In my 68 years on this planet, from the time of her birth, the most meaningful relationship in my life was the one I shared with my daughter, Megan, who saw something in me, a kindness of spirit and a gentleness of soul that previous to her birth on Saturday, March 26th 1977 was unplumbed, a capacity for love that remains in me still today, as will always be the case.
Megan was a breach birth, undecided if she wanted to make her entrance into the world. At Burnaby General Hospital, late on that Saturday night, Cathy under anaesthetic, forceps brought my daughter through the birth canal into the warmth of the operating room. After the umbilical cord had been snipped, Megan was wrapped in swaddling clothes, and given to me.
For the first 10 minutes of her new life, I held Megan in my arms, she looking directly into my eyes, and mine into hers, an event that is most often referred to as imprinting, a remarkable phenomenon that occurs in the first minutes and hours of life. From that moment to this, my connection with my daughter has remained the strongest bond of my life.
The months after Megan’s birth were tempestuous in her mother’s life, as our marriage was slowly breaking down.
By the time Megan was nine months of age, and I was enrolled in a Master’s programme at Simon Fraser University, her mother had removed Megan from the jurisdiction several times — these days we’d call it kidnapping, but back then in the limbo of a jurisdictional dispute between the family court and Supreme Court, and a supine provincial government seemingly unable or unwilling to bring closure to the jurisdictional debate (the Supreme Court eventually “won”, and was given jurisdiction over custodial and all other matters relating to the welfare of children), in B.C. we existed in a state of stasis, the welfare of our children in jeopardy.
Over the months of her first year, Megan would be taken away, I’d frantically attempt to discover her whereabouts, and the family court, police & Ministry of Human Resources would become involved in the pursuit of discovering Megan’s whereabouts (I was never overly concerned about Megan’s welfare — I knew she was with her mother and that was fine with me, it was just that I missed her & wished her reunited with her brother).
Early in 1978, when Megan had “disappeared” again, this time for a couple of months — Cathy had taken Megan to her mother’s winter home in Arizona — and was “apprehended” by Ministry social workers upon Cathy and Megan’s return, arrangements were made to once again place Megan in my care (at the time, I thought Cathy had got a raw deal in the courts).
One Saturday afternoon early in the year, arrangements were made for a social worker to drop Megan off at a friend’s home in the 4400 block of Albert Street, near Willingdon and East Hastings. A request had been made that the “exchange” take place in a public area — in this case, a friend’s home — and shortly after 1pm, there was a knock at the door. Someone sitting nearby the front entrance opened the door, the social worker asked if I was present, to which the person who’d answered the door said, “yes.” I could see around the corner near the front entrance, and could see Megan gently moved from the arms of the social worker, until her two feet touched the ground, at which point the social worker exited.
Megan, looking into the room, saw what I am sure she experienced as an unusual and confusing sight. That afternoon, was my usual practice, I was a participant in a Marxist reading group, about 20 friends scattered around the room, half of them men, half of them women. As was the de rigeur haberdashery presentation style of the day, I was wearing rimless glasses, had on a check shirt and jeans, my hair dark, wavy and unkempt, as I sat reclined in an armchair on the other side of the room, about twenty to twenty-five feet away from where Megan stood near the front entrance.
Megan set about to scan the room, all the men looking almost identical with their longish dark hair, checkered shirts, beards, worn jeans, with world weary, pre-revolutionary looks on their faces. The room went momentarily silent, at which point Megan took her first tentative steps, then a bit more determinedly, heading straight for me, stopping at and holding my bony knees, allowing me to pick her up and onto my lap, she turning to look at my face, then placing her body against my chest, breathing slowly and rhythmically. The Marxist reading group continued our afternoon’s activity.
After two months away from me, and at such a young age, how did Megan recognize me on that chill mid-winter’s afternoon?
The answer: the same way she has always recognized me, as my daughter, me as her father, our bond unbreakable, then, now and forever.
