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My mother gave me a gift. But I didn’t open it until I became a mother. And now that I have children of my own, I know that I took advantage of her generosity. I never realized the sacrifice she was making to be there, for me. It never occurred to me that she might have dreams that reached beyond the bounds of her reality.
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From my childish shoes, my mother seemed wholly content with her life. She had a loving, dedicated and devoted doctor for a husband and she had a lot of daughters who adored her -- a jane austenesque five. She took care of us, and our dad too. She cleaned and she cooked and she baked and did dishes. She washed and she dried and she ironed and she put away. She knitted and she sewed. She canned fruit from the orchard for a little taste of summer on those wet winter days. She drove. She applied band-aids and smoothed over ruffled edges. She tended her beautiful garden. She was always there. Always kind. Rarely frazzled. Never ranting.
Yep, my mother had five kids and no help. Yep, she had a husband who worked ludicrously long hours, requiring her to effectively be a six days-a-week single parent. Yep, she had a husband who, by the account of almost every woman he encountered in his busy obstetrical practice, walked on water. Yep, her husband had seen a large percentage of women that she encountered socially stark nakers. Yep, money was tight -- although they had a nice house, thanks to a little inheritance given by her maiden aunt. It took a long time for my dad to get up to speed, the road to physician being a long, expensive one. But, despite all these now-glaring obstacles to her contentment, in my childish memory, my mother seemed pretty happy.
My mom was born of a darwinian dad and a distant mother who owned a well-to-do, beautifully manicured boys’ school in England. When she was ten she was loaded on to a train bound for Scotland that took her away from her family and landed her in a boarding school on the edge of the sea, in one of the most beautiful windswept wet places on earth. There, she toughed out the war years worrying about her parents being bombed down in England, and being sick with diphtheria and polio. Then she went on to university at St. Andrews where she earned a degree in biology and an m.r.s. from my dad. By all accounts, she was quite a catch: beautiful, smart and athletic. They tell a wonderful story about how each of them was going out with the other’s best friend. At some point, they all said switch. And it stuck. The other couple got married too.
My dad enrolled in medical school and my mother gave up all ambitions of pursuing anything remotely related to her field of study, and instead took a job as a secretary at a battery factory in the little town in Scotland where they lived to pay the bills. Postwar Britain was not a prosperous place, and after the birth of my oldest sister, the creamy camellia, they emigrated to Canada.
Recruited by the Canadian Air Force, the three of them traveled in First Class across the turbulent Atlantic in a wave-tossed oceanliner, and landed on an Air Force base in northern Ontario where the cold shocked her. Although Scotland had been wet and chilling, the forty-below arctic blow in the face was a true challenge. She got snowsuits and boots and all the cold weather gear, and between the deep freeze of winter, the B-52 mosquitoes in the summer, and the isolation she must have felt being so far from her native land, she managed. Then they were sent to Cold Lake in northern Alberta, where their second daughter was finally born after three non-flowering pregnancies. This most northerly latitudinal child, the snowdrop, is her fairest one.
After completing their three-year mandatory stint with the sub-arctic Air Force, the price of their admission to Canada, they leapt over the Rockies and did not stop until they ran into the ocean. Dad decided to go back to school for four more years to specialize in ob/gyn. Mom lived alone in their house with two children, one of them worryingly sick, and pregnant with me, while my dad lived at the hospital in town, putting in eighteen-plus hour shifts and coming home for his one meager day off per week. You think ER looks tough. Mom had few choices.
But she made it. She had me and then my next sister, the marigold, two years apart. Then she took a bit of breather, until six years later, on the eve of her fortieth birthday, she produced her last blossom -- the sweet pea. Her afterthought. She had a full house with us five of a kind. In her hands were the makings of a bouquet.
I know for a fact that few of us were planned. It makes you realize how tough it was, pre-pill, to keep the seeds from being planted, even though her husband had professional access to all the leading-edge technology.
She didn’t get out much, having had those babies over a spread of fourteen years, and she didn’t even learn how to drive until after her fourth daughter was born in 1961. There hadn’t been much point, since they couldn’t afford a car for her.
In every season, I would see my parents in their garden -- tending it, taming it, loving it. My mother favours delicate things, so there were shell pink poppies that only flower for a few days, and that are so easily smashed by ever-threatening rain, and there was jacob’s ladder that collapses in the slightest of adverse conditions. They tried to keep roses in the huge shadows cast by towering douglas firs, but they never prospered. And they tried, unsuccessfully, to grow hollyhocks -- the classic English variety that are tall and linear with their pairs of fluffy balls -- one of several English flowers that wouldn’t thrive for them, here, in this Canadian soil.
Sometimes my mother would be frustrated by the garden, because is was so large. Sometimes it was hard to pay enough attention to different parts of it. Yet, even though it threatened to grow a bit wild, she never abandoned it; she worked hard to make it beautiful. But I only remember her enjoying her garden in brief snatches, pausing for just a moment to inhale its glory. And that was usually when others would come to admire it.
I remember my mom being tired much of the time. Late dinners, late bedtimes, phone calls for my father in the middle of the night, in the middle of dinner, in the middle of.... Single parenting, much of the time, and so little time for herself took their tolls. As a young woman, she played tennis, well, it is told, and many other sports at school. But when she had us, she gave up all that. Instead she walked with the family on meandering marches in Lighthouse Park every Sunday. She was the first stairmaster queen, our house having bedrooms spread out over four rambling floors. She read the paper, cover to cover, every day, and devoured books during her few quiet moments. She could do crosswords, the hard, cryptic ones, faster than she could set her hair. She was a wealth of knowledge.
By the time the sweet pea left home for university, Mom was pretty close to sixty and had been parenting for well over half of her life. Shortly after that, my father reluctantly retired from his medical practice, bringing to a close a big part of his life -- a life that he had known (and loved) for so many years. He has brought so many children safely into the world, and has impacted upon so many lives. He has made a difference. The same words speak the truth about my mom.
My mother turned seventy in 1999, the last year of a century that saw unprecedented turbulence and change of attitude, not unlike her passage to Canada in that bucking and rollicking oceanliner. It’s an odyssey that has lasted her lifetime. I think it must be very difficult to end up so far from where you began.
My mother spent this special birthday surrounded by her husband, her five loving daughters and their five adoring husbands, and her thirteen wonderful grandchildren. The grandchildren, aged two to twenty-two, each gave her a long-stemmed English rose as they serenaded her with the words: some say love, it is a river, that drowns the tender reed; some say love, it is a razor, that leaves your soul to bleed; some say love, it is a hunger, an endless aching need; I say love it is a flower, and you its only seed.
At 70, I caught my mom taking stock of her life, as we all tend to do at such milestones, watching her wondering who she really was.
I know it has been hard for her, sometimes, living in the shadow of my father. He has cut a wide swath through life, his passage marked by many professional successes and recognitions. He is a man who gives of himself, a man who heals people, a man who helps people. Old-fashioned, old-school, very British -- he is a man who commands respect, and deserves it. He is knowledgeable and articulate and forthright and he can be stern, if the need arises. My sisters and I will attest to that. But he is most always kind, empathetic and loving.
My mother’s path, though less wide than my father’s, is equally well traveled. She is a good mother; she is a remarkable person. She is someone with deep knowledge and limitless, some-yet-untapped abilities, who I sense somehow feels unfulfilled at this late hour in her day.
I’d like to hope that it’s not the time to be worrying about what seeds didn’t get planted, about what life could have been. Instead, I’d hope that it is a time to sit back and watch the flowers bloom, a time to revel in one’s garden. A time to gather a bouquet in one’s arms and inhale its essence and its beauty. A time for my mother to reflect on how much like her her lovingly cultivated blossoms are, even if they have grown in ways she could never have imagined when she brought them to life.
Our childhood was, in so many ways, different from hers. She was raised by nannies and a cold, no-nonsense, scholarly father and a selfish moody mother, in a boys’ school, in the years before she was sent off to boarding school in spartan Scotland.
We were raised by our mother and our father, in a circle of love with our sisters, in a funky old house with a wrinkly plaster pool and a big garden. We had summer trips to camp sites on warm lakes and in winter drove vertiginous mountain roads on skiing adventures. And, later, there was the little cottage in the Gulf Islands, where summers were spent wandering along sandstone beaches and gravely country roads, and fishing.
When my sisters and I were growing up, we sat down for every meal at home in the dining room with our parents. We converged at the small, old english oak table with a story of its own and big heart shapes cut out on each of its otherwise no-nonsense trestle legs. It was the table that my parents brought with them when they arrived from England. We sat together and we talked and discussed and planned holidays and debated and shared stories from our days and got cross-examined from time to time, and, only occasionally, angry words were said. When that happened there would be glaring silences, punctuated by the errant scrape of a knife or fork across a china plate, or the sniffle of a child, while everyone cowered or glowered for a bit.
At the table, my father would be seated at one end, my mother at the other (closest to the kitchen), and the five of us would line up down the sides. It didn't matter which way the table was turned when they moved the furniture around; my parents always sat on the ends. It was pretty formal, and very English. Everybody knew their place. But, most always, it was one big, happy family that gathered together at the end of each day.
My mom came of age in war-torn England, in a time when children were sent away from home to be raised by the system, and in a time when people in my mother’s sphere courted and married before sharing themselves. In a time when touching was considered to be an intimacy, long before it was recognized as an essential human need. In a time when elders were due some respect just because of their tenure, long before our obsession with youth. In a time when stoicism was still so embraced, long before people were allowed to express themselves freely. In a time when women were expected to quietly and cheerfully hold down the home front while men ran the world. In the time before bombs started flying and the complexion of the world, and the life on it, forever changed.
We came of age in the sixties (except for the sweet pea who is a groovy seventies type), during the time when television loomed and then doomed us to an electronic, information overloaded, hyperspeed life. It brought into our rec rooms and into our consciousness the Pill, Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, Gloria Stenheim, and Beatlemania, and introduced us to a whole lot of people, not much older than we were, leading lives very different from our protected one, and standing up very defiantly to authority, even to that of their parents.
In our early years, living a lyrical life, we promised, at least for a while, to grow in the same habit as our mother’s. Then our healthy tendrils reached outside the perimeter of her lovely garden to test the foreign soil, and we set seed in places there too.
With three daughters of my own, and after spending many years of my own life parenting my children mostly full-time, I am just starting to realize how hard it might be to see your children leading lives and making choices in some ways so distant from your own.
My mother sees my sisters and me as so iconoclastic, as so foreign, as so north american. Some of us have juggled demanding careers with small children. Some of us have been unhappily married and have dealt with bitter divorce. Some of us have been challenged by serious mental or physical illnesses. These are not things she would have chosen for us to have to confront. But, it must be so -- this is where we come from, these are the times that we live in, this is who we are: her daughters, her labours of love, her blossoms rooted in a different soil.
In this new millennium, we are expected to be more than just mothers. Society wants us to be supermoms -- perfect parent, perfect homemaker, career woman, supportive, sexy, second-income providing wife, juggler extraordinaire. And as we quest for this tenuous, near-impossible balance, she watches and wonders if perhaps she missed an opportunity in her life to be something more. I'm not surprised that she asks the question. How couldn't she when confronted with all of the choices her daughters seem free to make?
I don't think many opportunities, other than motherhood, ever really existed for my mom. Women of her generation were expected to stay home and do diaper and dinner detail. June Cleaver and Jackie Kennedy and Carol Brady set the bar for women then. There was no Oprah or Martha Stewart or Madonna -- no self-made female icons of industry and pop culture, seemingly without the need for men to direct them or children to define them.
Unlike the women of my mother's generation, women today have more choices about how they will live their lives. But, as a mother to my own three daughters, I have struggled with the balance between being an available mother, intent on sharing irreplaceable moments of my childrens' young lives, versus pursuing those things that would, perhaps, make me feel more complete and accomplished, and ultimately, more valued.
I doubt that my daughters will have the same luxury of choice in a culture that is ever-increasingly fixated and dominated by material wealth. And in a country where crippling tax burdens and the high cost of living now make the opportunity to be a one-income family, for most of the population, fiscally impossible.
But, it doesn't mean that my sisters and I don't think that our mother set the best example for us when we don't follow her exact footsteps. She did. She taught us to be attentive, available, responsible mothers. To be supportive partners to our husbands. To see beauty. To have knowledge. To be resourceful. To tend our gardens with care. To love.
My mother's late-life identity crisis has caused me to reflect on my own path as well as hers. It hasn't always been easy, staying at home, tending my garden. Cultivating enchanting, hardy, adaptable flowers that will flourish anywhere is sometimes tedious, often challenging, laborious work, and the true rewards are not apparent until the sunflowers and the daisies and the impatiens are in full bloom, so long after their seeds are first sown.
Now in my forties, I feel the rush of time and the transient fear that what is left for me may be too little, too late. Perhaps that is because we live in a time when we are acquisitors: people are too often (mistakenly) measured by what they own or what they earn or who they know. We are wired to want for more.
But despite the sacrifices, I feel very fortunate that I have had the opportunity, and the choice. My husband, too, has made big sacrifices so that at least one of us could be there. And even though, at times, I have struggled with the choices that I have made, I have no regrets. In the end, as I learned from my mother, it has been a unique gift that I could give to my young children.
My mom’s identity is clearer to me than my own -- she is my mother. She is the woman who brought me to fruition; I am a part of her. She is a woman whose love, though not invisible, feels sometimes under-expressed. That’s the British in her -- that’s the way she learned to be as a child. But the love is there, given in deed. She is a woman who has given her life for her family. It is a life that has been awarded with too little applause.
My mother is a classic English rose - lovely and delicate and ethereal, transplanted into foreign soil.
We used to call her Mummy when we were her little girls, sharing our lives with just her and our daddy. Then she sent us out into the new world to make our own way. Now she hears us call her Mom in our flat north american english. But the delivery doesn’t diminish the meaning. Mom, mum, mummy, mama. She is a beloved mother.
©1999 Judy G