Walking on Broken Glass: A Love Story

I’m not entirely sure how my stepfather is going to react to the dedication I put in the new book. I bet my biological dad will laugh his ass off though.

My previous book had “Hi, Mom” as a dedication. But for On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down the dedication reads: “For my two dads, a couple of cool motherfuckers.”

I guess we’ll find out.

He became my dad because I stepped on a piece of glass in a lake.

Anyone who would meet my mother and biological father would say “How the hell did those two ever end up together?” I think it was one of those icky “chemistry” things that people don’t want to imagine when it comes to their parents. Very early in the relationship, when they were both 21, Mom got pregnant with my older sister and it was 1965 so married it was. I guess it went okay for a while because I was planned, so I’m told. But by the time I was six it was over. I think Dad dragging us from lovely Victoria BC to northern small town Burns Lake BC for no discernible reason was the last straw for Mom.

Burns was the lake. The one with the glass in it.

My parents had been split up for a year and I was a seven-year-old walking in the lake and I stepped on a piece of glass and cut my foot. The ER doc at the local hospital was also recently divorced and took an immediate shine to my mother. This story probably involves a bit of medical malpractice and likely some of what people might consider creepy now but in 1975 I guess it was romantic.

This was not my first time getting stitches. Two years previous I’d gone knee-first into a sliding glass door and shattered it, taking 30 stitches in said knee. I had a bet with my mom how many stitches my foot would need. The bet was for a giant Superman comic book. She said three, I said five.

I told my stepfather-to-be of the bet as he was doing the stitching. I later learned that it really only did need three, but he put in two extra so I’d win. Mid stitching, he asked my mother on a date. She said she acquiesced because he was in the process of performing surgery, albeit minor, on her son. Also, we were moving away soon so she wasn’t going to have to go on a second date regardless.

“Now you be sure to come back and see me next week to get those stitches out,” he said as we were leaving the hospital.

“Oh, I can’t,” I said. “We’re moving to Salt Spring Island to live with my grandma.” It was true, because we were poor. We must have been really fucking poor, because my grandmother was the worst. If you read The Holy Sh!t Moment, Chapter 2 begins with a story about how awful she was. Racist as fuck too.

Anyway, he said, “Oh that’s no problem. I have an airplane. I’ll fly down and take them out for you.”

And that’s what he did.

I know we rightfully shit on the creepiness of the grand romantic gesture seen in many films, but this was a grand romantic gesture that worked. My dad and my stepdad could not be more different. One is a high school dropout who could barely read. (He left school at 15 to work in a foundry to help support the family. He did get a GED in his 30s and became a voracious reader thanks to Lord of the Rings.) He is also a rugged carpenter / hunter / heats his home with wood and has no running water outdoorsman type who still lives in northern BC. Conversely, my stepdad is a University of Toronto med school graduate who I’m not sure I ever saw change a tire.

My dad may be a good father, but he was never a good husband. My stepdad is both. And wow did he have a thing for my mom. And I can identify with that, because I fell in love with my wife right away as well. Like, by the end of the first night I met her (we spent the entire evening talking to one another) I was pretty sure I was already in love.

Anyway, dad flew down to Salt Spring Island in his little Cessna and took out my stitches. Grandma despised my biological father and approved of this new guy for no other reason than he was a doctor. I just remember thinking he was nice to me.

I guess my mom was impressed, and he kept making regular flights of about 500 miles each way in his little plane to visit us. After six months my mom said okay this guy is all right and living with my mother fucking sucks, so she got a job as close to him as she could manage, in the small city of Prince George (blarf) a little over two hours’ drive away from Burns Lake. Six months after that they were “married” in an informal ceremony in our crappy little Prince George apartment and we were on our way to Calgary.

And by “we” I mean my stepdad’s ex-wife and his kids came too. I expect there was some negotiating going on with that, but everyone decided that Burns Lake sucked and Calgary in 1976 was the land of opportunity.

His two sons spent half their time with us and half with their mom, who lived nearby. I didn’t usually get along that great with my stepbrothers, but that’s another story. What was cool was how much this guy not just adored my mom, but loved me and my sister too. He considered us his children and I happily called him dad, and still do.

I mean, it wasn’t always smooth sailing. Teenage hormone rebellion shit and whatnot. But when we moved to Calgary, he left emergency medicine and began a psychiatry residency, so whenever I needed advice about something, I often looked to him. A few years ago, I was visiting my Aunt (my biological father’s sister) as she lay dying from pancreatic cancer. I had little experience with such things, and the person I called to talk about it was my stepdad.

Another awesome thing about him is how encouraging he always was in my mom’s career. When we moved to Calgary my mom started studying social work at university. She was halfway through her final semester and told him, “I don’t want to be a social worker. I want to drop out.” There was literally two months of school left in a four-year degree and he told her, “If you want to drop out, then drop out. We’ll figure something else out.”

And that’s what she did. She got a real estate license and did very well in that for four years until the market collapsed, and he said, “I think you’d make a great stockbroker,” so she got licensed in that and she did indeed make a great stockbroker. But it wasn’t just her. He was very supportive of me in my meandering career as well. I struggled at first in university and when I finally chose “history” as a focus he thought it was cool, despite the want ads not being overflowing with companies looking for history graduates.

We were visiting them in their place on the coast in the summer of 2010 and I’d just had my first piece published in the Los Angeles Times. I was still working 20 hours a week as executive director for a non-for-profit as the last gasp of my business career that I’d been doing for over a decade, and there was a party going on and he introduced me to some people as “My son the writer.” That was cool. That made me feel like a real writer.

Anyway, my parents have been together over 45 years now. They are holed up and happily retired on Vancouver Island, rarely leaving their condo because of Covid, and they don’t seem to mind at all because what they enjoy more than anything else is each other’s company.

There is one last thing I want to mention, because I spent so much of my fitness writing career discussing it. My mom struggled with her weight a lot over the decades. Not once did I ever hear my stepdad say a single thing about it. He always showed her the unconditional love and affection he felt in his heart. To him, she’s always been as beautiful as the day he stitched up my foot.

I learned a lot of cool things from my biological father, but when it comes to being a good husband, I learned that from my stepdad. It’s odd to imagine how my life might be different had I not stepped on that piece of glass.

The scar is faint, but I can still make it out.