Dropped Threads 3 (17 page)

The root of the problem was that, if my mother was strong-willed, so was I, and I chafed under her illness almost as much as she did. Because she frequently tried to outrun her physical limitations, her body would often fail her, landing her in hospital, or on extended bed rest at home. For the last quarter of her life she was on oxygen around the clock, tethered to a machine that delivered it through a twenty-foot length of plastic tubing. She needed to rely on others to help her live the life she wanted, and she saw me, her daughter, as an extension of herself, a kind of early prototype of the Canadarm, whose function was initially to fetch out-of-reach articles like glasses of water, pills or laundry from the basement. But when I got older I was supposed to fetch other, less tangible things: good grades, a good job, success—prizes my mother would have gotten on her own if the bacillus hadn’t robbed her of the opportunities.

As a Canadarm I was pretty much a failure. For one thing, my mother had high standards that I usually fell short of: the one B plus in the line of As; the one mark shy of first class honours in my piano exam. But a deeper problem, and the source of many clashes, was my stubborn determination to grope about for my own discoveries, independent of the mother ship, especially after my taste of freedom in England. When I was young, my mother could always rein me back in with a sharp comment if she thought I’d ventured too far, or as she put it, got too big for myself. But after our return to Canada, I wasn’t so easily kept in line, and our clashes got more frequent and acrimonious.

It didn’t help matters that the feminist rhetoric I found so freeing in the ’70s and ’80s was as critical of my mother as she was of me. My mother had achieved what she had simultaneously been told was everything a woman could wish for and what she herself could never have: marriage to a good,
hard-working man, two children who hadn’t wrecked her figure, a suburban house and financial security. And here was her daughter turning up her nose at it all, saying “Not for me.” Her daughter who quit university to go on the road as a folksinger, who changed jobs with a dizzying lack of concern for the future, who slept with men but never brought any of them home for approval. For my part, what my mother wanted for me seemed conventional and dull: not having sex until I was married because no decent man would have me otherwise; taking a degree in business or education because it would guarantee a good job; or, failing that, taking a secretarial course so I’d have “something to fall back on.”

Oddly enough, though, eager as she was to direct all other aspects of my life, she was unusually reticent on the subject of motherhood. I once asked why she had had children against her doctors’ advice, and she said, “Because it’s what you did back then.” I suppose I wanted to hear that my brother and I had been desperately longed for, were worth risking death for, that we’d only become disappointments and irritants after we got a little older. Instead, her answer implied we were simply props in the conventional life of a 1950s couple.

But distance, both temporal and physical, gives perspective. My parents retired and moved to Kelowna shortly after I married, and I saw them only a couple of times a year—circumstances that allowed my mother and me to manage an uneasy peace most of the time. Then my father died, and in watching my mother cope with his loss, I developed a new respect, even admiration, for her.

It had been a good marriage, and she was hit hard by his death, but with characteristic determination she began to rebuild her life. She joined a grief group, a bridge group and a book club. She made a killing in the stock market. I began
to look at her in a new light, and to wonder if I had perhaps misinterpreted key moments in her life, by taking what she said about them at face value.

I had always assumed we moved to Algeria because my father felt stifled in his work in Calgary, and that my mother followed him because “that’s what you did back then.” But this decision carried serious risks to her health. Algeria had not yet reached its tenth year of independence from the French; the schools and hospitals, the infrastructure generally, were in a shambles as the country struggled to rebuild. There were frequent food shortages and political skirmishes. Resentment was mounting against the oil companies, one of which employed my father. My mother, given her fragile health, would have had every excuse to leave, even to insist that my father not take the job in the first place. She had often made her family bow to the necessities of her health, yet this time she didn’t.

I think now that she was thoroughly enjoying the adventure. She loved the strangeness of the scenery and the people, the trips into the Sahara, or to Italy and Spain. She loved bartering in the markets, where she was a pit bull in negotiations; she gave dinner parties for, and made friendships with, people from all over the world. I suspect she too had been feeling stifled by her job as wife and mother and, like my father, had been only too happy to have a change. But because she spoke of the decision in terms of wifely duty, I didn’t see that our overseas travel had opened up a new world for her as much as it had for me.

I realized that for many years I had been measuring her against Mrs. Pepper and those same 1950s standards of female servitude and self-sacrifice I had rejected for myself. What used to strike me most strongly in the tale of her time in the San was her extraordinary will, especially since I was
bent to that will many, many times. What strikes me now is how amazing it is that a frightened, lonely, desperately ill girl had the nerve to defy the voice of authority, and to build her life on such defiance. If she had listened to the doctors, who “knew best,” she’d have been, at worst, dead at fourteen, or, at best, an invalid living alone in the narrow world prescribed to her when she was twenty-one. And no matter how flatly she framed her decision to have children, even if her motivation really was the desire to follow the norm, the fact is that for her giving birth was an act of courage, even rebellion. A tractable, obedient woman wouldn’t have lived the life she did.

My mother died two years ago. She left behind a number of diaries, kept in pocket-sized Daytimers, that I read in the weeks after her death. In an entry toward the end she recorded her decision to give up duplicate bridge. She had taken up this demanding version of the game after my father died, during those first, intensely lonely years of widowhood. She had always loved bridge, and was a brilliant and fierce player. Many of the diary entries kept track of her wins and, less frequently, her losses. I know what it must have cost her to accept that she no longer had the energy for the weekly competitions. But with characteristic lack of bitterness she wrote, “However, there it is—one has to accept those things one cannot change—or be miserable—and I
refuse
to be miserable. There are still many enjoyments left to me, and I
intend
to enjoy them to the full.” If there is one legacy from my mother that I value most, it is that defiant determination to make all she could out of her life, even when it was shrinking to the radius of that plastic oxygen tubing.

And if I have a favourite memory, it is this: my mother was placed on twenty-four-hour oxygen just after my father
retired. When she went out she took a small PortaPAC tank that held only several hours’ worth of oxygen, which she filled from a big tank that was replaced weekly by a supply company. In order to travel farther than the PortaPAC would allow, my parents designed and had custom-made a stand that would enable them to take the big tank on long trips. They charted their travels throughout the United States and western Canada according to oxygen fill-up points, and my mother continued to travel this way for as long as she could after my father died. When I think of what she taught me, I see her at the wheel of what the family called the oxygen-mobile, with the green plastic tube snaking out behind her to the tank we nicknamed R2-D2, outrunning her limitations for as long as she could, and never letting anyone or anything force her to live small.

Unloading the dishwasher
I pull out the Tupperware containers: small round ones for raisins and peanuts, larger ones for cheese and crackers, a square one for a sandwich. As I stack them on the counter, I look around my kitchen with a sense of wonder, noting the juice cups, the lunch bags, the enormous piles of paper from school.

This is my life. I am a mother of two small children; my existence is defined by my kitchen counter. Each day ends here—the evening unload of Tupperware, the making of lunches, the organizing to lessen tomorrow’s inevitable chaos.

Motherhood can be filled with the mundane. For every moment of joy experienced in quiet bedtime conversations with my five-year-old and my seven-year-old, there are hours of asking those same children to put their toys away, to hurry and put their boots on and to close the door when they go outside.

Every day, I think about the long-term effect of my parenting, of my insistence on this boundary or that rule. I ponder how I am demonstrating my values, what my impatience is teaching my children. When I shout my frustration at muddy footprints in the hallways, at coats left strewn on the floor, I chide myself for doing so. They are so small and learning everything anew. When their pushing and teasing
of each other threatens to turn me into a “monster mommy,” I remember that, at first, I experienced only the marvel of them.

I will never forget the moment my son William was born. I had been in labour for hours, straining, pushing, and finally, after a violent pull from the doctor—he came into my arms. He was blue, and yellow and slimy. He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. His eyes were open and he seemed to be looking right through me. As I stared back in shock and wonder I knew that this was the most perfect moment of my life. That in that second of push and pull everything had changed. Everything that I was, so much of what I wanted, my needs—they had shifted.

Now, the marvel is mixed with the frustration that so much of precious mothering time seems to be spent cleaning, driving and making lunches. As well, I was unprepared for the worry and doubt. I do not make a decision without thinking of my children. Before my eyes are fully open, I feel their presence in the house, I plan our day, I gauge my emotional readiness for their energy. I know it will take a lot—that is a child’s job, to take, to ask, to have needs fulfilled.

I know I can’t just love them. It’s not enough. It’s not nearly enough. Each day I ask for the strength and compassion to be a great mother. I have not wanted anything as much as I want to be a good mother. I have never worked so hard in my life—the positive self-talk, the sheer endurance of long days, the doubt. What I want seems insignificant when measured against the importance of my children’s needs. Every new skill I’ve learned, every wisdom I’ve gained, I bring to my mothering.

And yet in many ways I simply feel ill suited to it. I cannot seem to quiet that part of me that is bursting to be fully realized, that part of me that knows that there is simply so much
to be done outside my little family circle. I have spent the better part of my life, so far, with my head in the clouds, dreaming of what could be, of what is possible and then making that a reality.

My Olympic journey required drive and tenacity and enormous belief; it required all my energy. To my great joy, I achieved some of my most cherished dreams. Today my professional life is a rich and delightful potpourri of speaking, writing and running a charity.

As a speaker, I am able to express who I am through my work. The lessons and insights I talk about may be universal, but they are from my own life experiences and have provided me the privilege of creating a rewarding career through sharing them with corporate audiences. As well, a year ago I started
SilkensActiveKidsMovement.com
. We are working with local champions across the country to create opportunities for kids to be active. I have watched in amazement as the idea of supervising kids in unstructured play has gained momentum and begun to unfold, with children playing actively once a week in parks and gymnasiums across this country. This professional focus can be demanding of my time and, always, of my mental energy, but it constantly challenges me to keep growing, to share what I know, and to find more effective ways of helping people be at their best.

The doubts and restlessness I feel with parenting have never been there for me in pursuing my athletic and professional goals. There, I am in familiar waters, guided by passion, ambition—and my mother’s example, for she lives in this restless part of me. The intensity of my passion comes from her—of this I am certain. She was a creative, expressive woman, bursting with expectation. She was contagious; her music and energy filled every crevice of our home. Her sculptures and paintings articulated her deepest longings.
There was a part of her that the demands of motherhood could not touch: she would not be consumed, would not disappear in the role of mother.

The other night I went through my hope chest and came across one of the rare pictures of my mother—most of our family’s albums seemed to have fallen through the crack of a split family. The photograph was taken on her fortieth birthday. Her blond hair cascades over her shoulder, her long and lithe body leans into the camera. What struck me most were her eyes: they look so clear, full of light and expectation. At forty she was looking at a world of possibilities. She was in art college, had a new lover and had left her marriage. There is a lightness, a clarity in her eyes I never really observed back then. Now, I notice it because I recognize that light in my own pictures.