Home
Of course I would trip up the steps to the front porch of the house. Christ, I thought. Are these things ever going to get fixed? It had been seven years since my mother first noticed the cracks in the concrete, but my father always had a reason why he’d get to it tomorrow.
I brushed the gravel from around the freshly made hole in the knee of my jeans, and noticing the front door was open, I went inside and announced my arrival.
Almost nothing in the house had changed since I’d been there last. Everything seemed meticulously in its place. The curtains of the bay window in the living room were open just enough to let in an almost perfect amount of early afternoon sunlight.
After removing my shoes at the front door, I made my way into the living room, past the grandfather clock which stood imposingly next to the staircase. Its constant ticking and quarterly chimes were something I’d grown to ignore when I lived here, but now, its heavy tone seemed soothing, as if it were an old friend sensing the apprehension in my movements as I made my way into the house.
Rounding the corner, I found the kitchen empty, so I made my way back to the stairs to announce my arrival once again.
The familiar baritone of my father’s voice finally shouted down from his office; he’d be down momentarily. I knew unequivocally that this meant he was going to be a while, so I went into the living room to wait patiently.
The large bay window overlooked a rose garden, and as I stood looking out, I had a clear sightline to the multitude of cars that drove past the house daily. A lot could be seen from that window, including a large part of my childhood. The garden led to a long front yard, and at the end of that, near the sidewalk, stood the tallest tree on the block. Garth Street at Mohawk Road was a busy intersection on the West Mountain of Hamilton, so kids in the area had to be very careful when going out to play.
My parents bought this house new when the neighbourhood was built in the late 1960s. This particular model, a brick two-story with a built-in garage and four bedrooms, was impressive to me as a child, but as I grew older, it became a very common middle-class suburban home.
Much like the cracks in the front steps, my dad took his time fixing and updating the inside of the house as well. Sure, the last forty years had seen the old green shag carpet that ran throughout the house pulled up, and the avocado-coloured appliances swapped out for beige ones in the ’80s. But otherwise, most of the house remained as I’d always remembered it.
Although quite faded and peeling at the corners, the beige flowered wallpaper that I helped my dad put up in 1980 still hung in the hallways between each room. And the bathroom, which featured the same pattern only in white-and-pink flowers, still sported its original pink toilet, sink, and tub from the year the house was built. “Why replace something that’s in perfectly good working order?” my dad would say. And who could argue with that?
The house felt quiet and calm as I sat down on the sofa and continued looking out at the garden. I began thinking about the things I’d wanted to say to my dad, but laughed at the idea of him sitting down to have a heart to heart.
“What are you worried about?” I could hear a gentle voice say, and I turned to see my mum standing by the living room entrance. She seemed shorter since I saw her last, but then again, I thought the same thing every time I’d visit. Her hazel eyes sparkled in the sunlight, and at almost eighty years old, she still radiated a youthful glow. I would often tease her that I’d never seen a little old white lady look so good. In fact, the only thing that gave away her age was her bright silver head of hair, which had grown a little long now, forcing her to move it repeatedly from in front of her glasses.
“Everything’s fine,” she said.
“I wasn’t overly concerned,” I replied, but of course I was. I was rarely summoned to the house, and when I was, it was never for anything good.
My mother took a seat across from me in her favourite wingback chair, and took a sip from a glass containing a very generous pour of what I could only assume was the finest cabernet to be boxed locally.
“You know your dad and his obsession with organization. He found some things that he felt you might need, or that you might want to hold onto.”
I was pretty sure we could have done that over the phone, but since I was there, I was more than happy to take a look at what there was.
“So, how are you doing?” she asked.
I wanted to tell her that everything was good, which it was for the most part, but I would have been lying if I said I wasn’t still struggling.
“Not bad, actually. The clinic is running well, so that keeps me pretty busy.”
It wasn’t exactly a lie, but I definitely didn’t want her to know that I was still having a little difficulty. Although work in my massage therapy practice had been pretty steady, I also had massive debt from my student loan which, if I’m honest, had been giving me more than a few sleepless nights.
“Are the girls managing alright?” she asked.
“Yeah, they’re pretty resilient. They miss you,” I said, wishing I would have brought them around to see her more often, but I’d been so busy with work that I barely had time with them myself.
My mum flashed me one of her big supportive smiles before taking another sip from her glass.
“I know,” she said. “I miss them too.”
My parents never complained about not seeing their granddaughters that often, they were just happy to see them when they could.
I really thought that leaving my acting career would allow me more time for visits with them, but I’d been overextended at a job with a lengthy commute, not to mention that I lived more than an hour away from their house.
Casually, I headed into the kitchen. “Is there any ginger ale?” I asked.
My mum raised her voice slightly in an effort to make sure I could hear her. “I think so. It’ll be on the bottom shelf of the fridge if there is, but there’s beer in there if you want.”
She was blissfully unaware of my recent five years of sobriety, so in order to avoid that conversation entirely, I simply told her that it was a bit too early in the day for me.
As I sat back down on the sofa, I noticed next to me what I assumed was the reason I’d been summoned.
“Is that it?” I asked.
“Oh yes, it is,” she replied, acknowledging the old box which sat at my feet. “There’s been so many trips up and down the stairs, I’d forgotten it was already down here.”
It was a very old bankers’ box; the kind with the lid that simply lifted off the top. And though it brandished a printed label with my name, I’d never seen it before. These same type of boxes could be found all over the house, and they were filled with anything and everything you could imagine. Both my parents were hoarders in some way, but with his OCD tendencies, my dad made sure that everything that my mum held onto was boxed up neatly and clearly labelled.
I was a little afraid of what I might find inside, but decided to ask her anyway.
“Should I just go through it?”
“I don’t see why not.”
The box looked almost new and showed no signs of dust; a clear indication that it had been recently removed from the bottom of a much larger pile. After removing the lid, I was taken aback to discover what appeared to be a carefully archived personal history. It was complete with important documents that were sealed in clearly marked envelopes, and although most items were fairly recent, others dated back to my childhood.
Unlike my dad, who saved things that he thought might come in handy later, my mum had a history of saving anything she felt had the slightest bit of sentimental value. So, I found myself facing into a life’s worth of souvenirs that had been kept in pristine condition.
There were pictures, playbills, and newspaper articles, many of which were duplicates since my mum would often ask for the programs or ticket stubs from any of her friends that had seen me in a show. Although it felt like a lifetime ago, these items of memorabilia were reminders of a very unique moment in time when pushing boundaries helped create some of the most groundbreaking musicals in the 1980s through the 2000s.
Having been in shows like Les Misérables, Miss Saigon, and Cats, as well as plays at the Stratford Festival of Canada, it was difficult to overlook the fact that I had been a part of many of the productions that helped shape a generation of musical theatre into a much more interestingly diverse landscape.
As I sifted through the box, I became more and more ambivalent, intrigued, but somewhat hesitant. I wasn’t sure if I should look much further in case I discovered something that would result in an emotional response I wasn’t prepared to have.
Yet my curiosity got the better of me, and as I slowly removed the envelope marked “ADOPTION,” I began to wonder what I’d find. Inside were a few documents with my personal information that had been given to my parents by the Children’s Aid Society. The familiar light-blue folder was something I’d seen many times before, and I was happy to find that still taped to the inside cover was the only newborn picture of me in existence.
It’s funny how I hadn’t really changed that much. My almond-shaped eyes, brown skin and the dimples on both cheeks, all were the same. Of course, my little tuft of curly dark-brown hair had filled in nicely since, and I was lucky not to have lost very much of it even into my 40s.
Immediately overcome with emotion at the image of myself at my purest moment, I felt a sense of peace. However, as I continued to read through the folder, I became aware that it was a feeling that wouldn’t last.
These documents from the CAS were more or less an assessment of my pre-adoption experiences. I had undergone some medical as well as psychological testing to determine my overall health, and even though I seemed mostly unaffected by the circumstances that led to my stay in foster care, I struggled with my emotions and had difficulty trusting adults. Physically I appeared fine, with the exception of the injuries to my genitals which, although described in the report, were not explained in any great detail. This was all information that would be important for any prospective parents to see prior to adoption. As I continued to scan through some of the documents, I could see by the expression on my mum’s face that she was genuinely concerned.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said. “I’m fine.”
I wasn’t. I’d been caught a little off guard, and hoped she hadn’t noticed the crack in my voice as I tried to appear unaffected.
Among some photos tucked in the back of the folder, I came across a black-and-white snapshot of my little sister and me that was taken at the last of the foster homes we’d lived in. With only a year between us, it was easy to see how people thought we were twins as we got older. We had the same dark complexion, and similar smiles, but as a little girl in the 1970s, her dark curly hair was being grown out long.
I loved that photo because it was the perfect representation of our relationship dynamic. We were sat next to each other on the chesterfield, and although I was trying to smile, I was making an awkward face because my sister’s fist was making contact with my right eye.
Laughing a little, I placed the photo to one side. There were several that were taken that same day, and each made me feel a connection to a youthful, albeit short-lived sense of innocence. Chasing my sister around the coffee table. The two of us finding eggs in a barn near one of the foster homes. The irony of being sick with chicken pox, and then being forced to eat chicken soup. So many memories and emotions came flooding back, it was hard not to feel overwhelmed.
It was a difficult position I had put myself in. Sorting through these memories would no doubt stir up old feelings, as well as spark some conversations that I was certain my mother was not ready to have.
As a child, and through my teens, I’d lived through some unpleasant experiences that eroded almost all my self-esteem, and even though I survived abandonment, and sexual abuse, the trauma left me shattered, and lacking a sense of self-worth. Everyone experiences trying times during their childhood, and I was no different. But I think that being raised by a family with such significant cultural differences caused many of the emotional problems I had throughout my life.
Growing up, I’d always been told how lucky I was to have been chosen by my parents, and that I should be grateful that they adopted me and gave me such an amazing life. Truth was, at the time, I didn’t feel lucky. And I definitely didn’t feel grateful. I was conflicted as I struggled with my sense of identity, and no matter how much my parents tried, I rejected them and refused to conform to what I thought they wanted me to be.
A non-practicing Jewish father and a Protestant Scottish immigrant mother living in a working-class steel town and raising two mixed black children, seemed like a sitcom in the making, but looks can be deceiving. I was being raised by quite possibly the whitest people in Canada, and for me, therein lay the problem. Our differing opinions on how important race would be throughout my life became the catalyst for a multitude of issues I had with my parents that went far beyond just teen angst and rebellion against them. It led to a full-on attempted coup d’état, leading to my eventual exile.
“Some things I remember about these photos, and some I don’t,” I said, the tremble in my voice almost certainly betraying my efforts to look calm and composed.
There were definitely situations I would have been too young to recall, and the social workers written account of what led to my abandonment didn’t spark anything in the way of a concrete memory. For the early things, the images were hazy, but I could still sense the emotions I felt then, some of which were so intense and overwhelmingly vivid that my eyes began to swell with tears.
My mum continued to sip from her glass, seemingly unphased by my unintended emotional release.
“You were a cute kid,” she said, breaking up some of the tension.
“Yeah, I was,” I asserted, and we both kind of chuckled.
The kid in those photos was cute and appeared to be a normal, happy, healthy little boy. Though in reality, he was confused, mistrusting, and desperate to be loved.
As the grandfather clock struck one in the afternoon, and started its pronouncement in chime, it’s melody combined with the appearance of this unchanged room made me feel as though time had stood still.
Being raised in a white family impacted my life in ways I never could have predicted. So did the pain of abandonment as well as what I’d been exposed to in the foster system. My mother had some idea of what my sister and I had been through before her and my dad came into the picture, but the broader parts of the story were muddied over time. Whatever the facts, there was one thing for certain; the cards were stacked against us from the beginning.
We were born in St. Louis, Missouri, in the early 1970s to a French-Canadian mother and an African-American father. This in itself already presented a number of challenges. Cities around the United States had been experiencing a change, and St. Louis was no exception. It was the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and white and black youth everywhere were still pushing for equality and an end to racial discrimination.
It had been only a few years since schools were officially desegregated, and even though discrimination based on race in public facilities had only just been deemed unlawful, my parents’ interracial relationship was not looked on too favourably.
In order to escape the volatility of their relationship, my birth mother left my birth father, and took my sister and me to Canada where, after a few short months, she realized she lacked the capacity to look after us on her own. In what I can only imagine was an act of sheer desperation, she left us with a babysitter one afternoon and never returned.
Tragic circumstances aside, I had always been somewhat sympathetic towards the poor babysitter who was left in that situation. Not only did she have to figure what to do with the two children that had been left in her care, but she was more than likely left unpaid, and without so much as a reference.
I spent a great deal of time in the foster system, and the experience was, to put it politely, disturbingly unpleasant. My sister and I were moved at least once because of neglect, from a home where we were often locked in a closet to keep us quiet and out of the way.
It’s something I could barely remember, having only been around two years old, but it was known to our social worker, who obviously documented it in an attempt to have us relocated. Although I couldn’t remember how it felt to me as a small child, thinking about it later in life filled me with an immeasurable sadness and an anger that was difficult to let go of.
Our last foster family was a much better fit for my sister and me, and although I have no real recollection of what they looked like, I could sense the emotions I’d felt around them. Our foster mother gave me a sense of comfort which led me to believe that she was kind. But when it came to our foster father, I felt a strong sense of fear. He may have been very strict with me, or perhaps just not overly patient, but the feeling is associated with one of the only distinct memories that I’d had about my time there.
It was more of an image really, but it was one that stood out because of that intense feeling of fear I’d experienced. I’d hidden from our foster father under a chair in the kitchen of their home, and though most memories of the past were a little cloudy, the image of that Sears dinette set from the 1960s with the flower-patterned high-backed chairs was crystal clear.
“Look at these photos!” I said to my mum. “You’d never know how close we were.”
I displayed a constant need to be with my little sister, and I’d become extremely upset when they tried to separate us for any length of time.
“If I noticed that she wasn’t around, I would throw a huge temper tantrum.”
“I can just imagine,” my mum said quite confidently, as she’d seen my temper firsthand.
My sister and I were however separated at bath time, which created an entirely new level of discomfort for me. It was painfully upsetting to have one of the older foster children constantly touching what I’d always been taught was my “private area.” At such a young age, I never thought of it as being sexual, but because I knew that letting someone touch me in that way was wrong, I was terrified I’d get in trouble if our foster parents were to find out. The thought of it made me angry and upset, and the more I stared into the bankers’ box and at its contents, the more upset I became.
“You know, if anything like what happened to me, I mean being touched in that way, had happened to her, I’d never be able to forgive myself.”
My mum and I had never really spoken about it before, but I chose to be blunt in order to get a clear and honest reaction from her.
“We never really knew what happened to you,” my mum said, quite visibly upset at my candid revelation.
“That’s because we never talked about it. All the evidence was there in the report from the Children’s Aid.”
I fully expected that my mum would feign ignorance about what had happened to me. After all, “If we don’t talk about it, it never happened,” could have been the slogan on our family crest. At first, I thought perhaps this stroll down memory lane wasn’t such a good idea, but in the moment, it felt so good to say some things out loud. This was a conversation I didn’t expect to have with my mum, but there we were. There were things she may not have known about the traumatic events which caused me to act out in such anger as a child, but I wish she had wanted to learn about them as a way of helping me work things out.
In foster homes around the country, a blind eye had been turned to what some children were being subjected to. There was definitely plenty of blame to go around, and though some would argue that the foster system was broken, sadly, it was working exactly as it was designed. The screening process for foster families had improved over time, but I suspected that in regards to dealing with Indigenous children, or children of colour, there was still a significant amount of bias and discrimination.
“Do you remember when you decided to adopt?” I asked, as though I didn’t already know the answer.
“Of course I do,” she replied. “Why?”
“No reason,” I said.
I thought back to the story that my mum had told me years earlier when I’d asked her the same question. I wasn't surprised when she explained to me then that since her and my father already had a girl, they wanted to adopt a boy. What was interesting was finding out that their initial plan was to adopt a child left behind from the Vietnam War.
Years later, I would encounter a very famous photo of a Vietnamese woman handing off her young daughter to American soldiers at Vietnam’s Tan Son Nhut airbase. It was during the fall of Saigon in 1975, around the same time my sister and I were adopted. The photo appeared on the inside cover of the book of musical selections from Miss Saigon. It served as Claude-Michel Schönberg’s and Alain Boublil’s inspiration for writing the Broadway show, in which I went on to play a lead role for over 1,800 performances. The image was powerful, and looking at it in relationship to my own story, I imagined myself being passed on to another family, in hopes of a better life.
When inquiring about overseas adoption, my parents were persuaded to focus on children living in Canada as there were so many in need of good homes. My sister and I had been declared wards of the Crown in the middle of the “60s Scoop” era when many Indigenous children were forced into foster care to be adopted out to white families. This was a time when there was a concerted effort to assimilate those children through rampant transracial adoption around Canada.
Because we weren’t a part of that specific demographic we had a slightly easier time. It was quite normal for the CAS to place children like myself and my sister with what they considered a “stable and loving family,” which was just social services’ speak for “white.” This practice had the potential to yield some socioeconomic benefits, but not without significant cost. It was clear in most cases that the connection to the child’s culture would inevitably be severed.
In our case, the CAS, in what was a fairly progressive stance for the time, suggested that the family we were placed with should have ties to the black community. My adopted father’s older daughter with his first wife was also half black, and more than likely the reason the CAS greenlit our adoption.
What my parents did in adopting my sister and me was commendable, especially since at that time, most people were looking to adopt newborns, or small babies. We were three and four years old respectively, and it was very difficult to find a home for an older child, let alone siblings who were children of colour.
It was just the way things were, and unfortunately, when it came to adopting children outside of their race, a family’s good intentions could easily become the stones with which an unimagined road to hell is paved.
Now that there were some subjects out in the open, I felt things were about to get a bit deep and perhaps a little emotional. With my father still working away upstairs, I decided to divert the conversation slightly in order to lighten the mood.
“It must have been our award-winning performance on television that made you choose us,” I announced, to which I anticipated a laugh from my mum. She didn’t disappoint.
My very first television appearance was with my sister on a program designed to draw attention to children in need of homes, and in particular, Indigenous and children of colour. It didn’t get me my SAG card, but it was cool to be on TV regardless. The show was called Family Finder and featured the Beatles song “All You Need Is Love” as its theme.
Its format was similar to that of an animal shelter ad, but what it lacked in the way of celebrity activist hosts and dispiriting soundtrack, it more than made up for with the visuals of dejected looking children joylessly paraded in front of a camera. It had all the benefits of a humane society infomercial, without the looming threat of being put down (I think).
The show targeted a very specific demographic, similar to the World Vision segments on Sunday morning television. Designed to stir up feelings of white guilt in middle-aged couples with decent financial resources, producers hoped that a few of them would take a kid or two off their hands.
“It was Big John who brought us on the show that day. Do you remember him?” I asked.
“Of course I do,” my mum remarked.
There was no forgetting the man we jokingly referred to as “Big John.” He was the social worker assigned to our case. I remember him as an older gentleman, but in hindsight, he was probably fairly young. There was a kind-hearted quality to the man. He had a big smile, and I was forced to lean my head way back to see it because of his extraordinary height. Even through the frames of his glasses, I could see that his eyes, a shade of brown that matched his hair and beard, were sympathetic and caring.
He would often drive us around in his green Volvo station wagon to the many appointments we had, including the first meeting with my parents.
“He brought us to meet you at the mall that time when you brought us those gifts,” I reminded her.
I could almost see my mother’s memory of that moment as I watched her try to conjure up an image of that day. We met my parents and their older daughter at a local shopping mall where we congregated around a bench seat in front of one of the stores. Our then-prospective parents gave me a little toy racing car, and my sister a little bean-stuffed doll that she’d lovingly, and somewhat unimaginatively, referred to as “Beanie.” I remembered how special and important it made me feel being allowed to keep that toy car for myself. Anything we’d had at the foster homes were communal, and so my sister and I had no toys of our own. Not having to share with anyone else made me feel empowered, and so that little car became something I held onto into adulthood.
My parents’ older daughter seemed nice, and at the age of fifteen she had over ten years on me. While she too was biracial, and the link to the black community on which our adoption approval was based, the fact that she rejected any hint of her blackness made that link all but inconsequential. She had a pale complexion, and light-coloured eyes. In fact, apart from her dark curly hair, nothing about her features suggested anything other than Caucasian. For reasons unknown, she preferred to “pass” rather than embrace her true ethnicity. I can only assume this decision was due to low self-esteem, and a strained relationship with her birth mother. I’m sure these same feelings also contributed to her choice of partner, who was the very definition of toxic masculinity.
Like a lot of young girls in the 1970s, she married right out of high school to her long-time boyfriend. He was the type of guy whose failed aspirations of playing professional hockey left him desperately clinging to the remains of his teenage athleticism, and a once-loyal hairline. Marrying so young meant that we would only live together in this house for a few years, so to say we grew up together would be a bit of a stretch.
In my adult life, I’d always tried to figure out my older sister’s indifference to her ethnicity, and the great lengths to which she’d gone to hide that part of who she was. I was never sure if it was something that happened over time, or if she’d always been that way. Whatever the reason, her behaviour always felt to me like a bit of a slap in the face, and something I would never really understand.
“No way!” I shouted, nearly causing my mum to jump out of her seat. “I thought this had broken years ago.”
I could hardly contain myself as I unwrapped the tissue paper from around a little ceramic Christmas ornament that my mum had made. It was a beautifully painted little boy in ice skates, holding a wrapped present behind his back. At the bottom was written “Christmas 1975.”
“This was from our first Christmas with you.”
My mum seemed surprised at how happy I was to see this little keepsake. I’d never been one to hang onto too many knick-knacks or collectables, but this was very special. Not only did it symbolize our first Christmas as a family, but it happened to coincide with the finalization of our adoption as well.
When all the paperwork had been signed that year, my sister and I travelled to our new home – this home in Hamilton where I was now sitting a lifetime later. It was already mid-January of 1976 when my parents drove us from Ottawa in their AMC Hornet station wagon with the faux wood panelling because of course, it was the 1970s. On the roof they’d tied their most recent gift to us: the extremely popular and equally nauseating Sit & Spin, a toy that enticed kids to sit on it and spin around until they became too dizzy to stand, vomited, or both.
At one point during the drive, I’d awoken from a nap in time to look out the car window just as we were driving up a hill. At the top, I looked out at the lights of the city below, and immediately for me, this became the image of our new home.
I don’t think I’d ever seen anything like it in real life. It was like an artist’s rendering of a big-city skyline used as the background for a movie. I must have fallen back asleep, because when we arrived, my dad had to carry my sister and me into the house one at a time, to put us to bed.
Originally, we were supposed to arrive before Christmas, but due to some legal paperwork issues, that time frame was pushed to the new year. Because of that delay, my parents decided to keep up their Christmas decorations in anticipation of our arrival. They prepared food, put gifts under the tree, and joined by all their friends, they held a second holiday celebration in order to give us something we’d never experienced before.
The excitement of all the gifts and attention was overwhelming, but it lasted only for a brief moment. Once things died down, and we tried to settle in is when I started to become very anxious.
Change is never easy, and as could be expected, the transition to our new home and family wasn’t a smooth one, at least not for me. It was difficult to navigate where and how I would fit in, and like with the cracked concrete of the front-porch, I was going to have to tread lightly at first, until I figured out my safest path.
