Like most parents, he inspects me through the rosy filter of unconditional love, but he doesn’t have enough material to develop a complex idea of the intricacies of Billy-Ray Belcourt the adult, who is different from Billy-Ray Belcourt the child. I don’t mourn this lack of expectation, this absence of narcissism, which is the narcissism of wanting to see oneself in one’s child, to have them bloom into another you. On the contrary, without a mirror held in front of me at all times, I felt without skepticism the platitude that anything was possible.
