There was something about having a baby at twenty that made me wake up from childhood with an abruptness none of my friends experienced. It was like having a cold glass of water thrown in my face. I was all alone, with no help from my family or the father’s family. I had to figure out how to support myself and the little baby I had named Arizona. I did not want to be on welfare like the rest of my family was, because then I would be a third-generation welfare case. If you grow up on welfare, you know how hard it is to get off.
I went to meetings for young single mothers in the upstairs of a church. I sat in a circle of folding chairs around a pile of donated clothes we were allowed to root through while the guest speaker lectured about birth control, or locating a baby daddy, or how allowing illegal activity in your apartment might result in you losing custody of your child. One day a woman lectured to us about the dangers of being on welfare.
“It is a proven fact that once a person is on welfare for five years, they will almost never get off,” she said, looking around the circle to see whether her words were sinking in. The young mothers pulled on the cords of their hoodies, pulled out compacts and applied makeup, or nodded off from exhaustion.
I felt a surge of horror flood through me. I knew empirically that those words were true. I was going to do something with my life. Not only for myself, but for my daughter, too.
*
I was raised during the eighties when child psychology took a sudden shift and regarded events that happened in a child’s upbringing as responsible for their later characters. A cover story in a 1983 TIME magazine called “What Do Babies Know?” by Otto Friedrich stated:
The current discoveries about how much a baby sees and hears and knows at the very moment of birth make the parental responsibility seem even more formidable. Most important, in a way, is that these findings are changing the way people actually see their own children, changing how they talk to them, what they expect of them.
Any faults an individual might have were attributed to events in their childhood. There were articles that said your baby’s personality is fully formed by the time they are three years old. And there’s nothing you can do about it afterward. This was very alarming news. Imagine the consequences of every minute action. Were an orange to roll off the table and land on her head, she might hate Florida. If you played heavy metal at breakfast, a child might grow up and always wear their bangs in their eyes. Say you allowed a barking dog too close to your baby’s stroller—they could grow up to be a verbally abusive boss.
I would have to give her a wonderful childhood if I wanted her to be a wonderful person.
But part of her having an incredible destiny meant that I had to have one myself. Wasn’t it true that in order to ensure a happy childhood for a little girl, her mother would have to be happy and successful herself? It seemed obvious to me that it was.
I decided I would be a writer.
*
The one thing about my life that made me believe I was destined for more was that I wanted to be a writer. My writing had always set me apart in some way. It was the only thing I remember teachers in elementary school and high school praising me for. I had a small shelf of dinky trophies I had won from short story contests that meant the world to me. I had a pin for having the top grades in English at my high school that I liked to wear on my leather jacket. It was the only thing in the world I could imagine doing that would make me happy. I spoke to a social worker about educational programs for young single mothers like myself, with the baby reaching for the pen on the counter.
“I would like to study to be a writer,” I said. “A writer?”
“Yes, like novels and poems and such things.”
“Oh, no, no,” the social worker said from behind the glass partition. “I’m so sorry. But you can’t choose to be a writer. Here is a list of options you can choose, though.”
He slid me the pamphlet underneath the glass, looking genuinely sorry for spoiling my dreams. I didn’t even look at the pamphlet’s list of jobs. I was too intent on being a writer.
Never mind school, then, I thought. I’ll go right into the field.
I worked on freelance gigs, copy editing, anything. Then I wrote a screenplay that was produced by the CBC, much to everyone’s, including my own, surprise. It was about a teenage girl who wanders around Montreal with a suitcase, doing drugs and sleeping on the sidewalk.
The film garnered very mixed reviews, but it was the beginning of a theme I wanted to develop. And, more importantly, it gave me a paycheck that allowed me to take some time off to work on a novel.
*
There is nothing more isolating than staying home with a baby. I lived in the cheapest, most rundown apartments in the city. I could never call the landlord if there was something wrong with my apartment. If they did repairs, they would raise my rent and I wouldn’t be able to live there anymore. I once experienced a moment of Beckett-like absurdity when I found myself holding an umbrella over my head as I had my morning pee to protect myself from the water dripping from the ceiling. I later fixed the hole with duct tape.
People wanted to equate me with graffiti written on the wall of a decrepit building, whereas I wanted to see myself as a small bird painted on the wall in Versailles.
I could not work at home. Instead, I would set off to the library. I was quite adamant about carrying a briefcase around with me in those days. I thought it made me look like a professional. I hoped it might make people consider me differently, although it probably didn’t. I was in my mid-twenties and wore extravagant suits from Goodwill and pleather high-heeled boots. I wore my hair in a ponytail on my head, and regularly passed for a teenager and my daughter’s older sister. Much of the time, I had to bring my daughter along to the library with me. Arizona also had a briefcase of sorts. She had a large plastic tool box with a bright red handle that she would fill with art supplies. We both headed off with our briefcases in tow.
Being in the library requires a certain level of decorum and quiet. In the adult section of the library, the patrons arrived generally by themselves. They communicated with no one. They found themselves a chair and remained huddled over their newspaper or book or tax forms for hours. If they did something as human as nodding off, they would be kicked out immediately.
Arizona and I were able to be quiet, but we lacked decorum. The children’s section was a little more lenient when it came to rules. A child would be splayed on the floor staring at the ceiling with their mittens and boots lying around them as though they were pieces of them that had broken off. There were children playing Battleship. There would be a child sitting in a chair shaped like a giant hand, reading up on the increasingly absurdly horrific circumstances of orphans while eating a box of Goldfish crackers. There would be a child who was so indecisive about which Asterix comic he was going to check out that he seemed quite mad. So we would set up in the children’s section of the library. It was unclear which world I was a part of anyway, that of adults, or that of children. I felt very much like a teenager who was exceptionally mature for their age.
I would take out my notebook and pens. I would also have a binder filled with inspirational prompts for the novel I was working on. I would cut out photographs from fashion and art magazines, ones that captured the strange, daydreamy, insouciant look of people on the margins, ones who translated the hidden beauty of that world. I wanted to translate what was beautiful about my life, in an attempt to prove my humanity in a novel—in a metaphorical language—despite the fact that everyone around me seemed hell-bent on telling me I was a pathetic loser who was contributing to the world being an ugly place. People wanted to equate me with graffiti written on the wall of a decrepit building, whereas I wanted to see myself as a small bird painted on the wall in Versailles.
Arizona had very different skills than I did. She was extremely crafty. She would take out her sketchbook and markers and begin making drawings of frogs who wore bowties and burped out thought bubbles filled with odd statements, replete with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. “Healp me mother. It is not I am frog!”
The writing of a novel takes several years, and as she became older, she would take out felt and sewing needles and thread and make extraordinary donkeys. Other children at the library would regularly come to see whatever project Arizona was working on. They would stand as near to her as possible, leaning forward on their tiptoes. They wouldn’t speak to her. They regarded her as a master engaged in her craft and they knew better than to disturb her.
They were not at all interested in what I was doing. There is very little that is objectively interesting about a writer scribbling in a notebook. From the outside it looks as though you are engaged in the same activity, year after year.
*
When we got home from the library, we would read the books we had taken out together. Arizona loved being read to. I loved children’s books, too. This was a good arrangement because that was about all I liked to do in the house. She handed me paperback novels and we would lie in bed and read them from cover to cover.
I had gone to school to study literature which, more or less, means learning to read in a critical, thoughtful, engaged way. I was a master reader. I could tear through philosophical texts while riding on the subway. Before I had my daughter, my evening reading consisted of writers like Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Genet, Roland Barthes, Marguerite Duras,…
