Picture This

Wasaga Beach - world's longest freshwater beach

If a picture’s worth a thousand words, I’ll take the words. It’s not that I trust the mind to catalogue and accurately recall events. Quite the opposite. It’s been my experience that people remember only what they wish to and in a light that they can live with. Sometimes, it’s just as well.

I did my best to photograph family life, but once my second child was born there wasn’t much time for it. Then came divorce. Should I have snapped shots of the packing, the for-sale sign on the house or moving day? I only hope those events aren’t as deeply embedded in the minds of my two daughters as they are in mine.

I quit taking pictures entirely, and not just because my ex got the camera in the division of our stuff. My heart wasn’t in it any more. So when the three of us set off on our first ever vacation-without-dad, we did so without a camera.

I would be diagnosed the following year with endometriosis, but at this point all I knew was that one week out of four was pure hell for me and, darn the luck, our Wasaga Beach holiday fell on that week. Still, since Wasaga Beach is the world's longest fresh-water beach, there should be lots of room to relax, right?

This was during the blistering Ontario heat wave of 2002. My apartment didn’t have air-conditioning and neither did my car. By the time the trunk was packed I was suffering, not only from the height of pms but also from heat exhaustion and aching muscles. The girls, eleven and thirteen at the time, were, naturally, complaining. Finally we piled into the car and drove to Wasaga Beach.

I’d rented a room on the strip. Location was everything but once we’d arrived and I’d unpacked, all I cared about was the air conditioning. I was bathed in sweat. My period had started. My daughters wanted to explore. Fair enough! We set out in the blistering heat.

Naturally the place to go was the tourist market. I was flush with cash at the time and determined that before I became poor I was going to give those girls a holiday to remember. So I bought everyone sunglasses and wrap around skirts and thongs (Oh my God pardon me I mean flip flops!)

Once properly attired, the girls begged to go to The Shark Museum. We went to The Shark Museum. The heat, already around 100 degrees Celsius, hovered another fifteen or so degrees higher inside.

We moved from tank to tank, staring at the giant killing machines. I felt as lethargic as they looked. I searched for something to sit on but there were no chairs, so, like the sharks, I just kept moving. Finally I found a big wooden box of shark food and sank down onto the lid. The girls went exploring.

I stared into the face of a great white and felt sorry for myself. Sweat streamed down my body. I didn’t like the way the shark was looking at me. Could the brute smell me through the glass? Speaking of which, I didn’t care much for the way my ‘chair’ smelled, either.

I sat for maybe five minutes and then went looking for my kids. I found one sobbing hysterically and the other shame-faced. The youngest had hidden behind a tank and leapt out screaming, “It’s alive!” causing the eldest to freak. She'd just gotten her period, too, so she was a little high-strung.

That night it was my younger daughter’s turn. She collapsed in tears; miserable with the realization that she just didn’t have enough money to do all the things she wanted to do at Wasaga Beach. Well, here was one problem I could fix!

I pulled out a wad of cash and said, “How much money will it take to make you stop crying?” Then I started peeling off twenties. (As a matter of interest, the amount it takes to get an eleven-year-old girl to stop crying is sixty dollars.)

Turned out she'd just gotten her period, too.

They spent the blistering hot days getting lost at the beach (one by accident, the other on purpose), fighting over the Playstation, disagreeing about what to do next and arguing about who got to sleep with me.

One night I was hiding in the bathroom softly sobbing over my cell phone to a sympathetic friend when a gigantic black millipede skittered across the floor. I screamed. The girls thought it was hysterical.

There was a midway but, like my eldest daughter, I didn’t care for scary rides. That left my youngest daughter stuck, sans her Dad, with no one to go with. Finally, on our last night in town, I reluctantly agreed to go with her.

The ride she chose didn’t look that bad but that was because what I’d taken to be a ‘seat’ was actually a chin rest. There were no seats. I was directed to lie face down across a bar and I did it. Anything for my baby. I clenched my teeth, (my eldest does an impersonation of me on that ride that never fails to get a laugh) and I shut my eyes and I survived. Afterwards, you got it, I cried. The next day we left. The maid got a big tip.

For March Break, 2003, my ex-in-laws took my girls to a four star hotel in Cuba. When we said our good-byes my youngest child wrapped her arms around my waist and hugged me tight. She whispered, “No matter how great Cuba is, Mom, it will never beat our Wasaga vacation with you.”

And that’s why I don’t take photographs.