I continued to reflect that she was dangerous...she
prevented me from liking myself. I, who was so naturally
meant for happiness and gaiety, had been forced into
a world of self-criticism and guilty conscience...
Françoise Sagan
prevented me from liking myself. I, who was so naturally
meant for happiness and gaiety, had been forced into
a world of self-criticism and guilty conscience...
On my dining room wall is a picture of my mother holding a bouquet of roses on her wedding day, July 9, 1947. She is eighteen years old. Under the long pale green gown, her belly is beginning to swell. She looks happy enough, while my father, leaning on her arm as if to steady himself, appears glum and frail. My mother’s parents, to the left of the newly weds, stand rigidly, arms at their sides, like the couple in Grant Wood’s painting, “American Gothic”. My grandmother could not have been pleased with the marriage. She was embarrassed about the ways of the flesh and never spoke to her eldest daughter about menstruation, copulation, or conception. How then did my mother tell her she was pregnant when she hadn’t been given words with which to approach the subject? She recalls only that my father asked hers for her hand in marriage and that my grandfather replied: “Can you keep her?”
My father lied. Although he was six years older than my mother and had worked several years as an insurance agent, he had squandered his wages and hadn’t saved a farthing. He wasn’t looking for a wife, let alone a child, when he first spoke to my mother in the office building where she worked as a secretary. Just as he entered the foyer, my mother recognized the young man she’d been eyeing for months and, startled, she dropped her lunch. He rushed over, bent down, and returned it to her. Without thinking, she denied it was hers because slabs of cheese were falling from the sandwich. She did not want the dark-haired stranger to know she ate such common food. My mother hates anything common. When we were children, she forbade us to wear kerchiefs, to chew gum in public, or to say the word “sweat”.
My father was so enchanted by the fair-haired maiden looking him straight in the eye and lying, that he asked her to the pictures. Before long, they were playing games in the hayloft of my grandfather’s barn while my mother chanted, “Stop it, I like it. If you don’t do it again, I’ll go home.” (Only in recent years has my mother been able to tell me about her youthful sexual self.) Once, when she was sick in bed, my father was allowed to visit her room and the brash young man, under her parent’s roof, hopped into her bed—but not before he had slipped off his trousers, folded them along the crease, and laid them on a chair. Years later, as my mother stood ironing my father’s underwear, she said, “Your dad has always been a fussy man. His mother warned me if I married ‘Sir Edward’ he would take the lining from my best coat to shine his shoes.”
Despite the warning, she married her knight and six months later gave birth to a daughter. Almost immediately, the pair set themselves the task of making another baby: in post-war Northern Ireland, only couples with two children could apply for a rental home. Fifteen months later, I was born and my family moved into a small three-bedroom bungalow a short distance from my grandparents’ home. Unlike my older sister who had been colicky and demanding, I was an easy baby who would lie in a pram for hours without making a sound. My mother dressed her two girls like dolls and visited daily with her mother and sisters, until another fateful incident put an ocean between her and her family.
One lunch hour my father accompanied a pal who wanted to immigrate to Canada, to the Canadian Embassy. For lack of anything better to do, my father also filled in an application. His friend’s was refused; my father’s was accepted. Still he had no intention of moving to Canada until he told his father-in-law. My grandfather laughed until the tears flowed. “Far-off fields look green,” he tittered. “You’ll go to Canada on a boat called The Never Budge.” At that moment my father, who hated being laughed at, decided to emigrate.
Within six months, he left to find work in Canada. Two months later, he wired for his family. Leaving her own distraught mother behind, my mother bundled up the poor woman’s only grandchildren and set sail to join her husband. Seasick for most of the journey, she did not think about the family she had left behind, until the boat docked off the shores of Newfoundland. After embracing my father, she began to cry and she continued to cry for the next six months. When I told this to a therapist, she shook her head and quietly asked: “How could your mother love you and give you the attention you needed when she, herself, was consumed with grief?”
“My mother loves babies,” I responded.
“That doesn’t mean she loved you.”
As a child, I was careful not to upset my mother. When monsters crept into my bedroom at night, I hid under the covers. When they slipped under the blankets with me, I squeezed my eyes tight. When they slid under my eyelids, I woke up my older sister who led me to the washroom and stood guard, bleary eyed, while I sat on the toilet. I never understood why this sister who teased and tormented me during the day, was so kind to me at night.
My mother never knew about my nightmares or my sister’s good deeds. She continued throughout our childhood to call her the difficult child and me, the easy one. Never thinking that the labels she gave us were harmful, she eventually gave all five of her daughters labels. Four years after my birth, the smart one was born, then the pretty one, and finally the baby. Recently, when all five of us met in a crowded restaurant—together for the first time since we left home—my older sister said that she wishes she’d been less difficult as a child. I spoke of the panic I feel when I am being difficult. The smart sister said that she becomes angry when we assume that all comes easily to her. The pretty one told us that she is still trying to prove to herself that she has a brain in her head. The baby was the only one without regrets.
“I’ve always felt that I was a good mother,” my mother once told us. “I guess that’s for you kids to judge. I did the best I could with what I had. We were brought up to always be well dressed, well spoken, and to be seen and not heard. So I tried to do that with you.”
She succeeded. As a child, I knew I must be dressed for the occasion and speak only when spoken to. I learned, whether consciously or not, that this would win her love and approval. As an adult, remnants of this remain. I am often uneasy in social situations. I worry that I have dressed inappropriately or, more significantly, that I have spoken out of turn or said something unacceptable. More times than not, my mother-in-me rises to the surface to question and taunt me.
My mother would be surprised at my anger and pain. She doesn’t question the child-rearing practices of her parents. Even now, over seventy years later, with a wealth of new literature on the subject, she continues to boast about her heritage. Given an opening, she’ll talk about her grandfather, the first man in Northern Ireland to own a car, or she’ll speak at length about her father as if he were still alive and running his hundred-acre dairy farm. She’ll sing praises to her mother who, with the help of two servants, maintained an eight-bedroom house and raised seven children to be hard-working and clean-living. All my aunts and uncles received a public school education, attended the local Quaker Church twice every Sunday, and drove a tractor before their tenth birthday. According to my grandmother’s belief that females should have at least one social grace, her four girls were privileged with piano lessons.
My mother insists that her childhood was idyllic, her parents, kind and loving. “Mother really didn’t have too many vices, really and truly. She was always soft-spoken.” “Didn’t she ever yell or scream at you?” I ask. “She would if we did something that she disliked,” my mother replies, contradicting herself. “She’d come over and give us a smack. She’d smack us practically every day, whereas Dad just spanked us if we really needed it.” She remembers being beaten only once by her father and even though she doesn’t remember what she did. “Obviously it was very bad because there were welts on my legs and yet Daddy loved us so much.”
Raised according to what Jungian analyst, Erich Neumann, calls the “old ethic” in which negative feelings and behavior are suppressed, where the needs of the individual for self-expression are less important than the needs of the group, my mother doesn’t question her parents’ discipline although, in her teens, she resented the restrictions placed on her. Amongst other things, she was not allowed to wear lipstick, paint her nails, or go to dances. “That didn’t mean that I didn’t do these things but they didn’t know I did.” When she married, she continued to do as she pleased and, if she thought her husband would not approve, she hid the evidence from him. My father wasn’t a tyrant but he was exacting and many of my parents’ fights began because he caught my mother in a lie. He rarely spoke of his parents but I gather from my mother that he adored his mother, a tiny wisp of a woman, who was twenty-five years younger than her husband and who would have starved herself rather than see her children go out in public poorly dressed.
If my father thought that all women were as self-sacrificing as his mother, his wife taught him otherwise. She kept up the image of perfect wife and mother in Northern Ireland but after her move to Canada, she was too depressed. Nothing my father said or did could stop the flow of tears. Finally, against his principles, he borrowed money and shipped her and the children back to her mother. We arrived in time to attend one of her sister’s weddings.
My mother, who remembers all events by the clothes she or her daughters wore, said that my sister and I stole the show in matching lilac organdy dresses trimmed with white lace and white straw hats banded with lilac satin. She loved being a visitor in her parent’s home: her sisters cared for her children and she came and went as she pleased.
Yet five months after the wedding my mother telephoned my father and asked for the fare back to Canada. Although my father says that she’d worn out her welcome, the truth is simpler. She knew her place was beside her husband. Having always lived by society’s rules, she could not have stood the stigma that separation or divorce carried in the fifties. Even today, she views every marriage breakdown as a failure and, most often, blames the woman. When she saw the film, Shirley Valentine, her only comment was: “What woman would leave her husband to become a waitress?”
My father, who has prayed on his knees every night, for as long as I can remember, lived as a monk while his family was in Ireland. When we returned, he gave his daughters a box of Laura Secord lollipops and his wife enough warmth to create their smart daughter, born within a year of our return. Four months after this birth, my mother was pregnant again, this time with the pretty one. After her birth, we moved to a slightly larger house—as had become my parents’ custom with the arrival of each baby—in a small town thirty miles from the city where my father worked long hours. Here, much to his delight, my mother delivered their only son.
After my brother’s birth, my mother joined the Conservative Party, the Canadian equivalent of her parent’s political organization and found, within its committee rooms, the recognition and applause she had not received as an unpaid laborer in her home. “I gave it everything I had,” my mother recalls, “and even though I know at times my family came second to it, I always had to prove to myself that I was completely dedicated. I loved it.” In a matter of years, she rose from seventh vice-president to president of the provincial party—the only woman to date who has earned that distinction.
During those years, I did not celebrate my mother’s victories. I was angry with her, not for the endless hours she spent in committee rooms, but because my older sister and I had to baby-sit our younger siblings and lie to our father about her whereabouts. Once she invited me to accompany her to help at an out-of-town leadership convention. In my mind’s eye, I see her standing at a podium, addressing a large crowd who listened hard and applauded wholeheartedly. I remember my confusion. How could I reconcile that vibrant outspoken woman with the wife at home who cowered at her husband’s bark? I failed to see that, away from my father, outside the patriarchy, my mother was in her element and had her own unique voice.
At fourteen, when my fourth sister was born, I realized for the first time what my mother must have done to make this baby. I was disgusted. A woman of thirty-six, I thought, should have been above such nonsense. A year or two after this birth, I became even more offended by her behavior. I had started dating a boy several years older than myself and she, an avid reader of Harlequin romances, took an over-active interest in my romance. At the urging of a younger liberated friend—this was the sixties—my mother supplied my boyfriend with a dozen condoms. Her liberalism died however whenever I displeased her. She was not above name-calling and more than once stung me with “slut.” I was her first daughter—my older sister began dating after me—to remind her, I now assume, of her own short-lived venture into the world of love and lust. “These are the best years of your life,” she kept telling me. “Enjoy yourself.” I hated those years nearly as much as I hated her living vicariously through me. The more she tried to involve herself in my life, the less I shared with her.
Throughout my teens my parents fought and, for some reason that I still cannot fathom, they singled me out from all their children and woke me to witness battles that were cruel, abusive, and often sexual. The thought of these still churns my stomach. When I finally left home, I was free of them. Or so I thought. I went to university—an action my parents neither encouraged nor hindered. “When you were growing up you always had to be nicely dressed,” my mother informs me. “There wasn’t a great deal of money around. We were trying to buy our house. There was no such thing as saving for an education.”
My mother believes a house is the barometer of success. She and my father bought and sold five houses during my childhood, each one more luxurious than its predecessor. I am “woman enough” as Erica Jong writes in her poem of that name, to appreciate my mother’s need for a nice home: “I sit at my typewriter/ remembering my grandmother/ & all my mothers,/ & all the minutes they lost/ loving houses better than themselves.”
Recently, I learned that both my great-grandmothers were illiterate. I am the only woman in my grandmother’s, and mother’s family to hold a university degree. Save for an education? The thought would never have crossed my mother’s mind. In my arrogant youth however, I was angry at this lack of forethought. Why didn’t she insist that her daughters pursue an education and career, I questioned, when she herself had suffered all her life from a lack of financial independence? All her comings and goings and material needs were based on the weekly allowance her husband gave her. When she needed more, she begged or borrowed. I swore that I would never be that dependent on a man. I swore that I would not live like her yet, time and time again, I find myself living an adapted version of her life. When I telephoned, for instance, half-drunk from a night of celebrating, to tell her that I was getting married, I thought she would applaud my conventional behavior. Instead, she exploded and told me not to be ridiculous. When I visited the next day, at her request, to discuss her objections, not one word was said about the wedding. At the time, I assumed she knew that nothing she could say would make a difference. I assumed that she wasn’t pleased about this union. My chosen was not a man she could write home about. His mother was a waitress. His father, a florist’s assistant, had never owned a car. I now wonder if I underestimated her. Perhaps, she was remembering her own young marriage. I do not know.
Several years after my wedding, my partner and I moved across the country and only as I write this do I realize that this is roughly the same distance my mother traveled from her mother when she left Northern Ireland. Unlike my mother, I didn’t cry. I was happy to miss the obligatory Sunday meal at my parents’ home and their inevitable quarrels. I thought that in moving so far, I was beyond their sphere of influence but, at the beginning of my third pregnancy, I realized I was still dependent on my mother’s good will. There had been serious complications with my second delivery and my mother had blamed me; according to her, I was too old to be having babies. Instead of telephoning when my pregnancy was confirmed, I wrote her a letter and asked her to fake enthusiasm if my news did not please her. “The child in me still wants your approval.” She telephoned laughing and congratulated me.
Six months later, I gave birth to my only daughter.
On my dining room wall, below the picture of my mother on her wedding day, is a recent photograph of my mother, my fifteen-year-old daughter, and me, at a local beach. My mother stands at attention in black sweater and trousers, gold shining around her neck, wrist, and fingers. Born in the British Empire in the 1920’s where class, in Doris Lessing’s words, was a straitjacket, an imperative, a crippler, where sentiment was more important than truth, where clothes were more important than the needs of the body they covered, my mother unwittingly adopted the life of her mother with its outward symbols of success. My daughter and I, with my mother’s fair hair and green eyes, look like poor relatives—me, in sloppy t-shirt and jeans; my daughter, in snug tank top with belly button exposed and short skirt. All three of us, I realize from the photograph, are as much products of our respective times as we are products of each other. I was born in the era where women were burning their bras and questioning the traditional roles of wife and mother. Spurred on by such mentors as Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Doris Lessing, and Adrienne Rich, I assumed that my life would be richer than my mother’s simply because I willed it. I did not expect the angst, the visceral pain a woman experiences as she differs and distances herself from her first love. Only now, in middle age, do I see that for two women, albeit mother and daughter, to differ is natural, but for a daughter to distance herself from her mother is arrogant. “The liberation of women cannot be won as a liberation from other women,” Suzanna Danuta Walters wrote in her book about mothers and daughters, “but only as a reaching toward everyone of us.”
I study the picture of my mother on her wedding day again and this time I see a teenage bride who left her beloved family to follow a man across an ocean because he hated being laughed at. Although she missed her family desperately, her emotional well-being was less important than maintaining the social order. She spent her youth bearing and raising six children to be clean-living and hard working like her mother before her and felt guilty about the time she stole for her love of politics. Her husband was a good provider, a faithful spouse, but he demanded much from her and gave little in the way of support beyond an allowance that was never adequate. My father would be shocked at my words. He sees himself as a good and generous man who loves his wife and family. My mother would support this view and then whisper an aside that it has never been easy living with a man who thinks he is perfect.
I understand now, after writing about my mother, that lives are shaped by the historical moment and by chance happenings—if my mother hadn’t dropped her cheese sandwich, would I be alive today? I have also changed with the telling: I have stopped being my mother’s easy child. Before, I was often frustrated talking to her. If she complained about some person’s lack of protocol or belittled someone’s unconventional dress or behavior, I seethed but, like an obedient child, did not contradict her. Slowly, over time, and not without fear, I have forced myself to say what I think. Surprisingly, this has never earned her wrath. Recently she told me that she finds it easier to talk to me than any of my sisters. “In my innocence, or call it by its true name, stupid willfulness,” Marilyn French writes, “ I imagined I could . . . break the chain of mothers, could free myself from the clinging fingers of a ghostly fate . . . What I wanted to escape from was not the past, but the pain.”
I cannot escape the past or the pain. I was born of a woman who was born of a woman who could not speak about menstruation, copulation, or conception. In not favoring their blood, their bodies, and their feminine nature with honorable mention, they inadvertently taught their daughters that the ways of the flesh are an embarrassment. I could not, with consciousness, pass on this legacy to my daughter. I found, through reading and writing, the courage to speak to her about menstruation and sex. Admittedly, I had to force the words from my throat and when they finally spilled forth, they were neither clever nor worldly, but I found my voice.
I could never stand up, in front of a crowd, like my mother, and speak my mind. But I can write my mind. When I ask her how she differed from her mother, she replied: “Mother knit. She knit beautifully and I suppose that’s why I learned to knit. But then I sewed. Mother never sewed.”