Dropped Threads 3 (16 page)

Being an author with an income as-well-as-a-mother restores my credibility, re-establishes my value as a human being and earns me entry into the officers’ mess. So I drop it like a small bomb and when it explodes, I am the only one who suffers any injury.

At times like these, when I fumble around making excuses for being what I am and doing what I do, I find myself wrestling little devils of self-doubt. Much as I try to deny it, there is a small, stubborn part of me that feels, not unfulfilled, but slightly underdeveloped—as if, in photographs I might not appear as distinctly as other women.

Was I meant to leave a more profound impression? In declining the opportunity to establish a career outside the home have I inadvertently undermined the feminist cause?

We have been conditioned to believe that our mothers and our grandmothers were trapped by their domesticity; that they were disenfranchised, oppressed; that they were prevented from exercising choice and therefore relegated to small, sad, prescriptive lives.

Today’s mother is not chained to the kitchen table. On the contrary, she is expected to put bread on it. She wears a business suit, not an apron. She works in an office, not a laundry room. She carries a briefcase, not a baby. But has the pendulum swung too far? Are the expectations placed on contemporary women any less limiting than those imposed on our foremothers? Have we been emancipated, or are we simply slaves to a different, more demanding master, one who expects us to be everything to everybody?

In the current vernacular, “motherhood” appears to be a dirty word. It is fine to have children, in fact, it is presumed of a woman. But mothering is supposed to be a hobby, or at best a part-time job. We have kids on the side, like fries. The real meal, the grade A all-beef burger, is the work we do outside the home. We are not considered to be fully developed, fully fulfilled, fully contributing women unless we have established a career in the wider economic world. So where does that leave women like me?

Are we, the legions of stay-at-home moms, sending a mixed message to our daughters? Do as I say, not as I do? Will we encourage them to be homemakers, or neurosurgeons and prime ministers? Do we want them to emulate our way of life, or escape it? Are we role models or village idiots?

In our legitimate but zealous bid for liberation, have women lost sight of the real freedom—the element of choice: the right to decide for ourselves what makes us successful, satisfied, complete?

We
are
different from our mothers: we are more stressed, more anxious, more overwhelmed, more depressed. We are tortured by feelings of guilt and inadequacy. We wear a dozen different hats, and not one of them fits quite right. We are expected to manage kids and work as well as husbands, aging parents, fashion, fitness, fun and finance. We are pulled in so many opposing directions that we are drawn and quartered; dismembered, but not quite dead.

•    •    •

I began to lose my balance the day after I finished my last undergraduate class; the day I married a handsome man I barely knew. Cinderella-like, I waved goodbye to my family, friends and home, and drove off to a new life, staring into the rear-view mirror. I wept every day for two years until my son was born.

Matthew’s first needy cry designed my destiny, and any career dreams that existed beyond his sphere of influence were instantly relegated to another lifetime. Patrick and Stephanie quickly followed, and with three children under the age of four, my fate was sealed tighter than a Tupperware container.

I was a mother.

Once those babies were placed in my arms there was no force in the known universe strong enough to pull us apart.
Returning to my job with a national labour organization in Ottawa wasn’t fathomable. I had to stay at home to raise my children. It was a biological imperative.

Changing gears was as effortless as changing diapers. I was born to be a mother. I loved my job and I was good at it. It wasn’t easy work, but it was enormously rewarding. Had I felt the need to produce an excuse for my decision, one that might placate some of my liberated sisters, those who were busy claiming their stake in the corporate echelons, I had a good one. All three of my children had been born with special needs, and my littlest angel, my baby girl, was profoundly disabled.

When my kids were small, life was rich and full and exhausting. I was too happy, too busy and too tired to think about what I might be missing. But as they grew bigger and slightly more self-sufficient, small holes appeared in my schedule that were easily filled with speculation. What if value really was equated with income? What if success really was defined by job status? I felt guilty being in the house while they were at school, as if keeping the home fires burning and-writing-books-on-the-side was somehow self-indulgent, deficient.

I considered getting a “real job” (my husband’s term for full-time employment outside the home—
You have no idea what it’s like to work for a living)
but there just weren’t any opportunities that offered the kind of hours I could manage: weekdays 10 a.m to 3 p.m. with school holidays and summers off. I had to be—and wanted to be—at home for my children. They were my purview.

As the boys became adolescents with a healthy sense of adventure, they needed more guidance, supervision and chauffeuring than ever, and Stephanie, who had plateaued at the developmental age of five, would require around-the-clock care for the rest of her life. My services—my love, my support and most of all my presence—were still desperately
needed at home. And I desperately wanted to be there to provide them. I was trapped, but I was content to live in captivity.

I was a mother, damn it.

Eventually, my husband left. More than his leaving, it was his disappointment and disapproval that deflated me. In the recesses of my soul I remained true to my own definition of accomplishment and clung to a rebellious sense of self-worth, but closer to the surface, under my thin skin, I let him get to me. I let him convince me that I was a failure. Not a good wife. Not a good mother. Not a good provider. Not a good anything. I was the “oh” at dinner parties, an underachieving embarrassment, and ultimately not worth taking along.

At thirty, I was the only one in my social circle who had the distinction of being a wife, let alone a mother. At forty, my friends were just starting their families and I had three teenagers and an ex-husband.

•    •    •

It has been two years since I reclaimed my maiden name. Slowly repossessing my sense of self, I collect small tokens of appreciation along the way and arrange them like wildflower bouquets. Good-night kisses. A ticket stub from
Mamma Mia
, a Christmas gift from Matthew, purchased with his own money. Patrick’s ninth-grade essay that begins, “I don’t know what I would do without my mom.” A fill-in-the-blank work sheet by Stephanie that reads: “I am happy when … my mommy hugs me.”

There are days when I feel restless, claustrophobic, a little bored, even. But I know that any professional who is worth her salt, any woman who has done the job for so many years that she could manage it blindfolded, suffers from the occasional bout of ennui.

I don’t have a lot of money, and yet I feel as though I’ve won the lottery. In almost two decades of being a mom, I haven’t missed a single thing. Not a tooth or a tear, a smile or a step; not a bath or a bedtime story, a school concert or a class trip; not a baseball practice or a basketball game, a breakfast chat or a dinner conversation. My critics might not understand the attraction or endorse my decision, but their esteem is not my concern. Achievement is a very personal yardstick. Power, prestige and personal wealth are not my benchmarks. For me, success is measured in happiness. And I am happiest being a mom.

These days, I am focusing on my epitaph. I want to be remembered as a good mother. If my tombstone reflects this great work, then I will have done what I set out to do—what I was meant to do—in this life. I may never write a best-seller-on-the-side, but I will have raised three well-loved children. And I could leave no greater mark on the world.

•    •    •

The girls—all with children of their own—are even busier now. Our get-togethers are so infrequent that they are more like reunions. Michelle moved her practice into her home. Nora took a demotion and cut back to part-time hours. Susie quit her job altogether. We still swap stories of workplace heroics and histrionics, but as the mother with the most seniority, I often lead the discussion.

Our lives are rich; meaningful; interesting; rewarding. We are not underachievers. We are not inadequate. We are not failures. We are smart, satisfied, happy women.

We are mothers.

No apologies, no excuses and no regrets.

In 1944
, at age fourteen, my mother took the train miles from her family in the tiny town of Kelvington, travelling farther than she’d ever travelled in her life, all the way to Fort San, a tuberculosis sanatorium in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan. Too ill to be put in the children’s ward, or even to have adult roommates, she was placed in a room by herself. She was laid flat on her back and stayed that way, without even a pillow, for two years. Her head was shaved because doctors were afraid a simple thing like a shampoo could give her a chill that would carry her off. Her parents were poor; there was no chance that they could visit for at least a year. Small wonder she spent the first couple of lonely months at the San crying incessantly.

The doctors and nurses explained that crying would sap her body of the strength needed to fight the disease, but she couldn’t stop. Until one day two doctors discussed her sputum results while they thought she was asleep. “She won’t see the New Year,” one of them said. It was October. The way my mother told the story, her tears dried up in that instant. I’ll show you, she thought, and bent all her will to getting better. In two months’ time, her results improved 100 percent.

Even so, it was seven years before she left the San. She’d gone in at fourteen and came out at twenty-one. Her limbs were so wasted that the first time she tried to stand, she fell
over. She would only ever have three-quarters of a functioning lung. The doctors gave strict parting injunctions: she must never overexert, and probably would never walk up a flight of stairs; she should not marry, as marriage led to children and she was unlikely to survive childbirth; and even with extraordinary care, she would probably not live past forty.

She took the bus back to Kelvington. All the way from Fort Qu’Appelle it rained, a heavy, cold rain that chilled her with fear—the legacy of all those years of not even having her hair washed because a wet neck might kill her. But just before she got to Kelvington, the rain stopped. As if she’d been given a special dispensation, as if even the heavens bowed to her will to live.

My mother did take good care of her health, but on her own terms. She worked on her high school diploma parttime, while doing the books for her parents’ general store; she put herself on a walking regime to get her muscle strength back. At twenty-five she got married, leaving her parents to sell the store they’d bought for her security as an old maid. She bore two children, of whom I am the elder. She not only walked up a flight of stairs but also joined a bowling league, travelled and even lived overseas for several years. And she astounded everyone by outliving my father by nine years, dying at seventy-three. She was a kind of walking miracle.

But miracles can come at a price, and are not always comfortable for those who live in their immediate vicinity. I grew up in a household organized around my mother’s illness, for TB remains a threat even to its survivors. One of the rules in the San was that patients must keep order in their surroundings because order creates calm, and calm means you are not overtaxing your lungs. My mother took this to mean ordering
not only the physical space she inhabited, but also the people who inhabited it with her. From the time I was small, she controlled, or tried to control, every aspect of my behaviour, usually finding the results disappointing.

The standard she measured me against was that promulgated in the fifties: girls were naturally tidy, obedient and unselfish, ready always to put their desires aside to serve others. I, on the other hand, always had my nose in a book and was too apt to thoughtlessly follow my own inclinations. Frequently she would compare me with other, more tractable children. “Why can’t you be more like your cousin Regan?” who was pretty and thin and practised the piano without being nagged. “Why can’t you be more like Polly Pepper?” a fictional character in
The Five Little Peppers
who did housework without being asked, and didn’t have any desires to put aside because her only desire was to help her mother. My first flicker of independent thought began with the mute protest, “Because you’re not like Mother Pepper.” Who was unfailingly sweet-tempered and encouraging, and who, I was fairly sure, if her eight-year-old daughter had asked, “Am I pretty?” wouldn’t have said, “You have a long chin.”

My second movement toward independence came when my father’s seismic career took the family to Algeria in 1970. Because of a shortage of English-or French-speaking schools, I was sent to boarding school in England and thus spent the bulk of each year out from under my mother’s direct supervision. For three years, I travelled on airplanes by myself, stood up for myself in problems with students and teachers, and sucked up the British cultural revolution that had begun in the sixties. I went to England an obedient twelve-year-old, and returned to Canada and my parents a fifteen-year-old hippy. The transformation did not make for happy relations with my mother.