The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers Read online

  Do I have regrets? Damn right I do. I regret that Harvey Gilmour Cameron did not live to see his grandchildren. He would have cherished Seanna and Ian and Mark and Steven because he loved children and he would have instilled in them a thirst for knowledge as he did with Beverly and me. One of my biggest regrets is not telling him that I loved him. We were not a huggy family and I loved my dad unconditionally but I just couldn’t say it. As Phil Coulter says in the song:

  I never will forget him,

  For he made me what I am.

  Though he may be gone,

  Memories linger on.

  And I miss him, the old man.

  The Five Thousand Fathers Who Made You

  Jon Tattrie

  Becoming a father delivers stunning proof of death. Watching your newborn come screaming into this world, you’re flooded with fears for its fragile body, but the understanding of mortality comes from a difference source. You know for a fact that this person did not exist ten months ago.

  The world existed before your child, and will exist after your child.

  Tell Me Y

  Every son has a father. Not every son becomes a father. Most lines die out. You and I can trace our DNA family tree back to Adam. Not the biblical one, but the scientific one. Geneticists have traced the Y chromosome (handed down from father to son only) back about 130,000 years, and by studying mutations track Adam back to the Rift Valley in today’s Ethiopia. He is father to all men on Earth – all men you’ve ever heard of, or passed in the street, or who added their bodies to the thousands killed in a war you once studied.

  Our common father was African, of course. Everyone was back then. Language might not have yet existed, so there’s a good chance he communicated in sounds and gestures. He had fire, tools, and probably clothes, and in most respects was genetically identical to modern people. The entire human population lived in northeast Africa, and numbered 10,000.

  Adam thought differently. He looked at the raw materials of the world and found better ways to create hunting weapons. He taught his brothers and sons how to stalk prey. Adam used his mental advantage to become the ultimate super ancestor. He embodied father as provider and protector. His curiosity advantage swept through the small human world and while other men had no children, or had daughters (who don’t carry the Y chromosome), his sons had sons, who had sons. Five thousand fathers to five thousand sons: a small town’s population equals the short trip from our great father Adam to us.

  Humanity held little territory back then. Adam and his brothers and sons fought off lions and rival tribes, supplementing his family’s diet of gathered berries and nuts with what he killed, scrabbling forward while protecting his family. Adam probably died young, by our standards. But he did enough to get his son into adulthood.

  One hundred thousand years ago, Adam’s sons diaspora-ed out of the Rift Valley, pushed by climatic pressure, and perhaps pulled by their new ability to speak thoughts to each other, a trick no other animal mastered. Adam’s children exodused out of the cradle and into all of Africa.

  Crossing modern Saudi Arabia, then offering greener pastures, Adam’s sons parted company. One band followed the beaches of India and sailed all the way to Australia 50,000 years ago. Another took a slower route across Asia, crossed the steppes of the Bering Strait landmass, and settled the Americas perhaps 20,000 years ago.

  If you’re European-Canadian like me, our fathers turned west and spent millennia securing an existence under the killer glaciers of Ice Age Europe 43,000 years ago. They advanced as the ice retreated. We know little about these men, but we know they had sons, and they did enough to ensure their sons fathered sons in turn. Their black skin paled 20,000 years ago to absorb more vitamin D in the gloomy north, and their bodies morphed under genetic drift.

  If you’re of northern European DNA, like me, your fathers climbed all the way up to Scandinavia, that great birther of civilizations. My own Y chromosome came south at some point, perhaps as a raiding Viking, or as a trader settling in England’s now vanished Danelaw. We don’t know if he brought misery or happiness, but we know he brought a son.

  Father Provider And Protector

  My fathers later moved again, crossing over to France, which is where they sheltered from the murderous religious wars broiling Europe. In 1752, a man called Jean-George followed his ancestors and decided to move. He, a Protestant, found no peace in the religious wars. When a new Catholic priest invaded his Lutheran church with a troop of soldiers, Jean-George fought back with stones. He took a musket ball to the leg and fled Europe as a refugee.

  He landed in Halifax, and whatever his last name was before, it was written down as Tattrie here. He was part of a wave of Foreign Protestants breaking over Nova Scotia, drowning Mi’kmaq and Acadians. He lived in Halifax, helped found Lunenburg, and then moved to Tatamagouche. He reached age sixty with no children, but then married for a third time and produced about eleven children, including several sons.

  Ned Tattrie entered the world in the same village a century later, and worked the land to provide for his family. He moved to Londonderry and sought work in the woods. He operated teams of logging horses while his wife Bessie cooked for the lumber camp. He later drove a flatbed truck for the dockyard.

  Ned begot Bill in 1908, and migrated to Halifax in search of provisions. Ned worked the train lines, drove horses to deliver oil to homes, and judged the sulky races at Sackville Downs for fun.

  Bill grew into a man and with Eveline had a son called Jackie. Like Adam before him, Bill became father the provider and protector. He drove the old track trolleys, clanging along the cobblestones of Halifax trailing a sparking wire that powered the whole machine. Bill guided the transit to one end of the line, flipped the seats, and ran it back the other way.

  The world kept changing, and Bill trained and retrained on newer models of trolleys and buses. He brought Jackie back toy jeeps from his training stints. Bill’s work was essential during the Second World War, and so he ran the transit while others ran the war.

  “He was always coming home dragging a sailor with him. Some lonely guy here from out west – he’d bring him home and feed him,” his son Jackie remembers.

  For his troubles, Inspector Tattrie got punched during the VE Day riots at war’s end.

  Bill worked and worked and worked, nights and days, weekends and weekdays. “He used to come home when I was quite small and crawl up on the couch to get his nap. He could have a nap from 12 to 12:15 and be refreshed,” Jackie recalls. Occasionally the nap was interrupted when Jackie took his toy hammer and bopped his young, tired dad on the head.

  The foulest language he ever allowed himself to use: “Cripes all fishhooks.”

  The world kept on moving. “The change in Halifax that he saw from birth ’til death was incomprehensible. It went from a small place with tram cars, up to a fairly modern metropolis,” his son says with a note of pride. Bill kept up with the changes. He marvelled at them. He learned how to provide for and protect his family in each iteration.

  But internal changes came, too. A revolution in fatherhood launched out of the wreckage of the Second World War, accelerated by the free-thinking 1960s. Once women liberated themselves from domesticity, they found they could enter the working world and thrive. They became mother the provider.

  Slowly, quietly, men learned the reverse. Liberated from their sole roles as father provider, fathers began to enter the domestic world as father the nurturer.

  Ned, Bill, and Jackie lived near each other in Halifax, but Jackie saw little interaction between father and son. Ned loved chewing tobacco, and made the tin can ring with spit after each meal. Bill was as near a teetotaller as you could be. They expressed whatever grew in their hearts to no one but themselves, and perhaps not even then.

  Ned worked to be father the provider and protector. Bill did that, too, but advanced his fatherhood style to quiet availability in the house. The long, erratic shifts meant he seemed to be out of the house more often than ot
her dads, but when he was home (and not napping), he volunteered with Jackie’s Scout troop.

  He provided food and shelter for his family – and took pride in it.

  Jackie became Jack, and became the first in his family to go to university. “I remember Dad saying to me at one time, I don’t care what you do, but don’t get shift work.”

  When Jackie was thirteen, his mother Eveline sickened with cancer. Jackie picked up the domestic slack, cooking and cleaning as his father went out to earn the family income. “The whole community had an eye on me, watched out for me, but once she was dead and gone, who’s going to fill that role? Dad didn’t see himself as the one to fill that role – to be the caring nurturer.”

  A neighbourhood woman moved in to be his keeper. No one thought a man could care for his thirteen-year-old son without a woman. No one thought a boy could run a house. But Jackie did, heating up food to feed his grieving father.

  Mothering Father

  Jack became a father at age twenty-six, when Scott toddled in the front door. Jack and his wife Gail, embracing the 1960s spirit, and perhaps drawing on memories of his dad bringing sailors home, always wanted to adopt. “I remember a very exciting time of having a third person in our home.”

  At twenty-seven, Jack became a father again when he had a baby girl and named her Heidi. Jack was possibly the first Tattrie man to see his child born. Bill and Ned heard the news second-hand. So did Adam. But Jack talked to the doctor, who was a parishioner and friend, and proposed the idea. The doctor owned enough hippy spirit to open the door for this un-role-modelled idea.

  “Beyond anything I’ve ever experienced, then or now,” Jack says. “Babies come crying as life is brought forth. It was overpowering. To see this little one you’ve actually created – wow. They’re so dependent. Such a sense of love and care and concern.”

  Heidi, born on Nova Scotia’s south shore on January 2, was the New Year’s baby for the region, so her early days filled up with media interviews. Any father will tell you his child’s arrival should be heralded on the front page.

  Add in Jack being a young Christian minister whose wife was heavy with Christmas child, and you have a magic moment.

  Paternity leave remained an unthought idea, and so Jack went back to provider father mode. He used a priest’s irregular schedule to stick around the house. Bill and Ned didn’t see a role for themselves crawling on the floor, but Jack found fun in it. “I was much more hands on, playing with you and wrestling with the kids.”

  He didn’t change many diapers, and his main job was much the same as Adam’s: protect his family and provide them with a safe place, food, and clothing. He didn’t stroller his kids around on his own, but he was a determined co-pilot.

  When I look at family photos of this time, I see a bright glow where I’m not. My parents kindly trained me to do this – as though I always was, and merely waited offstage for the moment of birth. But that’s another secret parents learn: people are born after long conversations about finances, life goals, and so on. People are born by accident. Until the moment of conception, no one exists. My parents didn’t know me in those photos. I wasn’t.

  Jack became a father for the third time at age thirty in 1977, when a sickly little boy emerged in the winter. “One of the most joyful days of my life. And to actually have a birth boy – I was ecstatic,” he says. “To see you there, so squirmy and independent, just a ball of noise.”

  The noise got very quiet. The boy had serious medical issues and soon had life-threatening surgery. The baby lay unconscious and motionless for twenty-four hours. It turned out the doctor had never operated on so small a person, and nearly wrecked his tiny body.

  “It was heart-wrenching to have to stand back and watch other people look after your sickness. That was a very horrible time. I remember standing in the Bridgewater hospital looking through the crib at you just lying there hooked up to all the wires. ‘Oh my. I hope he makes it. I hope he makes it.’ And you not responding,” he says. “It challenged my role of who I was.”

  What is a father if not the provider and protector? Fathers surge through a dramatic restructuring of identity. If women can provide for the family, can a man take over the domestic side? All across Canada, self-conscious and bold fathers of the 1970s pushed strollers, changed diapers, and wondered if this could be fatherhood, too.

  “That was very much of a shift. I don’t know if men have landed on their feet or not. Who are we now? What are we supposed to be? Where do we fit in this whole scheme of the world?” Jack asks. “You’re not the main provider, sometimes your partner is the main provider. So who are you? What do you give to this family? But you don’t see much of that in our culture, being explored or celebrated.”

  Quietly, men reinvent fatherhood each generation. Being a good provider was no longer the only goal – or desire.

  Grandfathers

  At the age of sixty-six, Jack became a grandfather. Heidi, that little girl who caused a media sensation, had a little girl: Madeleine. “So excited to see her coming into the world. Terrified for Heidi,” Jack says. “You had to learn again that you were sitting back and couldn’t fix it. You had to watch and provide what care you could from a distance, and hope to heck that everything will go off all right.

  “The next generation is so important. They are carrying the fate of the world. It sounds dramatic, but they are the ones who are going to be the leaders in the next world.”

  It’s a simple fact: without children there literally is no human future. Fathering them remains one of the most important tasks a man can aspire to.

  Jack became a grandfather again at sixty-eight, with Madeleine joined by her brother Max. Like his Baby Boomer brethren, he’s reinventing grandfatherhood just as they did fatherhood. Today, he’s a diaper-changing, minivan-shuttling force of grandfatherly good, showing this stunning world to his little descendents.

  “It’s just fantastic. It’s enriching to be allowed into their world, to see it with new eyes again. That’s what kids do for you, and that’s what grandchildren do. Something that’s old and tired for us is brand-new and exciting for them,” he says. “We know it’s going to be a short walk with them – how long, I don’t know, but hopefully for years – to provide the sense that they’re loved, cared for, and have a place they can go to.

  “Each generation has its challenges and this generation will have theirs, but if we’re going to continue on as a species and as a civilization, we need to have good kids that are solid and caring.”

  A brutal life fact is that grandfathers historically died shortly after their grandkids arrived, but now we have the great opportunity of a decade, or two, of grandfatherhood. What will we do with it?

  Y Becomes X

  I became a father at thirty-six, much later than Jack or Bill or Ned, and way older than Adam, but younger than JeanGeorge. Giselle and I had a boy and we called him Xavier. We liked the sound, the syllables, the powerful X, and its root meaning of “new house.” He’s the new house that houses my Y chromosome, carrying Adam’s work forward another generation.

  I spent my twenties thinking marriage and fatherhood was the breakers yard for manhood. Movies, television, and books all told me I should shirk it as long as possible. When you saw a father in that culture, he was invariably a slobby, whipped loser who lusted after the single man’s life.

  I grew up in the Knocked Up generation, our fatherhood fears captured in Judd Apatow’s cinematic vision of fat loser/“fun-loving party animal” Ben Stone operating a porn website before deploying movie magic to land a one-night stand with a beautiful, smart woman who’s got a great life. Ben Stone never wants to become a man, let alone a father. The concept of provider father is gone – it’s clear the mother earns more and will have better career prospects. Stone brings nothing but his Y chromosome. He can’t imagine a role for himself as father.

  I hate Ben Stone. He strikes me as a pathetic boy shirking the deeper tasks of manhood. I spent my twenties mostly
single, travelling the world, and learned a lot, but experienced deep loneliness. It was only after starting my own family that I realized my twenties were a little familyless gap, and that’s why I felt lonely.

  I provide for my son, but so does my wife. She changes his diapers, nurses his wounds, and introduces him to chocolate ice cream, and so do I. I want to give him a safe place to grow up. I want to chase away the modern lions. But I also use my flexible writer’s schedule to sit with him, play with him, raspberry his belly, and eat his toes. Freed from the sole provider’s burden, I invent fatherhood again.

  My whole generation is. Around me I see full-time dads raising their kids while their wives provide. I see men discovering that you can fall in love with another man, and raise sons and daughters with two fathers. Fatherhood is an open question. How will we answer it?

  Jack – my father, Xavier’s grandfather, Bill’s son, and Ned’s grandson – says in an always-changing world, our elders can find their practical life advice out of date. But deeper wisdom doesn’t change. Jack’s advice to Xavier is to learn what drives you, what triggers you, so that you can control the things that otherwise control you.