‘I called Pierre and told him that I was expecting’
In her memoir, federal Liberal leadership hopeful Deborah Coyne shares intimate details about having a child with Pierre Trudeau
E-BOOK EXCERPT In the fall of 1990, I made a surprising, but happy, discovery. I called Pierre and told him that I was expecting a baby.
Soon after, I visited him at his home in Montreal. He was happy for me but, ever the pragmatist, asked if I wanted to keep the baby, making it clear that he would support whatever decision I made.
When I told him I intended to have the baby, we toasted. Later, we decided that if the baby were a girl, we would name her “Sarah,” the name of his grand- mother, and a family name on my father’s side. By mutual agreement, we also decided that Sarah’s surname would be Coyne, not Trudeau.
Pierre was not prepared to take any sort of active role in bringing up a small child and didn’t want to disrupt the lives of his boys in any way. I told him that was fine; I had made the decision for myself. Sarah was born shortly after midnight on May 5, 1991.
A month or so later, I flew with Sarah to Montreal, where Pierre picked us up at the airport and saw his daughter for the first time. He looked curious and pleased, in his reserved way, so characteristic of the man who skilfully controlled all aspects of his life.
At Morin Heights, we took our daughter for walks and bathed her in the bathroom sink. I’d brought the baptismal papers, which he had to sign, and we discussed when his sons should be told of Sarah’s arrival. Pierre wanted to wait until they’d finished school at the end of June.
That September, a Globe and Mail reporter discovered Pierre’s name on the birth certificate in St. John’s. Suddenly we became the unwilling subjects of a media sensation that lasted a few news cycles. We both dealt with it as best we could, which was by saying very little about what was, in our view, a private matter.
Pierre once told me that when he was barely 13 and his father died, he had felt angry and abandoned. An older father even to his own sons, he was determined not to have the same thing happen to them, which partly explains his dedication to them after retiring from politics in 1984. And he knew that there was an even greater likelihood that it would happen to Sarah. Because of that, he chose to play the role of a distant uncle.
His sons were older when Sarah was born — Justin was 20, Sacha 17, and Michel 15 — and Sarah and I rarely saw them. On one occasion we crossed paths for an evening at the chalet in Morin Heights, after the boys had skied during the day at Mont Tremblant. Michel, the youngest and an easygoing teenager, was very kind to Sarah. I especially remember him playing Sesame Street with her, along with her Elmo doll and her other stuffed animals.
There are many pictures of Pierre and Sarah together, but I’m particularly fond of one of them. In it, Pierre is holding Sarah and Elmo outside of Morin Heights.
On June 14, 1993, shortly after he had paid for Sarah’s first real bed, he wrote, “I was glad to hear that you and Sarah are both well. A big bed is a milestone for her, and I hope she is enjoying it! Perhaps she will let you sleep a bit longer in the morning!”
In the summer of 1993, when Sarah was 2, Pierre and I drove up to Meech Lake and borrowed a canoe to paddle over to see the old property where my family’s cottage had been. (My parents had sold it to the National Capital Commission after the children had gone off to university. The cottage was torn down as part of a plan, eventually abandoned, to turn Meech Lake into a wilderness area closed to motorized watercraft.) There is nothing more melancholy than to see the old landmarks of one’s childhood: the big swimming boulder, the lone cedar tree on the point, the old steps cut into the rocky hill and, of course, the gaps where the cottage and docks had once stood.
I’d bought a kite before Pierre visited Sarah and me in Ottawa in the fall of 1993. It was a very happy day for all of us. In a letter dated Oct. 7, Pierre wrote, “Flying the kite with Sarah was for me a return to boyhood pleasures.”
I became more and more absorbed in the responsibility of single motherhood. And I guess that finally our age difference and his unwillingness to play a larger role co-parenting our child proved insuperable. When I mentioned to him that I was thinking of applying for the job of director of the Montreal-based Institute for the Study of Canada, a position that would have been ideal for me, he responded in a discouraging way to the prospect of Sarah and me moving to Montreal. (Among other things, he stressed that Sarah and I wouldn’t be able to just come by his home anytime we wanted to.) I decided not to apply and began distancing myself from him. We remained very good friends, staying in regular touch, even though visits became less and less frequent. I married Globe and Mail journalist Michael Valpy in 1995. Although the marriage was to end just two years later, we had a son, Matthew, in December1995. Matthew was diagnosed at a very young age with autism spectrum disorder, eventually refined to Asperger’s syndrome. As any mother or father would know, that changed everything. It made parenthood fascinating, challenging and sometimes a nearly all-consuming commitment. It certainly made my longstanding ambition of running for political office impossible to think about for a number of years. In January 1999, a couple of months after Michel Trudeau’s tragic death in an avalanche while skiing in British Columbia, I booked one of those economical, all-inclusive vacations at a modest resort in Cuba for Sarah, Matthew and me. Pierre, devastated by Michel’s death and deep in his own personal grieving process, decided to join us there. We met him at the airport and watched as he patiently got through all the autograph-seekers and people wanting to have their pictures taken with him. We had a really lovely time together: lazy dinners and walking along the beach with the children. I treasure a heartwarming picture of Pierre and Sarah standing in the sand, Pierre holding a smiling Sarah’s arms outstretched.
These memories of the children and Pierre, together with memories of our days sitting around the chalet, reading books and articles and having long conversations afterwards, will remain with me always.