Falling Backwards: A Memoir

I
look across my yard every morning at my parents’ little house. They live fifty feet from me now. I can see their lights go on in the morning and shut off at night. I can see them moving about in the yard when they’re watering plants or cutting wood or when my mother is digging up her flower beds. I watch them and I smile. Sometimes I catch myself wondering what in the world I will do when they are not there anymore. I drink cold water and tell myself to stop being so selfish. I close my eyes tightly and open them again, hoping that my thoughts will be cleared away. They never are completely.

I have fourteen acres of land west of Calgary, not far from where I grew up. Not far from where this story begins. My mother and father met on a blind date in the late fifties, before there were colour TVs and cellphones and CDs and computers and even Spanx, for that matter. My mom’s old friend Freda, who’s now deceased, was determined to set my mother up with her boyfriend’s pal, convincing her that this blind date would be different. Freda told my mom that
this
guy was funny and smart and had a job, for Pete’s sake! What else could a girl possibly want? Freda didn’t seem to care that my mother
kind of
already had a boyfriend (though my mother says she never really liked him all that much anyway), and asked
what would one little date on a Saturday night hurt anybody? My mother reluctantly agreed to go out with my dad. The rest, as they say …

It’s hard to believe that my parents are still together and going strong some fifty-three years later. They have survived things that would have crushed most couples. They persevered where others would have cracked in half. I don’t think I could have done what my mother and father did, and that was to go ever forward with their shoulders back and their jaws set straight and their faith unwavering. Both my parents
lasted
. They beat the odds. They survived each other, for starters, and that was—and is—no small feat. I don’t know if something was in the water, but not a single one of my friends’ parents divorced either. I thought about that one day and just shook my head. It says a lot about the company I kept and continue to keep all these years later.

My parents are my treasures. They are my secret weapon, my shield, my strength and my faith. Whenever I went off the rails, and that was fairly often as I was figuring out how to be a person, I turned to them for comfort and solace and direction and forgiveness. They were always there for me, always.

I sometimes see my dad standing in the yard. He’s perfectly still and quiet, with his arms resting on his rake, and he’s looking off over the fields. I wonder what he’s thinking about. I wonder if he’s thinking what I am thinking.

I asked him once what it was like getting older, and he told me that he couldn’t feel it and he couldn’t see it in the mirror either. He said he just saw himself the same way he always was. I think about that conversation a lot.

So many things have changed around me, but I still see the same face when I look in the mirror. I know what my dad meant.
Living is a process. You plod along and hope you’re on the right road and if you’re not, well, that’s okay too. I know that from experience now.

When I was in my early twenties, I moved out to Vancouver for a few years and managed to get myself into a lot of trouble. Not legal trouble, but emotional and spiritual trouble. I felt so lost and so down and out. I made one mistake after another. I was on some kind of self-destruct mode. Eventually I picked myself up and hosed myself down and ended up, as my mother often says, making something of myself, despite myself. She also says to me, “Thank God you could sing, or who knows where you’d have ended up.” I don’t like to think about that.

Years later I returned to Vancouver for a series of sold-out concerts. It was a giant contrast to the days when I was busking on the streets for a buck or two to buy cigarettes and wine. I couldn’t believe I was there, standing on a beautiful, brightly lit stage, singing my songs for people who had paid to see me. I felt vindicated somehow. I’d survived the stupidity of my youth.

After one of the shows I had the limo driver take me across the Lions Gate Bridge to the North Shore, where I’d gotten myself into so much trouble. I had him drive by my old apartment building on Third Street, where I had lived twenty-five years earlier. It was boarded up, to no one’s surprise—least of all mine. It stood there like a tombstone. The pouring rain added nicely to the movie I was creating in my head. I saw my young self, staggering in drunk through the beat-up front door. I closed my eyes and clearly pictured the old mattress on the floor, the ironing board I used as a kitchen table, my beloved cassette deck. I sat in the car for ten or fifteen minutes with the window down, looking out at the street. The cold rain was spitting at my face.

I won, I thought to myself. I won. I felt a weight lift off my heart. I said a prayer in my head about gratitude and forgiveness, and then I had the driver take me back across the big bridge to my hotel. I lay in my bed that night and thought about how I’d gotten to where I was that day. I fell asleep smiling.

I
was reluctant, to say the least, to get here. My mother tells the story on pretty much every birthday I have ever had. She most often smiles—a laugh lurking inside of her little bird-like chest—and says, “When you were born, I said, ‘Let me die, let me die.’ ” She really isn’t kidding.

For some reason, that line always made me laugh too. Not that it was a prelude to a happy tale, but it was a funny one nonetheless. She’d go on to say that the doctor just let her suffer through two long days of pushing and pushing and pushing to no avail. I guess I was backwards or feet first or probably just refusing to come out of her at all. Why would I want to fly out into the abyss without really knowing what in God’s name I was getting myself into? I’d still be in there now if I’d had my way.

One thing about being born: it’s hard for everybody involved. You learn within a few seconds that it’s not going to be easy being a person. That first breath must really be something. I am kind of glad I don’t remember it. The human body is an extraordinary thing. What it is capable of doing is, quite simply, miraculous.

I can’t even begin to figure out how an eight- or nine- or, God forbid, twelve-pound body inches its way out of something that seems to be smaller than the slot in a slot machine. And never mind that, after the twelve-pound body has fought its way out of the womb, the whole bloody layer-upon-layer works suddenly just folds itself back together like a book with a few ripped-up pages. Like nothing ever happened. Kind of like a Slinky.

My mother would disagree with me, I’m sure, as something did indeed happen. I am in pain just thinking about childbirth. In fact, I suddenly have to fold my legs together and hum “Happy Birthday.” My poor mother; all that suffering, and for what?

Oh yeah, me.

My mom said that back in those days they didn’t just give women C-sections like they do now. I mean, now women
pick
the day they’d like to have their baby.

“Ah yes, Doctor, I have March 27th open after 4 p.m. after my pedicure.” I can just picture that in my head. In 1962, they made you push until you thought you couldn’t push anymore. Epidurals weren’t even that common. It was natural childbirth or bust. She almost did bust.

“I thought it was either going to be you or me,” she’ll often say. I tell mom that I am really very glad that it wasn’t either of us.

I always ask the same questions. Where was dad? Wasn’t he in the room? Didn’t they let men in the birthing room?

“He didn’t want to come in,” she says. “He went home and went to bed while I was lying there thinking I would die.”

My mom was apparently just about to throw in the towel on the both of us when the doctor appeared. They were finally, after two days, going to do a C-section. They had to call him at home to
come in to do the operation and, according to my mother, he took his sweet time getting there. You’d think they could maybe have found another doctor who was
in
the hospital? To top things off, I think he got caught in a snowstorm. Yes, a snowstorm in March, which is fairly typical for Alberta. It can snow in Calgary in July.

Fortunately for my mother and for me, we didn’t end up needing him after all—not for a C-section, anyway—because I decided to come out into this complicated world all on my own. I think all the doctor ended up doing was grabbing my legs and turning me around. I mean, turning a person around? In a womb? My dear mother said it was nothing short of agony. I have given her the odd sympathy card on my birthday. It seems fitting, somehow. The card simply reads, “I am sorry about your vagina. Love, Jann.”

The nurse at the hospital told my parents that they wouldn’t be able to bring me home until they had a name for me. Velvet was an early contender. My mother was an Elizabeth Taylor fan, and she loved the movie
National Velvet
. Thank God that never stuck. My parents didn’t even smoke pot, so that’s not an excuse. I ended up being named after a cartoon strip called
Jane Arden
that ran from 1927 to 1968. My mother loved that cartoon strip. Jane was a reporter
and
a crime fighter and a force to be reckoned with, and I guess mom thought I would be too. But mom didn’t like the name Jane, so she substituted an
n
and called me Jann—Jann Arden Richards. Maybe they were just desperate to get the hell out of the Calgary General Hospital, but that was their final answer. Final answer: Jann Arden.