Dropped Threads 2: More of What We Aren't Told

by Carol Shields

  I had two assets that helped me to shape a single life. My mother never pushed me into marriage; in fact, she occasionally spoke of the possibility that I might never marry, and she accepted that. Also, we were immigrants; we had come from Holland when I was eight. I had watched my parents draft a new blueprint for us, as all immigrants do, and I knew that it could be done.

  At whatever age it is—thirty? thirty-five? forty?—the woman who is still single has to invent a life that’s different from the one she had probably expected to have. It requires creativity and courage, as well as common sense.

  When I reached that stage, what I needed was a clearer, prouder image of the kind of person I was, the kind of life I wanted. Something in me—no doubt the same part that had been speculating about singleness—had already been collecting ideas. In books, I had come across a few images of unmarried professional women, with briefcases and tailored suits, their lives centred on absorbing and important work. I knew about the Victorian ladies who travelled to out-of-the-way parts of the planet, botanizing, sketching, writing—but they were not all single. And there was the very attractive image of the graduate student, whose life is transitional but acceptably so. Teaching English at Ryerson Polytechnic University in Toronto, and researching and writing books—as I eventually did—had a graduate-student feel about it. My life is still much like that, the transitional quality long ago made permanent.

  A few images came from the lives of single men that, especially in literature, tended in past times to be seen in a more attractive light than those of single women. One of my favourites was of a man sitting by a fireplace in the evening, reading. No doubt women did so too, but the picture I have comes from the time when women, especially those leading non-traditional lives, were less visible than they are now. My image was of a man totally absorbed, oblivious to but sheltered and nourished by the atmosphere of books, firelight and lamplight, comfortable and slightly shabby furniture. There’s no sign of wife or children. I savoured that image.

  These, then, are some of the experiences that a woman like me might bring into Cronehood. Not being “chosen,” or being chosen but saying no. Muddling through a decade, more or less, of indecisiveness, unable to shape a very definite life of her own because “anything might happen.” Then, gradually or suddenly, realizing that nothing is going to happen, that she had better get on with it, regard as permanent what has been temporary. Perhaps she has a sense that this is second best—not necessarily because she thinks so but because society tells her so—which may lead to a deep-seated feeling of being wrong and unacceptable.

  And then, perhaps to her surprise, she may come to accept it and perhaps even rejoice in it, delight in having the opportunity to be as fully as possible what she has it in her to be.

  Some of my best times now are spent sitting in my armchair, by the fire, under a lamp, with a book. I’ve made this image real. This is me, now, and I’m sitting in my own house, by my own fireplace, reading—researcher, writer, perpetual student. The house is full of books and papers and all the clutter of a full-time writer.

  I reached this point by indirect ways—oblique and confused on the surface, with many turns that even now I can’t label as being right or wrong, but largely guided by that inner sense of what I really needed and wanted. I abandoned the ideas—serious enough at the time—of becoming a media personality or an economics professor. Instead, I worked for four years as a writer for radio, then for twenty-three years taught university English. All along, I was learning to be a writer, and eventually my books began to be published.

  I’m self-employed now and work at home; I have to make a point of going out to where the people are, of inviting them here. Social life is extremely important to me, but it is always framed by solitude, and that is how I like it. I sometimes miss the casual companionship that comes from sharing a roof with someone, but I need the solitude and the space. Like a solitary tree, I grow mostly according to my nature and choices, shaped by soil and weather but with an open area around me. Mostly I love that space; what brings on my darker moods is not some simple form of loneliness. Having 360 degrees all to myself can be difficult, but it can also be a pleasure.

  I’m not defined by a relationship to a husband and children. I’ve never had to centre myself on them, nor have I been the centre of their lives. In my adult years I’ve never lived with anyone for long enough to have my eccentric corners rubbed off. My primary focus is my writing and what’s needed to make it possible, which includes the whole structure of house, garden, intellectual stimulation, connections with other people and time spent alone.

  Being single means that I’m not always firmly fixed in my age and generation; I often surprise myself by thinking like a younger or an older person. Immigration and many moves within Canada kept me comparatively rootless, and the wide-ranging imagination needed for writing made all connections temporary, provisional.

  All these elements are part of who I am now, and I carry them with me into old age. At sixty-three, I’m on the way to becoming a Crone. When I get there, I will have travelled by a different road from that taken by the traditional Crone, for whom the Mother phase is assumed to be central. But the road I took need not be defined in terms of negatives, of things lacking—at least no more so than any other course of life. It has an identity and pattern of its own, and the process of shaping it continues.

  Debonding

  Faith Johnston

  A year ago my husband played seven games of racquetball with his twenty-one-year-old son. Then he drove home, grabbed a pillow from the bedroom and flopped on the living room couch to watch a football game. It was there that I found him hours later. His death was a fluke, a sort of accident. If only he had not been so competitive (he won all seven games). If only he had recognized the symptoms of heart distress (a bottle of antacid was open beside the sink). If only I had been home.

  I have a cousin who has been widowed twice. Her first husband was killed in a construction accident. Her second husband died in his sixties, after a series of strokes. Someday, she says, she will draw up a list—the advantages and disadvantages of a sudden death versus a long lingering death. She is a very crusty lady but a sympathetic one, and in the early days after my own husband’s death she phoned often and sent me cheery e-mails. She had been out for a walk on a lovely day. She had been to a quilting convention. Life goes on, she seemed to be saying. God is good.

  And of course, she’s right. We are a resilient species. Even at the moment of finding my husband’s body, I had begun the process of reconciling myself to the hard fact of his death. My poor darling, I thought, your life has been stolen away; you will miss so much. But at the same time I told myself that he didn’t know, that he hadn’t a clue, that there were worse deaths than falling asleep on your living room couch. I still go back to those thoughts, to that night, over and over again. Perhaps that is one of the disadvantages of a sudden death: the tendency to get stuck in that moment, like a car mired in the mud, its wheels spinning. There’s no going back, but there’s no going forward either.

  It was New Year’s Eve. I had just arrived home from four days with my own children on the West Coast. All the comings and goings, the logistics of supporting a blended family of five children, so daunting at first, had become almost routine. The children were in their twenties and living on their own. We had been married eight years and considered ourselves extraordinarily lucky.

  That luck had changed. I was no longer the woman who had found love again in her forties—a sort of fairy tale we like to believe. (“Do you mind,” said a friend, “if I tell your story to my family studies class?”) Now I was a widow, and I didn’t like that word at all. I felt that I had been thrust into old age prematurely.

  My apartment block is full of widows, doughty women who always have a cheerful word when we meet in the elevator or the laundry room. How do they do it, I wondered, year after year—all those dinners eaten alone? “Widows,” I said to my daughter, “widows everyw
here. Did you know that widowers are seven times more likely to remarry than widows?” She told me I was being morbid and bought me a copy of Rolling Stone with a cover photo of Courtney Love, topless. “She’s a widow, too,” she said.

  But I wasn’t convinced. It was so clear to me, in those early days, that the best of my life was over. The future seemed entirely bleak. There was the money to travel, to do whatever I wanted to do, but I was sure there would be no pleasure in anything, so what was the point? I thought of the grandchildren yet to come, of taking care of them by myself, half the pleasure lost. I felt a new kinship with all the lonely people in the world. I thought of a friend, childless, widowed in her forties, who tended to latch on to men who treated her badly. I had listened to her sad stories but never really understood. Now I did. There are times, I have discovered, when even a scrap of attention is better than nothing at all.

  It was as if I had crossed an invisible line into a new world in which I had more in common with the panhandlers I met on my walks than with my friends who were still in pairs. I was needy not for money but for attention, for love, for hope. I was not depressed in any classic sense. I read late and slept eventually, I had the energy to go for long walks, and I took up again all the activities that were mine alone and had not involved my husband. Still there was a lot of time left, a lot of life left. What would I do with it? Get a job? Buy a house and start a garden? Keep a cat? None of these ideas appealed to me. I had just retired from teaching and had no need, no desire, to reconstruct that phase of my life.

  “You must learn to become good company to yourself,” a wise friend advised. Yes, I said to myself, take your own interests more seriously. Don’t be ruled too much by the need for companionship. But emotionally I seemed to have reverted to adolescence. I bounced around as if on a bungee cord, one minute up, soaring, the next minute entirely glum.

  There was a man I would often meet in the mornings when I jogged down the crescent and into a park along the river. He was a slight, bony man with blue eyes, who smiled and said hello and then was off and on his way. He had a jaunty sort of walk. I could imagine him crossing a desert with the same self-assurance, stepping out briskly, wearing his Tilley hat and carrying a newspaper, his springer spaniel following obediently behind. My husband was that sort of man, happy with his routines, energetic, optimistic. I wondered if this man had a wife. Already I could picture the two of us, in our housecoats, sharing the Saturday papers.

  Then one day, in the same park, I met a blond woman in a pink shirt throwing a stick for a springer spaniel. The wife! My heart sank, all my fantasies dashed in one blow. But later the same day, I ran across the same pair and realized that it wasn’t the right dog at all—far too shaggy and ill kept. There was still hope! I blush to tell you this story now, it’s so ridiculous. But there it is—that’s how I felt. I wanted a replacement, and even a small grain of hope was enough to set me off.

  I’ve been writing in the past tense as if I have come through and become a more sensible person, but that’s not the whole truth. I realize more and more that I am the same person I always was—cool on the surface, but willing to follow my romantic heart wherever it leads me. At twelve I fell in love with the paperboy (and he wasn’t the first!). I have never broken the habit of loving men; I’ve never seriously thought of trying. If the man in the Tilley hat should happen to be single, and if he should one day break his stride and invite me along, I cannot imagine saying no. But in the meantime, I’m not holding my breath.

  When you live alone, work comes easily. For play and growth you need other people—close friends who love you despite your annoying quirks (isn’t that what husbands are for?). If you knew me, you would say I have many such friends, but still they are not enough. The married ones are busy with families and careers. The single ones have developed their defences. We approach one another warily, fearing excessive demands on our time, fearing rejection. How easy it is to appear needy and ridiculous!

  Developing intimate relationships in middle age is daunting, but what is the alternative? Burying myself in books? Becoming a counter? I fear becoming a counter. It seems to run in the family. One of my grandmothers (widowed early) counted the buds on her rosebushes; an old cousin (also widowed early) counted her slights, tallied them up in a long list. Someday others, too, would know what it meant to be alone. Then they would be sorry for neglecting her—and I, of course, was one of the culprits. May I not become a counter.

  How will I find that balance of work and play that nourishes us all, whether we are young or old? I don’t know yet. It seems that everything in my life has changed, that every relationship is in the process of realignment. It is not a simple matter of replacement, after all. No person can replace another. Perhaps, someday, my husband will become one of my many ghosts, a missing piece of myself, but only a small piece, one I can live without. Meanwhile, I must make every effort to look forward, for I know that if I look back, I will spend the rest of my life loving someone who is dead.

  A year after my husband’s death, there is a belated New Year’s dinner at my sister-in-law’s house. Everyone in my husband’s family is there, happy to be together again. The feeling of caring and congeniality goes far beyond the usual command performance.

  A year ago on this day, we were planning a funeral, and a few nights before that my husband’s youngest son smashed his fist into a brick wall when he learned of his father’s death. None of us will ever forget that night, but we do not speak about it—it’s rather like the war. I was born during the war, but growing up I never heard a thing about it. I’d like to ask my stepson about his father’s last hours. What did they talk about? What was my husband thinking? Was he happy? We’ve had many private conversations in the past year, but I have never dared ask these questions.

  The oldest son takes his father’s place at the head of the table and carves the ham. When we play cards, he is the scorekeeper. There is no debate about any of this—no discussion at all. It’s as if his father were still present, guiding his behaviour. But the appearance of normality is deceptive; our common link has been broken, and we are into something new, into forging a new set of relationships, and though I am not sure what my place in this family will be, I am determined to stay. I had often viewed my stepfamily as a burden, but now I see it more and more as a blessing. Is it possible that in the past year I have grown in wisdom?

  I know only that my loneliness and despair are subsiding. I still cannot look back, but I can live fairly comfortably in the present. The merry-go-round of life may have dropped me off, unceremoniously, back where I started, thirty years ago, but I’m not the only one. Like other women whose lives have been filled with people but who are now alone, I am standing here waiting to choose my horse, ready for another go.

  In memory of Barry Boothe, 1944–2000

  Mother

  Interrupted

  Sarah Harvey

  Good mothers don’t want to drop their newborn babies on their heads. I understood that. At thirty-one, I wasn’t young, stupid or inexperienced. I had a seven-year-old son I adored. I had wanted a second child, albeit for some fairly dubious reasons, and now I was terrified of her and even more terrified of myself. How had I come to be standing in my kitchen on a perfect autumn day, contemplating infanticide?

  It was 1981, and I had been married for eight years to a man I had come to loathe and fear. Isolated from my friends and unwilling to confide in my family, I decided to have another child, since being a mother was the only thing that brought me any joy. My husband was out of work, and we had run out of money and moved in with my parents, whom my husband detested (the feeling was mutual). My daughter was conceived in my parents’ four-poster bed while my mother played duets with my son on the grand piano downstairs. Mozart, as I recall, something cheerful and sunny to herald the beginning of what would become a nightmare pregnancy. At five months, I went into labour and was told by an obstetrician that if my baby was born, it would die. Left alone, hooked up to an
IV, watching a machine that monitored my baby’s heart, I struggled with fear and pain and a powerful desire to rip the IV from my arm and run—away from my husband, my children, my future.

  When the contractions finally stopped, I was sent home with strict instructions to spend the rest of my pregnancy lying down. I could forget about working in the garden. Even lifting a full kettle of water was forbidden. I read a lot of biographies that spring and summer—other people’s lives being infinitely preferable to my own—and worried about the significance of every passing twinge and pang. I did my best to look after my son, although I failed to play an adequately animated Robin to his Batman. When I was eight months pregnant, he broke his arm in a fall from our backyard apple tree—he was Superman that day—and I cringed when a nurse asked me what I had been doing when he fell. “Lying on the couch,” I replied. “Reading a book.” When the labour finally began, one day after the due date, it was swift and, if not painless, certainly the most fun I’ve ever had in a hospital. I was elated. My daughter and I had both survived, my son was happy to have a baby sister, and I could go home and carry on doing what I did best.

  A month later, I was wondering what would happen to the baby (and me) if I dropped her on her head. Would I be arrested? Would my son be able to visit me in prison? Would I be able to get a full night’s sleep and eat a good meal? As the days wore on and my anxiety deepened, I became utterly unable to care for Fiona—I couldn’t nurse her or even be trusted to prepare formula. I cried every time she cried, and even changing her diapers exhausted and repulsed me. A picture of me taken at the time shows a woman I barely recognize—gaunt, unsmiling, standing next to my frowning husband, grimly clutching a crying baby and wearing the ugliest apron in the known universe. I felt no connection with the baby in my skinny arms, only unendurable anxiety, paralyzing shame, unfathomable depression and enormous guilt. Adrienne Rich says that “the first knowledge any woman has of warmth, nourishment, tenderness, security, sensuality, mutuality, comes from her mother.” If that was true, my little girl was out of luck.