Four years later I was called home again, this time from England, with two small children. She was in the hospital, sometimes coherent, other times in a morphine-induced schoolroom reverie, murmuring a lesson from the past, inscribing the air with imaginary chalk. In my youth and sadness I asked many useless questions: “What would you like me to bring you?” “Nothing.” At least nothing material. I did take her hand, tracing the prominent purple-blue veins, tributaries of the heart. She spoke briefly, pragmatically, of her funeral, “No eulogy,” and of her gravestone, “No birth date.” We did not say, “I love you.” I did not speak of her life, of her mothering. Once she said, “I had a good life. The last five years were important.” I hung on to those words, and for many years I thought she simply meant she had had the chance to travel. But now I see that she was giving me a kind of blessing—that she was happy to have seen me married and to have held two grandchildren.
I am haunted by her last night, her black hair on the white pillows. I sat as usual by her side, but there were no words spoken. Finally I took her hand, “I’ll be back in the morning.” At the door, I turned. I can feel the pull back into the room as strongly now as I did then. I hear her say, “Goodbye”—like the thunk of a stone tossed so high it falls in a single deep-throated sound into dark lake water. There I stand, uncertain and frightened. Then I opened that door and walked down the long hospital corridor.
It is not that I lost my mother traumatically early (I was twenty-four), but I lost the map to my past, to her past. “What was she like?” I now ask my aunts. I need those emotional co-ordinates. I was startled to discover that she was sixty-two—ten years older than I thought. Before I arrived in her world, she had experienced thirty-eight years of exciting—or boring or difficult or sad—life. She had told me only a few stories from her young adulthood. The one that gives her a glamorous past in my eyes was of a visit in 1939 to “beautiful, beautiful Savory Island.” I imagined her steam-boating up the coast from Vancouver, landing at the Royal Savory Hotel, settling in the wicker lounges on the veranda overlooking the most golden sand this side of the Pacific. But who were her companions? Were there dances and late-night swims in the sea, sparkling with plankton like underwater fireflies? (I can imagine that scene because my sister and I followed her trail up there nine years after her death.) I want to know some of the passion that must have been in her life—what she laughed about, cried about, loved and hated.
My father died from a massive stroke just five years after my mother’s death, although I think he died of loneliness. In the hospital I remember the brief moment of recognition, the flicker of eye contact that, without words, spoke of love. I was able to stay to the end for him. Then I was set adrift from my own past.
I spent almost twice as long with the Mitchells as I did with my own parents. They showed me the joys of expressing emotions, of telling stories, of saying it all out loud. Living in that family was transformative. W. O., very near the end of his days, brought things full circle for me when he spontaneously declared, “I loved your mother and your father, you know.” I always did love my parents, but that ease of expression that he possessed never came as naturally to me and my family.
But there was always a gap with the Mitchells—on both sides. From the beginning I could not call them Mum and Dad. Preserving that place for my own parents was an important symbolic gesture. As time went on, the Mitchell standard tarnished somewhat and my parents gained value. I recognized how extraordinarily difficult it was to sustain my own identity in such a powerful family without the balancing factor of my own parents and history. I was always a degree of hyphenation away from the Mitchells—a daughter-in-law. Their own children, quite naturally, but also anyone new and dramatic, registered first on their radar screen. Although W. O.’s exaggerated assertions were sometimes embarrassing to his own children, they conveyed a love and pride that I missed out on. He would say, “I’d like you to meet my son, Orm, the famous Blake scholar, who is writing my biography.” When he neglected to mention that I, too, was writing the biography, I felt as if I were being vanished.
I am still finding my way, not to diminish, but to counterbalance the Mitchell luminescence. After twenty years buried in the Mitchell biography that Orm and I have been writing, I have fallen into the role of unofficial memoirist for my own family. My aunts and uncles, now in their eighties and nineties, are, more than they know, bridges to my parents. My father’s family has passed on, reminding me more urgently to grab hold of the flesh and blood memories on my mother’s side. It’s not the statistics I want to gather; it’s the physical resemblances, the temperaments, the language, the stories, the intimate memories, the secrets. Now I see that long line stretching back, and I feel the strength and power of belonging. I feel attached; I feel significant, laden with the substance of my family.
Surprisingly, we have discovered a past not known by my mother, not talked about by my grandmother. I find I am descended from Hudson Bay men and their country wives, from Scots (Orkney), from English and Aboriginal ancestry. Now I know the names: Turnor, Harper, Loutit, and the places: Rupert’s Land, Moose Factory, Albany Factory, Stromness. My ancestor, Philip Turnor, mapped these places. He taught David Thompson how to survey; he told Alexander MacKenzie, who believed he had discovered the Hyperborean Sea, that he did not know “where he had been.”
With such map-making genes surely I, too, will find my way.
I was generally well behaved when I was a little girl. The limit of my rebellion then was giggling fits, usually with one or both of my brothers. It drove my father mad. The angrier he got the worse the giggling became. I think it was then that I realized you could push things further than it might appear.
It wasn’t until my late teens that my full-fledged rebellion took wing. Whatever I was told I couldn’t do was what I wanted to do. “Girls don’t go into science,” they said. In those days, “they” was the word used whenever anyone in authority was summing up conventional wisdom to limit the desires of a child, most often a girl child. I went into science at McGill University even though my great passion was writing and reading. I would have done much better taking English or general arts, but that was what was expected of me, and I was rebelling against those expectations. I wanted to be a doctor because once again I was told, “Girls can’t be doctors.”
My rebellion led me into an almost dead end in university. As soon as I understood university science, I realized I had made a mistake. I’m a big-picture kind of gal and the detail of science just didn’t suit me. Never one to give up, I looked elsewhere for my passion and found it in the McGill Daily. It turned out that the Daily was a hotbed of radicalism in those very radical times, and I found other people who didn’t like the restrictions that society had placed on us.
I had spent most of my teenage years in pitched battle against my domineering father. My strongest memory from those years is of running up the stairs and slamming my bedroom door. I stayed away from home more and more until finally, in my last year at McGill, I left for good. Even after I was on my own, I made choices to go against what my father expected or tried to insist I do. When that rebellious streak affected my decisions on relationships with men, it was in some ways to my detriment.
In October of that final year at McGill, I met an older man at a party. He came on very strong and ended up coming home with me to my newly occupied first apartment. Those were the days of free love, but the reality of an overweight, insecure middle-class Jewish girl was far from the bohemian appearance that I affected. I had had a few lovers before him, but this man understood female sexuality and provided me with my first experience of an orgasm with a man. He wanted to move in and I agreed, thinking that having an orgasm with him must mean I was in love with him. I was really that naive.
I was twenty-one, Roger was thirty-four—and insistent—and I just let his life wash over me. Montreal in those days was teeming with alternative cultures. Through Roger, I became part of the bohemian scene there, which at
the time was probably the most exciting and creative in North America. This was the time of Leonard Cohen, the grand poet, and Roger knew him. All of Roger’s friends were fascinating people, like none I had ever known. They were wild sexually and into experimentation with a wide range of drugs, from marijuana to opium to LSD. Roger himself was a kind of dysfunctional Renaissance man. He read and retained a book a day. He was ahead of his time in some ways and very much of his times in others—he was for women’s rights at the same time as being an incredible womanizer; he could go months without drinking very much and then descend into frightening binges. Our life was unpredictable and intense.
I stopped being active in campus politics. I excused it by embracing existentialism, which I understood to provide a philosophical framework for living life for the experience alone. And with Roger I was having plenty of experiences. My friends were worried about the type of experiences and when my father met Roger by accident, he threatened to disown me if I continued seeing him. That sealed my fate for months to come. If my staying with Roger made my father that angry, it must be a good thing. Ultimately though, Roger’s drinking became unbearable, and I realized that my life would be entirely consumed by his if I didn’t leave. That’s when I moved to Toronto.
I didn’t last long in Hogtown, a.k.a. Toronto the Good. I was looking for adventure, and it was a pretty sleepy place in 1967. Not wanting to risk going back to Montreal and falling in with Roger again, I moved to New York City where I had family. As usual I rebelled against restrictions: walking alone at night and refusing to be a prisoner in my apartment in fear of what might happen to me in the (then crime-ridden) city. I was accosted more than once by flashers and by men trying to pick me up, some of whom I had to fight to escape. To protect myself, I stopped wearing makeup, learned how to walk aggressively and make a scene at the slightest provocation. After that hardly anyone bothered me.
I tried just about everything that was going in those crazy days of 1968. Having experienced the open sexuality of Roger and friends, I gladly participated in the major pickup scene in the Village. I was extremely street-savvy and in one year had five different boyfriends, which I saw as a positive sign of my liberated, independent status.
When the woman upstairs was murdered by her boyfriend and I heard every sound, every word—the shot and the scream still resonate in my head—I woke up to another reality. I didn’t have a framework for understanding violence against women in those days. I thought it was just part of life on the streets in New York. Most women stayed off the streets in their own little worlds, but I didn’t want to restrict myself like that, so I accepted the risk. The murder made me realize that I was playing with fire. Rather than retreat into a closed world, I decided to leave and move back to boring old Toronto.
That didn’t last long. After a month or two I decided to hit the road again. “Girls can’t travel alone,” they said. Well, I ignored them. I had survived in the Big Apple alone, how much worse could it be in Europe and the Middle East?
Discovering an answer to that question occupied me for the next year, 1969, as I made my way overland from Turkey to India. There is a fine line between courage and stupidity. That was when I crossed it. Travelling on buses from Istanbul to Delhi and then beyond was an insane risk: it damaged my mental and physical health and nearly cost me my life. On the other hand, having had those experiences and survived them put me on the path I would follow for the rest of my life.
The threats were terrifying. In eastern Turkey the bus I was on was surrounded by men who tried to get me off by rocking the bus back and forth, back and forth, while I desperately tried to convince the driver not to make an overnight stop in that town. In Mashad, Iran, where my train stopped for a religious holiday, I was stoned by a crowd. I ran for safety to my hotel and several hours later answered the door to find the instigator of the stoning, beaten black and blue and dropped on my doorstep by way of an apology.
When I arrived in India, a much safer country for women, I developed dysentery and was desperately ill—to the point I thought I might die. In that crisis, I decided that if I survived I would dedicate my life to changing the conditions of terrible poverty that I saw around me. In those days, we didn’t have much information about the poverty in the developing world. I knew the rhetoric of American imperialism because of the war in Vietnam, but it wasn’t until that trip that I understood the depth of the West’s exploitation and oppression of the Third World. At that moment, alone with a high fever in a hotel room, it was more of an epiphany than an understanding. I didn’t believe in a god, so it wasn’t a prayer but a promise to myself. A promise that I’ve kept for the rest of my life.
On another level, I also began to understand that my personal rebellion against the restrictions on me as a woman was not going to work. I had foolishly risked my life in order to act out my defiance of those restrictions, and I was paying a big price. In that moment of realization, I had moved from rebellion to resistance.
• • •
In her famous book, Truth or Dare, the American feminist Starhawk discusses rebellion: “We rebel to save our lives. Rebellion is the desperate assertion of our value in face of all that attacks it, the cry of refusal in the face of control.” She goes on to explain, “When we rebel without challenging the framework of reality the system has constructed, we remain trapped. Our choices are predetermined for us.”
Until my mid-twenties, my life was all about rebellion. Whatever the cost to me, I was going to do whatever my father or other authority figures told me I couldn’t or shouldn’t do. That was the nature of my feminism in those days. It was how I made my decisions. I rebelled against all the restrictions of the life set out for a middle-class Jewish girl. In my experimentation with sex and drugs, and in my risk-taking in travelling, I developed a courage that stood me in good stead in my life to come. But I also developed a single-mindedness that narrowed my vision and my choices. And I took too many risks, some of which cost me dearly.
It has been a long journey to where I am now. I don’t accept convention any more than I did then; although I understand much better the price of defying it and measure the risk before taking it. I still rail against injustice, but the rage that filled my heart in my youth is mostly gone now. I get angry at injustice and oppression but the anger doesn’t take over my life. It no longer stops me from feeling love and joy and appreciation for the lovely things that happen every day, when one is open to them.
Matt Galloway, from CBC radio, asked me, on air, why I was still active well into middle age when so many people gave up activism in their youth. I wasn’t sure how to respond then, but I now think the answer is in my passage from rebellion to resistance. If activism comes only from rebellion, only from fighting against what is, it won’t last as we age. Resistance is deeper. It is about challenging injustice not just to protest against it, but to end it. You can rebel alone, but resistance ultimately requires collective action. The women’s movement was the frame that allowed many of us to move from individual rebellion to collective resistance for social change.
Another thing I had to learn that rebellion couldn’t teach me was that each of us, however we despise the culture in which we live, however it oppresses us, have learned a lot of our behaviours from it. In my case, I took on a lot of the behaviours of men, above all my father, who were restricting me. I wanted to be powerful in the world and in my youth the people with power were all men. In my family, although I fought constantly with my father, I saw that he had the power. I constructed myself to be the opposite of my mother. I became aggressive, domineering, single-minded, totally sure of myself and put all of my energy into politics and work and not very much into personal relationships. I almost completely repressed my female side. To this day I’m not much at doing anything domestic. I don’t feel that as a loss, but the inability to develop and maintain relationships of trust until I was well into my forties cost me dearly. It wasn’t until I got active in the women’s movement and realized that t
hrough my behaviours I was oppressing other women that I began to change—and it was as if my life went from black and white to Technicolor.
Rebelling against social control is what youth does. The greater the restrictions, whether societal or parental or both, the fiercer the rebellion. Almost my entire generation rebelled against the straitjacket of 1950s middle-class morality. Rebellion is an important step on the road to social change, especially for women. Today the restrictions are different. Due in no small measure to the work of feminists, our choices are much greater. We are permitted and encouraged to do any job that strikes our interest. We are permitted choices in whether to marry and whether to reproduce, and whom to love, whatever their gender, race or religion.
But there are still restrictions: the way we are supposed to look, the expectation that we will be the primary caregiver of children and elders, the assumption that we will do whatever it takes to maintain the home and still give our all in the workplace—and, of course, the fear of male violence.
Resistance is what is required here. Instead of all the individual solutions that young women come up with to make their lives bearable, they could work toward collective solutions to the problems we all share. For example, they could organize women and supportive men at their workplaces to demand job-sharing, care leave and other measures to value caring work in the family and the community. They could join local daycare advocacy groups to work for a national childcare program or for infant childcare in their local areas. They could set up women’s groups in their neighbourhoods or workplaces to discuss the issues they face with other women. We have been hoodwinked into believing that we are on our own in solving our problems, but most of the problems we face are social problems and we can solve them better with others.
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