Back in April of 1996, Alexandra Spring Cook was born. What a glorious day.
I never thought prior to finding out when Janice was pregnant that I would ever be a dad. As it turned out, I feel like I haven't been a very good one, but I take solace in hearing otherwise from Janice and Lexy both. Sometimes I'll even hear it from someone else, albeit rarely; but this is about Mother's Day.
Janice is more than just a wife or the mother of my child to me. She's my earthbound saviour. I say repeatedly to anyone who will listen that I exist because she came into my life. It's a bit eerie when I think about it. In the mid 80s when I started working at Green Gables store, not long afterwards this tomboyish girl came into my work hobbling on crutches with the biggest smile and charm that electrified the air. We hit it off immediately, at least in a friendship capacity. That would continue to evolve and grow as she wound up with a job at that same store, and later inherited managing it. I left to try to find 'greener pastures', and landed employment at the Irving Tissue plant. What a time in life that was. I broke my foot and lost my job, lost my girlfriend, lost the house I lived in all my life up to then, lost all my friends, my own mom was diagnosed with dementia, was on the outs with family... it was utterly hopeless. Rock bottom.
But after I lost my job at Irving Tissue, Janice had been running another Green Gables store, and I offered to work for her. That meant going back to working midnight shifts, which is what I did at the first store I worked at for seven years. It's not the kind of thing you'd recommend to someone with mental illness, but I hadn't been diagnosed with that yet. I'd been mentally ill since 12, though, in retrospect, and it just worsened through time. Janice took me in to work for her, and since we'd been good friends all along, we got closer, and eventually got together by '92. That turned out to be the biggest game changer in my life.
Mental illness had been getting the better of me as time wore on. I'd be self-harming, inflicting God knows how many head injuries upon myself, and just exhibiting irrational and erratic behaviour. My judgement was way, way off. I'd say and do things that would strike people as odd, to say the least. Janice was there through all of it, and was unwavering in her support of me. You'd have better luck lifting an anvil with a feather than you would taking Janice away. She was and is stalwart, and nothing would change it.
We had to leave Green Gables once it was bought by Sobeys and changed to 'Needs', through a series of highly unfortunate events. Her prized Sunfire car spontaneously caught fire, and insurance didn't have her back and the dealership wouldn't own up to it. Things added up and she had to declare bankruptcy just to survive. That meant the two of us living in the cheapest place possible and looking for new jobs. She worked at a number of places, many of which screwed her over for the dumbest reasons. I couldn't find work at all. I cleaned buildings for a short time before I'd had enough of that and went back to a computer college for $5000, which got me not a minute of employment when I was done. Then Janice got pregnant.
The night before we were to discover she was, I laid in our bed saying "I CAN'T be a father. I don't want to be a father!" Then she got her pregnancy test back, and started crying out of dismay, perhaps feeling I wouldn't stick around. The moment I saw those tears, I knew I had to man-up and get my shit together, and accept this oncoming reality. "It'll be okay!" I told her as tears streamed down her face and we held one another. She supported me through all those years. It was my turn now.
She would go to work at Vito's restaurant pregnant, half the time ready to hurl from morning sickness with the smell of food cooking in the air in the early mornings. It was so hard for her. She eventually got a job working at Plaza Bowl, a ten-pin bowling alley that just went up in Moncton's north end. She was able to get me in there, too, only to see me get canned because I was looking for other work. Long story short on that subject, she got a job at Loblaw's Superstore eventually which led to her getting screwed there too, and went to Shoppers Drug Mart. As fate would have it, Loblaws went and bought out Shoppers Drug Mart.
However, Alexandra came to us in the thick of things, just after I'd gotten the best job of my life with BJ's Subs as a driver, where I was for eleven years. We rarely needed a babysitter, because my boss was kind enough to let me cart our kid around on the job. Alexandra was such a happy little kid! The three of us were always together. We never took vacations away from her, and always insisted she be with us. We were a tight little family that did everything together.
But Janice was and is the rock of the family. She was there when Alexandra fell out of a tree and broke her arm, and coached her to stay conscious. Lexy wound up with a blood infection that would sideline her in the hospital for weeks with multiple surgeries, and Janice and me did 'shifts' at the hospital to be sure she'd never be alone. When crucial bloodwork was needed to assess her condition at the French hospital from the city hospital, the city hospital misplaced it, and Janice became a human flamethrower. She grilled the staff there relentlessly to find it, which they did, but they wouldn't have if she hadn't been so relentlessly forceful about it. That very act saved Alexandra's life, because that was the bloodwork that determined the infection that could have taken our daughter from us. Lexy wound up with a pic line for weeks to absolve her of the infection she likely inherited from a bumbling doctor during one of the surgeries. They attributed the infection to dirt that got in the wound when she got injured, which reeks of bullshit to us. Ultimately, Janice the Rock saved the day, and another life, again.
Today, Janice works at the postal outlet of Shoppers, and has Alexandra as her right-hand employee, and trained her to be capable of anything she does; she would even claim Alexandra does it better. Whenever Lexy has trouble in her independent life away from us living with her boyfriend, she would consult with her mom, and Janice would settle her down and level things off. Janice is to her rescue at any time she needs her, and even when Lexy doesn't think she needs help, Janice is there.
That is what a mother is, and should be.
I am honoured to call Janice my wife and the mother of my child. She is the center of our universe. Without Janice, I wouldn't be alive; and naturally, Alexandra wouldn't be here either.
To anyone who's been enriched by the presence of either Lexy or myself, Janice is the one to thank for that. She effectively changed the world for the better.
I wish my wonderful, beautiful wife a happy Mother's Day.
You are the world to us, Janice.
We love you.
