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.
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.
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