photo by sarah macdonald
We pulled out of the gas station just beyond Peterborough when I picked up my iPod Classic tenuously tethered to the aux cord in my mother’s car. I put on Drake, the way I always did in summer of 2014, because that’s when I started to care about the rapper and performer. My mother didn’t care much about what we listened to. I’d made her listen to Sleigh Bells just before and The xx and a little bit of Laura Marling. Whenever I put on Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Fleetwood Mac, or anything from that stretch of her youth in the 60s and 70s, she’d smile at me and say we should switch generations. She never cared much for the music of these eras.
I put on “Hold On, We’re Going Home,” that singularly great pop song of Drake’s, with Majid Jordan anchoring and containing the rapper’s earnestness. I sang along, pulling my knees into my chest, checking the text message I received from a man in a rock band. I quickly replied and then looked out the car window again, singing along, “it’s hard to do these things alone.”
Aubrey Graham’s voice carried over the curves of the road as we sped further and further away from the southern bit of Ontario my mother had cocooned herself in. Five hours from her hometown seemed just about the right amount of distance. It wasn’t, of course. Pain follows you down the 401 West no matter how far you go. That summer day we drove east; a blue sky with barely a cloud overhead. My mother and I talked about what we’d like to do in Round Lake when we got there. I wanted to go to the Coca Cola river at Bonnechere. We called it that as kids because the sand or the water, we never knew, was a deep red in this one part near the lake, just before the water flowed out into it. When you stepped in it was ice cold. My cousins and I jumped in and out of it as kids, screeching, enjoying a cool reprieve from the sun. Even in the heat, especially near the end of July, that water remained ice cold. I told her I wanted to do that again. I wanted to screech, to feel like I was going home to something familiar.
She smiled, meekly.
I knew going home wasn’t something she wanted to do at all.
~
How do you reckon with your family history? Or even just your family as they exist now? I’ve told myself so many stories about my family for decades in an effort to make sense of the cruelty I experienced and the cruelty I’d heard about—the latter imposing so much more than the former because the cruelty I felt was always as a result of who did something bad before me. I think of my maternal lineage of women who hurt the generation after with fierce resentment. My paternal lineage is hidden from me because of my estrangement from my father. My family as it exists today is a collection of three other people and the friends I’ve gathered and pulled into my orbit. My partner is my family. He’s part of the family I’m making for myself. Maybe I have ten family members in total as part of this new construction. I don’t know. But family is, and always has been, the concept I’ve struggled to release any expectations of and yet still get pulled into with the promise of love and tradition. Families love you. Families accept you. Families are complicated but they contain your history, they contain the textures of what makes you, well, you.
I have one photo of the great-grandmother I never met, Anna, because she died in the late 70s. Anna had 13 children. My grandfather was her last. This image is at the top of a family reunion leaflet for all Mask relatives that I didn’t attend. When I look at this photo I am looking at myself. I wish I wasn’t so literal but it’s true: Anna is my physical twin. Her eyes are small, her lips pursed, there’s a tightness to her entire demeanor. She’s looking ahead but not direct, averting her gaze the way I do when I don’t want to be seen. Even her eyebrows are shaped a lot like mine now. She’s wearing a high-collared blouse; her hair pulled back into a severe bun. When I look at her I wonder if that’s how I look to people: this uptight-looking Polish woman who took care of more than a dozen people in her life. (Perhaps I am projecting.)
And yet when I look at myself now I so clearly see my father in the shape of my face, the way I smile, and how my eyes contain some mystery and the ability to take the piss out of someone. I have three little freckles on my right cheek. My father has those, too. Our little constellation, I say. How can I look like both the twin of Anna, who was born more than a century ago, and my estranged father?
This is what I wonder about families; how we’re shaped physically, emotionally, and psychologically by scores of people we see every day or once a year or not at all. Even those we’ve never met based on the stories carried by loved ones around us. And that’s why I asked my mother to take me back to Round Lake in the summer of 2014 so I could put the money I spent on journalism school to work and understand the town that shaped her, that inadvertently shaped me, and how we carry our family in us. I wanted to write about the town up north— well, the collection of hamlets that had become the first Polish settlement in Canada in the 1860s. One of the first 15 or 16 families to come from the Kashub region is my grandmother’s family. This is what I’ve been told. One of the few things my family, in particular, is very good at, but I think all families are to some degree, is storytelling. The Masks and Borutskis know how to weave good tales. I never know if it’s true, and that’s why I wanted to investigate, take apart, and really uncover such stories, and how they affect us.
This is the point where I tell you it didn’t happen this way. My family, who have some of the cruelest people I’ve ever met, live in a tiny, sprawling place among pine trees and bears. They are hot with anger and religious practice. They tell you the stories they want to tell. They yell and call you bold, as though that’s a sin. They tell you how and who to be, and try to break you down. They are the authority, not you.
The thing about investigating your family, even yourself, in an environment that doesn’t like questions, doesn’t acknowledge pain, or takes accountability for anything is that you will suffer.
And I suffered.
~
I cruised along this route what felt like a thousand times before that summer day. Bancroft held the only Tim Horton’s we’d ever go into. Whenever we reached Combermere, we always talked about Al Capone. The trees and rocks go high up along the drive to Round Lake. I always wondered if they’d fall like a landslide, something dramatic. We’d often see cottage-goers getting their canoes out, running on the dock to jump in the lake, or sitting out in the Muskoka chairs. My father did this drive once in less than four hours; trying like mad, probably fueled by cocaine, to get him and my sister to my grandfather’s soon-to-be funeral. That day, my mother and I were leisurely.
When we hit Barry’s Bay I felt the shift. My mother was calm for the most part but her energy tightens when we make this drive north. Her stories are her own but they are woven into me like a bracelet around my heart that I never asked for. She left when she was 19, ridiculed by my once beloved grandfather, and certainly my grandmother. I didn’t know it when I was young but I know it now after she unleashed every secret, hurt, and thought she’d ever held about Round Lake. But because of my sister and I, and the free babysitting my grandmother provided, she came back every summer for over a decade to drop us off with our boxes of toys for two months.
Thinking of it now, I can’t imagine being in this remote spot for two months out of the year but I did it for all of my childhood. I watched Days of Our Lives, ate Lipton’s Chicken Noodle Soup for lunch, picked potato bugs off of plants in the garden, made cookies and donuts with my grandmother, and swam in the lake every evening. It sounds serene now, a life I wish I could live, one that was as simple as walking along the road to collect blueberries for a snack, raspberries in the bush behind my grandparents’ garage. Raspberries I get at the grocery store or market do not taste like the ones my grandmother grows. I can smell the raspberry bush even now; that tart tang rolling around in my mouth, grabbing plump berry after plump berry.
We arrived to the part of the Simpson Pit road most familiar to me: we drove past my father’s mother’s home, a person I’ve not seen since I was 13; my great aunt’s house; and, finally, what was my great-grandparents’ house, across the street from the Catholic church, once a shiny, white jewel of this small place, now overrun with stuff littered all over the yard. I saw a billboard had been put up near the church. It featured a dead foetus.
My grandmother still lives in the small bungalow my grandfather built—the one where she raised four kids. When we turned into her driveway, I felt a pang of sweet familiarity and also a low, dull ache in my belly. It never felt safe here after I’d been told about all of the abuse, cruelty, and hardness that enveloped this sweet, serene looking space. My grandmother, a tiny lady with white hair, bright false teeth, and the same slacks she’d been wearing for nearly 30 years, grabbed me when I got out of the car. Her tight grip held me as she cried.
~
I left my mother and grandmother in the evening to wander by myself. She made me lemon meringue pie (my favourite, particularly her pie) and I wanted to walk it off. The sun had left, lingering behind low, dense grey clouds. I breathed in the pine, the quiet around me. I touched the scaly bark of the trees, dry dead grass. I left her property and walked toward the lake. I dipped in and out of the bush where there were no homes, staring up at the tall trees, green and immense around me. I went to my grandfather’s grave, passing the headstones in Polish. It was tradition to visit him every time I was there, to say hello, that I was fine and I missed him. I swept the pine needles off and continued toward the lake. I walked past the dead foetus again.
I stood on the dock I used to jump off of. The lake was still and so grey it looked purple. I watched and listened, closing my eyes, feeling real peace for a moment. My phone buzzed. It was him again. My reception sucked in this place but here, on this dock, in a moment to myself, he could reach me and I let him.
~
I spent the better part of that week listening to seniors talk about Round Lake. I heard stories about the original people who settled here, what the town was like in the early part of the 20th century. None of it felt new to me. They all said the same thing and it wasn’t interesting. I’m bored now thinking of writing it down. It started to take a turn when my cousin Rosemary, a kind older lady, brought half of a pie to my grandmother’s unlocked door (because they still keep doors unlocked here) and she started to talk about the violence in her life.
It’s prickly to me still, thinking about that week nearly a decade on. How the energy shifted so quickly from cordial—even pleasant and sweet—to painful and angry. As the days went on, I talked a lot about my father with anyone I met—more than I would’ve liked to talk about him. It wasn’t just with Rosemary—who read to me a then recent piece I had published on my father’s abuse, telling me it was the town he was raised in, the one I was sitting in that second, as the reason for it. Another day my uncle Leonard, now deceased, sat next to me attached to an oxygen tank and across from my mother, saying he never really knew of my father’s abuse because he wasn’t bad to him. “That’s all that matters to me,” Leonard so bravely said. I curled my hand into a fist and stared at him. The audacity. He went on to say that he’d once lived across the street from his sister and her husband and often heard her screams. He smiled and said that wasn’t his concern either.
I’d heard so much of the violence my mother endured in the stories she told and retold; of the violence so many women in that town lived through. I don’t think she ever had an outlet so I listened to them again and again. Leonard told these same stories with an authority that I’d come to truly understand among the patriarchs of this family. So much of the violence was at their hand—a command, too, to the women to participate in and perpetuate, which they followed. He sat, in his sickness, still positioning himself as this authority. I hated him for it. I hate him still. I seethed, sitting there as he ticked off each positive trait of the man who’d hurt me, who hurt my mother. She looked over at me. She knew I wanted to say something and her face said, please don’t, it’ll hurt me more than you. I stayed quiet.
~
My refuge from the familial and emotional excavation I endured was texting that man back in Toronto. We met on Tinder and hadn’t met in real life yet. We talked about music, food, and how loud Eastern European families tend to be. I sent him photos of Kashub recipes my grandmother had. He would come to hurt me, too, psychologically and emotionally many months later, but at that point he was fine. I liked how I could disconnect from the world I was in and pretend I was back in Toronto, talking to a stranger who felt like home.
I took notes and recorded interviews with people I met that week but I’ve since deleted and destroyed them all. Someone, somewhere will write about these settlers on land that wasn’t theirs, how they lined the main road with crosses for people to gather to worship and pushed those indigenous to the land further away; that hardness and brutality sustained generations of men in the bush, loggers pulling down tree after tree, and pulling down the brightness of each woman in their life.
Another of my now-deceased uncle’s had told me that week that my father wasn’t all that bad. That men, in general, weren’t all that bad. I was inclined to believe him at the moment. We rarely spoke to each other like adults this way. It was like I finally got the elusive invite I longed for as a child—to be included with the grown-ups. I was 25 and felt as though I knew everything while really knowing nothing. He and I drank shitty beer, my mother was inside drinking wine with my aunt, and we all pretended to be a family at that moment—as though we actually liked each other. My uncle tried to impart some wisdom but he knew I was a lost cause. I asked him how you reconcile the ways in which someone hurts you so deeply—how should I think of my father, my grandfather, even my grandmother who once physically hurt my shoulder to try to get me to go to church? He said because they are your family, you have to try to love them. They love you, he said.
I thought of my mother, inside, trying at that very moment to belong to and love a place and people that put a lot of effort into telling her she was unlovable.
~
We brought a box of photos of my father with us on this trip to give to my other grandmother, Alice. I hadn’t spoken to her at that point in more than a decade. I don’t even know if she’s alive today. My mother had gone through all of her photo albums and removed every one with my father in it. She thought Alice might appreciate them.
I kept putting off the drive to her house, the knock on her door. Every day that passed, I heard more about him as a person, the kind of anger he had, and how it was allowed to develop, even encouraged. I didn’t want to see her. When my mother and I were leaving, I asked her to do it. She parked in the driveway and walked the shoebox up to Alice’s porch. Before, without my mother knowing, I slipped out two photos of my father: a black and white photo of him as a baby in his baptism gown and another of him around seven or eight. In it he’s smirking like I do. Smirking like how my nephew does now. I kept them because he’s still my father. He wasn’t always so cruel. I look at these photos of him as a child, even as a baby, and there’s someone who was once untouched by the world around him. I don’t love him, he doesn’t love me, and I don’t forgive him. But I do understand. I feel for him. I wish it wasn’t that way for him either.
When my mother pulled out onto the Simpson Pit Road, I started to sob. Searing July sunlight poured into the car as I heaved and let thick tears escape my body. She let me cry. After I stopped, she said in a low voice, “that’s what this place does to you when you’re an adult. They don't stop the hurt.”
A week after I came home from Round Lake I met the man from Tinder. I wanted to forget everything from that trip. Everything about my life. I wanted him to ruin me. I let him.
~
I don’t speak to my grandmother anymore. I saw her the day we said goodbye to my uncle a couple of years ago. I walked along the porch where we had those beers. He died six months after that day. I see my cousins on Instagram and, every few years, in person; watching them grow from babies to young adult women. I love them more than I have ever told them. I’ve always had a protective urge toward them but never acted on it. Feeling like an outsider to this place, that this isn’t my home, where I’m from, and never was, it always seemed too awkward to really lean into those relationships. It’s a family cycle I’m perpetuating. I don’t know if they know about our family histories. They grew up near it, in it, and shaped so urgently by it. I suspect they don’t. I used to get texts from them about talking to my grandmother. I’d later find out she was right beside them.
I see Anna’s face and my face and I think that, perhaps, we’re just two strangers who happen to look like one another. Recycled faces a century apart. We’re not really related. Maybe that’s why I can look like both her and my father, and most importantly, myself. I’m them and me and likely no one at all.
And then I look at my mother. What she holds, and what she asked me to hold for her. She feels guilty all the time. The guilt makes it worse. I’d rather just forget all of this and start again. Start with the family I have now: the one with my partner, as heartbroken as he is about the way his own life has been formed, and our cat; my only parent and my sister, and this beautiful baby boy she brought into the world. He doesn’t have those stories. He doesn’t know these people and he never will. Going home for him is different. He’s free of this baggage for now.
What if we all remained that way? I’m naive and earnest. I know we’ll never be free of such stories.
~