Falling Backwards: A Memoir (2 page)

I could have been called “Baby Girl Richards,” which kind of has a stripper ring to it. (My real stripper name would have been Louise Bentley, if you were to base it on the first street you lived on and your mother’s maiden name. Or is it your first dog’s name and your mother’s maiden name? If it had been my first dog’s name, I would have been Aquarius Bentley.)

As much as my mom teases me about how hard it was getting me out of her body and onto the planet, I don’t actually try to imagine the pain she endured. I have a bad period and I’m ready to call in a midwife with a morphine drip. They could at least have given my mother a big glass of vodka. Forty-eight hours is a long time to be stuck in a canal of any kind. The Panama Canal only takes a day to float through and that involves a giant ship. (There’s not a goddamn thing to look at going through the Panama Canal, according to my dad. I sent them through there once on a cruise.) Two days in a birth canal? That’s beyond cruel and unusual.

My mother told me that my head was so pointed that she kept a hat on me for a year, but that I had a cute face—like that was supposed to make me feel good about the pointed head bit? I’ve seen a few pictures that were taken of me in those first few months of my life, but I’ve never been able to ascertain whether I indeed had a pointed head or not. Maybe it’s because I was always wearing a hat.

She should have known I would be difficult, considering that my older brother Duray nearly killed her while he was being born three years earlier—he was a lot fatter than I was. I guess it’s true what they say about forgetting the pain of childbirth, because that’s what my mother did. She forgot all about the misery and went ahead and tried it again. I guess she figured things would be all stretched out, and I would just drop onto the ground after one push.

My parents adopted my little brother Patrick five years after I was born, which made a lot of sense. They wanted another baby, and mom couldn’t put herself through the whole almost dying by giving birth thing again. My mom was not childbearing material, although she does get an A for effort from my older brother and me. Her thing-a-ma-dingy had seen enough pain for one lifetime. (I just want to say “vagina” instead of all these other ridiculous euphemisms, but my friend Nigel said he did
not
want me to write down the word
“vagina” in this book. He said his mother wouldn’t read a book with the word “vagina” in it and
he
did not want to read the word “vagina” either. He said it would make him feel really uncomfortable, so I promised him I would neither write or use the word “vagina,” and a promise is a promise.)

A few years after we were blessed with Patrick, my mom had a hysterectomy. Right about now she will be saying, “Why would you write that in your book? Maybe I don’t want anybody to know that I had a hysterectomy.” She was thirty-seven years old when she had her uterus out, and I would be very happy to give her mine if she’d like to have another one put in. I am not using mine for anything special. I don’t see why my mother couldn’t bear me a child, since she is home more than I am. If she wants grandchildren from my branch of the family tree, she’s going to have to have them herself. (I don’t know how to record that on the family tree; I will have to consult some of my Mormon relatives, if they’re still willing to talk to me after they read this.)

Not every life starts with a giant bang like mine. Some people just slip into the world, seemingly unnoticed by anyone or anything. They fall into the cracks that nobody seems to see but God. Thank God for God is all I have to say about that. From the beginning of my life, from what I have pieced together, I have somehow felt noticed. I don’t know how to explain it other than it feels like the Universe has one eye following me around no matter where I go or what I do. It’s creepy but comforting at the same time.

I have always felt observed by something or someone. Something catches my eye and I turn to see what it is, but it’s just shadows or dust floating through the air. I may just have a multiple personality disorder, which could mean that I have just been following myself around all this time. If that’s the case, I am a nice bunch of girls.

My mother said that when they finally did take me home, I refused to eat. I wouldn’t breast-feed or bottle-feed or any kind of feed. Not milk, not cereal, not formula, not even KFC. Well, I am sure they didn’t try KFC, but if they had I bet I would have eaten that. At least the popcorn chicken, for crying out loud; it’s smaller. I would have eaten popcorn chicken for sure.

My parents had to have a nurse visit our home and stuff food down my throat. She waltzed in—the nurse, that is—and, according to my mother, took out her own special spoon, loaded it up with some horrible concoction and crammed it down my throat. Our family doctor told my parents that I was very anemic, and that if that nurse didn’t get me to eat he was going to send me to Africa to live with the Masai people. Maybe the Masai people could get me to eat goat meat and white corn and curdled milk from a gourd. (Well, the doctor never said that, but I’m telling the story, so I’ll say what I want).

My mother said she couldn’t bear to watch the nurse holding me down and shoving that spoon into my head. She had to leave the room. I guess I bawled the entire time, very loudly, like I was being killed rather than saved. Didn’t this woman know I was destined to be one of the greatest singers the world has ever known? Okay, that Canada has ever known? Okay, that the Canadian prairies have ever known? Okay, that my local community centre has ever known? Didn’t she realize that my voice would one day become a golden tool for all things musical and melodic and, from time to time, depressing? She could have damaged my precious vocal cords. I guess she didn’t realize this because that nurse came back time after time until my tiny body pulled itself out of an iron-depleted slump. I find it amazing that they even had nurses who made house calls back then, but then again they had people who delivered milk and ice cream and eggs and diapers and Fuller brushes and Avon and newspapers and mail and pretty much anything else you wanted to have delivered.
They even had folks who came to your house to give you accordion lessons. I am not sure what happened to all those home delivery people. They died, I assume. Those were the days. Customer service was the rule, not the exception. That sounds exactly like something my mother would say. Good grief. Each and every moment I sit here, my mother slowly takes over each and every one of my cells. I will wake up and be her and the circle will be complete. Kind of like in
The Lion King
 … (I am hearing African drumming in my head.)

The home-visiting nurse did get me to eat on my own eventually. My mother will often talk about how terrible that woman was. But not once in my life since have I ever had trouble eating. She must have cured me. It’s a miracle.

I grew up on a quiet little street in southwest Calgary. We lived in a very modest house with a cracked concrete driveway that my mother scrubbed on her hands and knees with soap and water and I am not kidding. My mom is the cleanest person in Canada, if not the world. This is a woman who used to vacuum the dog. (The dog loved it.) She has worn out vacuum attachments with simple friction. Metal against rug. Rug always wins. I am surprised any of us kids had skin on our bodies. We were scrubbed into bright pink beings every night of our young lives. My mother was very proud of how clean our house was. You could seriously make Jell-O in any toilet in our house on any day of the week, and then eat it out of there. She was clean and we were all grateful for it.

We lived in the perfect neighbourhood. We had good neighbours and there were lots of other kids racing around on any given day, so I was in my glory. I was social, to say the least. My mom said I was like the Pied Piper. I sought out new people to charm at every possible opportunity and brought them home with me. I always wanted to be liked. Not much has changed in that way—being
liked is important to me. I wish I didn’t care what people thought, but I always have and I always will. I didn’t even know who or what the Pied Piper was when my mother said that to me. She also told me that I was just like a whirling dervish. I didn’t have a clue what that was, either. I finally saw a whirling dervish on TV about ten years ago. They are men in lengthy white outfits who certainly do whirl around like crazy people, but I am definitely not like a whirling dervish. I don’t know what my mother was thinking. Yes, maybe I was like a Pied Piper, but that’s as far as I am willing to go. Anyway …

The neighbourhood looked like a spread in
Better Homes and Gardens
. I don’t remember anybody on our block ever being robbed or shot. Kids could walk to school in the sixties and not have to have a parent drive them the two blocks there (in their giant SUVs, no less). There were lovely trees and flowers everywhere, and people waved at you from their front lawns. Sprinklers waved back and forth over perfectly groomed lawns while the proud owner stood with his hands on his hips admiring his mowing job. Everybody looked out for everybody, or maybe they were just completely nosy. Either way, Neighbourhood Watch was in full swing on our street. People didn’t lock their doors every hour of the day. They actually left them wide open with just the screen door shut. No one was scared of being mugged in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon. The world wasn’t quite the paranoid mess it is now.

I just remember being happy. I didn’t have a worry in the world. Nobody ever died in that world. No one got sick.
Everybody
had a job they went to, and they seemed to love every minute of it. (Little did I know.) If you’ve ever seen the movie
Pleasantville
, that was us. Houses all lined up and painted perfectly. Bicycles lying out in the front yards with pink baskets attached. Swing sets and monkey bars in the backyards with eight kids hanging off them. I was healthy and
sun-kissed and innocent. I was beyond lucky. My childhood memories are like panes of glass, sunlit and clear.

It’s amazing to me how life eventually begins to wear you down, but in a good way. There is such value in loss. There is so much to learn from failure. You just don’t realize it at the time. Every blow you take makes you that much taller and stronger. Like I’ve said before, it’s hard being a person, and I was a busy little person. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t thinking about things: big things, grown-up things. I wondered why I was here at all, and where I came from and how my hands knew to move when my brain told them to. I had so many questions running around in my head. Nothing seemed simple to me. Sometimes I made myself physically dizzy from thinking too hard. Everything I thought had some cosmic attachment to it. I had been briefed briefly about God by the church we went to, that he loved me and that he knew everything that I was thinking about, good or bad. That was a bit disconcerting to me. I didn’t like to think that God could see me in the bathroom wiping my little white bum. I didn’t like to think that God was able to see me picking my nose on the rare occasion I did it. I didn’t want God to know one single thing that I was thinking. He would think I was crazy. I was told that God was everywhere, and that he was a very good God, and that if a person were good, they would be rewarded in heaven. How about rewarding me now, I thought to myself? I was pretty darn good today, God! You find out early on that life is not based on a system of punishment and reward. Bad people often get ahead and good people can and will die of cancer. There is no sense to be made of any of it. You just have to get up and deal with the day.

When I was six or seven one of our neighbours died of a heart attack. I wondered how a heart could attack anybody. My mother said that it was a shame that a good person had to die so young. It would have been easier had he been a bad person, I guess. That
makes more sense to all of us. I felt sorry for God having to make all those hard decisions. I knew for sure I would never want to be God. I could mark that off my to-do list. Whew.

I was a short, small person, always the smallest in the class, but I was a big thinker. I preferred thinking to pretty much doing anything else. When I was really young, like six or seven, I did love being social, but as I got a little bit older, I was more or less happy being on my own whenever possible. My mother always said that I could entertain myself for hours on end. I am sure I could. I could doodle on a piece of paper for three or four hours and not notice a single second going by. I didn’t mind being by myself at all, although my mother tells me that I was seldom, if ever, alone. I think you can be alone even when you’re with someone else—you can be alone together. Even when I was playing with other kids, I was in some far-off place making up my own version of things. Daydreaming was my specialty.

My parents were very practical. They are still very no-nonsense people. They always told me that things happen to you in life and you just throw your shoulders back and keep going. I have learned so much from them over the years, invaluable things that have saved me a hundred times over. Persistence is more important than anything else—that’s one of the lessons. Another one: the harder you work, the luckier you get. Both of them have served me well countless times.

Things at 6307 Louise Road were easy and breezy and pretty much devoid of any kind of worry. The days were simple and organized. My family seemed to be really very normal. We fit in with everybody else. My parents were very present to me then, and they always seemed to be around. My dad worked hard at his job and I didn’t see much of him during the day, but the lot of us always had dinner
together in the evening. Dad was usually home on weekends and his specialty was Saturday morning breakfasts. Eggs over easy and crunchy dark-brown bacon that was cooked beyond recognition and—my personal favourite—his home-fried potatoes. They were so crispy and salty. No one could make them they way he did. The nearly black pieces of potato were worth fighting over. We sat at our round white table with the white plastic swivel chairs in the kitchen with the sheer yellow curtains that my mom had made with her very own hands, and always fought over the last piece of burnt bacon and the last crispy potato. If I were to go to my parents’ house, right this very minute, they would have a side plate covered with a paper towel on the counter with leftover bacon sitting on it. They would also be having potatoes of some kind, no matter what meal of the day it was, breakfast, lunch or dinner. I think we ate more potatoes than the country of Ireland before the great famine.