent very little time together — but ours was still a house of sadness, with a still loud and angry father and a quietly seething, self-involved mother. I couldn't get away soon enough and left at twenty as our parents, and little brother Kyler, moved back to Ontario.
I moved north to Edmonton, and within a couple of years, big brother Ken moved to within visiting distance. And then Ken's heart got broken and he moved back east near Mum and Dad. And then Dave and I had a baby and moved back east near Mum and Dad (and his Mum and Dad). And we were all learning how to interact as a family of adults with our own young families when Mum and Dad enacted their retirement plan and moved away to Nova Scotia. Leaving just me and my brothers and our families to navigate the next stages of our lives.
And while time since then has passed in drips and spurts and has mostly seemed like no time at all, it now feels like we're entering a different stage. Big brother Ken's cancer is starting to spread more aggressively, little brother Kyler has chronic Lyme with autoimmune disorder and related coinfections, and we just went down to visit Mum, who had a large part of her colon removed and who will need to live with a colostomy bag for the rest of her life. Dad's not so angry anymore, it's surprising how tenderly he now cares for Mum, but neither of them seem to regret moving away from us; they didn't seem to want us when we were little, and they don't seem to want much from us now.
I'm not ready to be without my brothers, even if I don't spend the time with them right now that I guess I should. I have travelled a lot with Ken this year (four trips to Nova Scotia, with other trips to Alberta, Newfoundland, and an Italian cruise), but even though he lives across the street from me — and has a progressing cancer diagnosis — I don't see him every day. And Kyler tends to be too busy to spend much time with us, but he did have some kind of nasty words for me when we were in Nova Scotia together this summer, and as he seems to be becoming ever more of a loud and proud far right hardliner, I feel a weariness when I think of him that makes me question if our relationship will extend in the same way beyond Ken's passing. I know I'm not looking forward to ever being with him in Nova Scotia again.
Yet I can still look at that picture up there and remember when I felt like it was just me and my brothers in our little boat, holding steady against uncertain storms — and maybe they don't even think of those days in the same way; each of them was so much better at making friends and just existing in the world — and nothing that has happened since can touch the steadiness and stability I see that those three kids (poor, wanting, wary) sought and found in one another.
What a real treasure — to be reminded of those early days — as we now enter the third act.
