Dropped Threads 2 (10 page)

I didn’t have any real therapy afterwards. I tried peer counselling once, but the other woman’s story was so horrific that I spent most of my time interviewing her and then left feeling fortunate. She had real problems, I thought. Everything was going to be fine.

Now I stare at these words and wonder how I managed to pull them out without breaking apart. Recalled one by one, the scattered memories had always been manageable. Combined, they felt heavier and more lethal. If nothing else, completing this puzzle has forced me to reveal all the dirty little pieces to my husband, my family and my friends. And there is relief in the telling.

Variations

Like Mother,
                    Like Daughter

Maggie Dwyer

Our mother leans down to kiss her daughters good-night. Her cheeks are sweet with the scents of powder and rouge. Where are you going? we cry. In our cries she hears a slightly indignant tone. Where is she going without us? It must be a weekend when her father is visiting and watching over the household. She has a date with Dad.

She cherishes the first valentine he gave her. Their courtship was a simple one. He was a close friend of her brother’s, and they met at one of the dances that were held in local homes in the final years of the Great Depression. Both families were members of St. Patrick’s Church at Kinkora, P.E.I. Their grandparents and great-grandparents, early settlers from Cork and Kerry, were buried side by side in the cemetery and memorialized in stained-glass windows given to the church in their honour. Their marriage banns were read out here, but they didn’t hear them. Following the local custom, they had slipped away to attend Mass in a neighbouring parish, avoiding the initial reaction from the crush of well-wishers. It was as if they had eloped. Their friends and neighbours held a wedding shower for them at the church hall and wrote a loving letter of good wishes. They married in September 1940, after the harvest was in and my mother was free to leave her widowed father and brothers.

Their deep and enduring love was the inspiration and foundation for their partnership in marriage and family life. We didn’t always have much, she says, but we always shared. Their early married years were spent in northern Ontario at Kirkland Lake, where my father sold magazine subscriptions. Mom contracted a serious illness there and lost her first pregnancy. It would be five years before my older sister was born. Long awaited and happily welcomed.

Their next move was south to Waterloo, where he worked as a machinist during wartime and she as a clerk in a jewellery store. After a few months she gave up this job, which she enjoyed, at Dad’s request—women did not work outside the home unless economics required it. She stayed at home from then on.

Several pairs of white high-top leather shoes are lined up in a precise row. It is late in the evening, and Mom has finished polishing them. The thin, chalky smell of the polish hangs in the kitchen air. This is the last on her long list of daily duties. It is after eight in the evening, and her little girls are upstairs in bed. The house is quiet, and she will sit down with her husband now, to read the newspaper and listen to the radio. My mother says she had all of us in these shoes to the age of six, in keeping with the wisdom of her day concerning what was best for young feet.

In those years, homemaking and caring for children were labour-intensive—think of the meals, the laundry and ironing, the cleaning. Six daughters born within ten years and the birth of the youngest celebrated with the gift of a fur coat for their mother. My sisters and I grew up in a house where the linen was fresh, the meals made from scratch, the furniture gleaming, our hair curled in ringlets and our little white shoes polished. There was laughter, music and kindness. We accepted it all in the selfish way of children. She knew the true value of her work. If we forgot to compliment her on yet another delicious meal, we were reminded. She would quietly say, “Well, I guess that tomorrow night, I’ll put a bale of hay in the middle of the table….” We’d hurry to make amends and pour her tea.

On a warm afternoon in a long summer season of canning, Mom is efficiently quartering pears. I am breaking a clove into quarters and inhaling its pungent scent while I listen to a story about how she and her mother and sister managed the cooking for a threshing crew of twenty men.

A woman’s work on the family farm was essential, respected within the family. The work and roles of men and women were distinct and separate but complementary and accorded equal value. Women looked after the house but were not permitted inside the barn. Mom recalls that her father allowed women to come to the door but no farther. She tells us with pleasure that on days when her mother had to go to town, which meant Stratford, “She wouldn’t have the buggy out of the drive before I started to bake.” She was ten when she began, and her pastry has always been light. She excelled in the domestic arts, and this excellence was the reason Dad gained forty pounds in their first year together.

Mom has many stories and sayings about women and kitchens, recipes and providing hospitality. One of my favourites, on the occasion of unexpected dinner guests: if you haven’t got much to put out, use your best tablecloth. In our house the cloth was white damask and the dishes were her mother’s.

On another occasion one of us invited a boyfriend at the last minute. Before grace was said, a whisper went around the kitchen. We took such modest portions that there were unexpected leftovers. “Go easy on the duck” is a remark that still brings a laugh when we are setting an extra plate.

A fifty-seven-year-old woman in her first pantsuit. It is 1970 and my father has been dead for two years. Now, after the early intense mourning has passed, Mom has found a job. The women’s revolution is gearing up. She begins working as a clerk at an insurance firm.

Recently, when we were speaking of my elder sister’s coming birthday, she commented, “Fifty-seven, that’s when my life began again.” She got a new look—a work wardrobe—found new friends, travelled and enjoyed her status and her own paycheque.

She has infected us with her love of fashion and good grooming. Her weekly trip to the hairdresser is a must. She delights in having good-looking clothes in her closet: a fashionable black suit, pretty dresses and scarves, sports clothes and “something lovely in the back of my closet so I am ready to accept any invitation.” A pretty pair of shoes is a favourite item—she very reluctantly gave up wearing high heels in the middle of her ninth decade. She was delighted to find a stylish coat for this, her eighty-ninth winter and beamed when I told her she looked pretty with the soft fur collar at her neck.

Often when I visit my mother, we take a drive “up home.” She points out the handsome red-brick two-storey house and the window of the bedroom where she was born. It pleases us to see that the family name remains on the deed. She is the one who knows the histories of its generations and much about the forty families that made up the membership of the local parish. Each person, the life and the accomplishments, has value as comedy, tragedy or drama. She is the one who remembers. Especially the details of the women’s stories. She is the matriarch now, the eldest surviving on both sides of the family tree, and her status is important to her.

My mother provided a model for the role of a wife and mother that was time-honoured, the norm in our Ontario city where few married women worked outside the home. This was the world I knew, and in my youthful ignorance, I imagined that life went on virtually the same way in homes everywhere in Canada. After I left home to attend nursing school, I was shocked to hear other girls trashing their mothers by belittling their lives or claiming to hate them.

And yet in my young adult years, all aspects of a woman’s domestic life bored me. I did not really appreciate the worth of my mother’s work—until I became a mother myself. This was in the early days of the women’s movement, and although
woman
was being transformed into
goddess
, it would not do, politically, to be like the most familiar of women, our mothers. The role of wife and mother was last on the list of choices for my generation.

Although I admired my mother and the way she lived her life, I knew I had choices. I wanted something more. As a teenager and young woman, I did not worry about “turning into my mother.” I was determined I would not. I sharply dismissed her life as sweet but dull. I saw her as a lovely, intelligent woman who was lucky to marry the man she loved, someone who appreciated her good fortune in having her own home and in not being relegated to the role of spinster sister who kept house for her father and brothers.

I opted for a conventional career, certain that being a nurse would be a ticket to adventure. Through the sixties and into the seventies, I was studying, then living,
really living
, playing, loving and working as a single woman far away from the dull fog of domesticity that seemed to enshroud my mother.

Until my mid-twenties, I resisted the idea of marriage and motherhood. The idea of a conventional marriage and family life filled me with dread. I imagined it to be the narrowest of existences. I was not so much a feminist as a dedicated contrarian—until I fell in love and married at age twenty-seven. The adjustment to becoming a stay-at-home mother was shocking. I was constantly fighting fatigue and worrying that, yes, I was slipping into the dreaded domestic fog. I hadn’t been paying attention; I didn’t know how to mother. It did not come naturally, unlike the birth process with its inexorable rhythms. I struggled to keep pace with the world, reading the
New Yorker
while I nursed my daughter. I imagined that my life was taking place off to the side of real life.

It was the shock of the now. The needs of my newborn baby demanded precedence over all else. And from then on, the persistent call of my first duty to my daughters. In this transition from self-indulgent career woman to mother, I looked to my mother and others, sisters and friends, who were there before me. We talked and talked and laughed and cried—and I learned. I saw that there were many ways, many styles and strategies I could adopt.

I found that humour is a mother’s very good if not best friend. At parties, when asked that dreaded question, What are you doing these days?, I used to answer that I was working on my doctorate in chemistry—the chemistry of laundry stains—and that my thesis was on the differential extrusion of the banana molecule. I claimed to be attending U. of M. By this, I meant I was keeping sane and current by listening to CBC’s
Morningside
program during the LaMarsh, Harron and Gzowski years.

Gradually I came to understand the powerful role of mother and to know that there is pleasure in duty. That the years I spent at home were full of wonder and opportunity. That there was time for me and my interests. That in my mother’s life, never so sweet, never so dull
for her
, there were challenges, many and varied, and I learned to appreciate and respect how she managed them.

Over the years, Mom has also revised her views and opinions, especially on topics such as women’s rights and marriage. If women’s lib had been around in my time, she says, things would have been different. She would not have listened to the doctors who insisted on the science of bottle feedings and gave her a new and improved formula for each of her six daughters. She would not have given up her job at the jewellery store. Now she understands how hard it is for young women who have been living and working on their own to stay at home with small children, even if that is what they want. “My job at the insurance company was good,” she says. “I got more out of it than the work.” She got a new life. She knew her work for pay was important then. Now we know the value of all her work.

To her daughters and their families, Mom is always encouraging, the giver of sound advice for problems of the heart or head. She delights in all our successes and commiserates in our disappointments. Now at eighty-nine, she is so agreeable a model of how to live as a woman and mother that I try not to avoid turning into her but to keep up as gracefully as she has. Like mother, like daughter. It is a high compliment.

Snapshots

Sandra Martin

Snapshots were always kept in a Black Magic chocolate box when I was a child, waiting for the moment when my mother could find the time to paste them into albums. Of course, that moment never came, and we continued to shuffle through the piles—the way we had once dug through the wrappers seeking out the caramels or the Brazil nuts buried in the second layer.

After my mother died, my youngest sister arranged the pictures and gave them to my father as an act of remembrance. When he could finally bring himself to sit down and go through the books with us, I learned the significance of a snap taken of my parents and some friends in March 1946: six happy young people out for a walk on a spring day. Or so I thought.

Now I know that nothing would ever be as promising again as it was on that sunny St. Patrick’s Day in the woods north of Ottawa.

The war was over. My father and his friend Syd were alive. They were both newly married and employed—a feat for two boys raised in the Depression. In the picture, my mother is wearing stockings, spectator pumps and a dress under a wool coat with a Persian lamb collar. She is dressed more elegantly than the other women, who are in baggy trousers and lumpy jackets. Being attractively turned out, especially in public, was like a credential on her resumé. When I was old enough to go to dances, she would often ask me afterwards, “Did they say that you look like your mother?”

Standing in front of my father, she is smiling into the camera, one hand in her pocket, her body slightly angled—the way I pose to make myself look slimmer—the other hand holding her gloves. For years I thought her coat was unbuttoned because she was warm in the spring sunshine. In fact, it wouldn’t close over the discreet mound that would become my older sister.

The evening after the hike, Syd banged on the door to tell my father he was wanted on the telephone in the lobby of the quadruplex where both young couples lived. It was the priest. My mother’s younger brothers, George and Gerald, had drowned the day before. While she was blissfully walking in the woods, her beloved brothers were dying in the frigid waters of Lake Ontario.

My mother was the eldest daughter of six children from a farming family on Wolfe Island, the largest of the Thousand Islands, about three miles by ferry from Kingston. Her life was hard. When she was seven, the family home burned down, and she was sent to the mainland to live with a childless aunt and uncle until her parents could regroup. In later years, my grandmother was flattened by depression, and my mother often had to forgo her own plans to keep house and take care of the younger children.

In a different age, she might have stayed on the island to run the farm, but of course that went, without question, to her older brother. Instead, she moved to the city in the dregs of the Depression and found a job in a pharmacy on the edge of the Queens University campus. That’s how she met my father.

Although she didn’t attend classes, she used to say that she felt like a Queen’s grad because she never missed a football game or a formal. When asked, “Did you go to Queen’s?” she invariably responded, “Queen’s came to me.”

The boys, as they were always known, had been out partying. They wanted to get home to see their mother for St. Patrick’s Day, but the ice was too thin to drive across, and still too thick for the ferry to navigate the passage. Stymied, they hitched a ride in a small, open motorboat. It capsized, and four of the passengers, including the uncles I would never know, drowned.

How my father conveyed the news to my mother, I cannot imagine. Prompted by the hiking picture, he later recalled that “dreadful night” and talked of how the doctor had come to give my mother a sedative. The next morning, they set out in a borrowed car for Kingston. A day later, they went over to the island on the ferry, the ice having cleared by then. My father can still remember sitting in the smoke-filled cabin and feeling the boat rock as the first hearse drove on, and rock again a few minutes later as the second one was loaded.

I don’t think my mother ever recovered from this tragedy; she had mothered her younger brothers, who were only twenty-one and nineteen when they died. Ever afterwards, she made it abundantly clear that at least one of her four daughters should have been a son to make up for the enormity of her loss. This lesson was so ingrained that when I was pregnant with my own children, I refused even to think about the sex of the baby I was carrying.

Illness was as familiar as a radio serial when I was growing up. My mother often had the flu or headaches, and I was frequently expected to make dinner or to come home after school to take care of my little sisters. I don’t ever remember my mother making breakfast except at Christmas or before we all embarked on a holiday in the family car. When I was in high school, my youngest sister would carry a cup of coffee and a plate of toast to my mother’s bedroom before taking herself off to school.

My mother also underwent a number of serious operations; one was a spinal fusion, when I was two, to correct an old back injury. After the operation, she was encased in a cast from her armpits to her thighs.

I can remember standing in bare feet and nightgown beside my older sister, pressing our backs against the wall, while two men in white uniforms carried a body down the staircase. As they passed, a woman I recognized as my mother rose from the pallet and waved goodbye before slumping back down again. I thought that she had died, and that the husky men were taking her to heaven. Now I realize that the only way her cast could be changed was to put her on a stretcher and cart her back to the hospital by ambulance.

Was that Lazarus-like image the reason I didn’t pay much attention when I heard she had found a benign lump in her breast? Was it because I had already confronted her death that the threat of the real thing seemed anticlimactic? More likely I was too wrapped up in my own doings. I was newly married and living in England, where my husband was a graduate student.

From a shy, sickly child with her nose in a book, I had become both rebellious and unpredictable, prone to bringing home unsuitable young men and arguing about politics with guests at the dinner table. My insouciant outbursts about the population explosion or the hypocrisy of organized religion enlivened perfunctory conversations about the weather and the royal family, but they upset my mother’s precarious sense of decorum.

Even as a little girl, I had been the odd one. My older sister was cute and boisterous, but I, the unexpected second daughter, was a clinger and a crier. My mother would often look at my glasses and my skinny frame and say, “Ugly in the cradle, beautiful at the table,” as though wishing were enough to make it happen.

Most teenagers are deeply embarrassed by their parents, but my disaffection for my mother grew more, not less, rancid as I fled from her nagging and her pretensions about “my father’s position.” It was the seventies and I hated everything she revered: solid, boring, conventional, suburban respectability. And why wouldn’t I? I had never been poor, or homeless, or farmed out to relatives.

My first inkling of trouble was a cryptic remark that she made about the lump being malignant after all as we were walking back from a visit to King’s College Chapel when my parents came to see us in Cambridge. Shocked, I said the words “breast” and “cancer” and she told me to be quiet because people—complete strangers living not only in a different country but a different continent—might find out.

That imposed silence became the norm through the years of remission and during the final battle. If she brought up the C-word, we could talk gingerly about her illness, although the prognosis was always off limits. I learned never to raise the subject myself or to discuss it with anybody outside the immediate family.

Monitoring the information flow became her way of exercising some control over her life. Often she would forget she had revealed her secret and then accuse us of disloyalty if her confidants inquired about her treatment. She was always afraid that people were comparing her breasts to see which one was augmented with a prosthesis. To this day, I don’t know which breast betrayed her.

As the treatment options narrowed, she retreated into a bitter shell. Not even my father could penetrate her blackness. That was the way I saw it then. Now, thirty years later, as I fearfully check my own breasts in the shower, I envision her face flashing with alarm when she first felt that hard nugget.

Our last trip was to a family reunion in the Maritimes. Nobody was to know about my mother’s illness, not even my aunts. My mother was too ill to drive to the cottage we had rented, so my husband and I drove from Toronto to Montreal, where my parents lived. While he continued on in the car, my mother and I flew on a packed plane with my son, who was eleven months old, teething and on the move. Nobody had warned her that the air pressure in the plane could affect her already compromised lungs. As the plane bucked and lurched, and I wrestled with my rambunctious son, I glimpsed the fear in her rolling eyes as she gasped for breath. That moment made me ashamed for all the times I had been irritated and impatient when she snapped and complained. For the first time I realized that she was frightened as much as angry. Rage was her camouflage.

My mother’s medical and emotional needs increased, and the dynamics shifted as we all tried to help my father care for her. It was as though children and mother were exchanging roles. By the end of the summer, the cancer had invaded her brain stem and she was admitted to hospital. On my next trip to Montreal, I was terrified to go into her room. Would I recognize her without her wig? And would she even know who I was?

She smiled when she heard my voice and opened her eyes briefly before drifting back into fogginess. As I sat by her bedside, I wept out my frustration and grief for silent, stony years wasted in misunderstanding. What she wanted was a daughter who would win the local beauty pageant, marry well and move up a rung in Montreal society. What I wanted was passionate debates about the pill, the Vietnam War and women’s liberation. What we both needed was unequivocal love.

The farewell stretched out for nine weeks. Gradually I found that sitting by her side, ministering to her few needs, gave me an unexpected sense of peace and closeness. She was unconscious sometimes, confused at the best of times, but her lashing out vanished. By finally retracting the portcullis that sealed her from “intrusive” sympathy, she allowed us to soothe her anxiety. Her rage had been replaced with sweetness.