Carol Shields

by Dropped Threads 2

  I’ve just scanned my screen to see which words the spelling feature doesn’t like. It balks at the cancer-specific medical jargon, the same words I wouldn’t have recognized just months ago. Should I allege that no one prepared me for this? Or should I admit that before I needed to, anything more than a cursory glance—accompanied by a relieved sigh and a crossing of fingers—at the reality of breast cancer was absolutely nowhere on my priority list?

  Lest I’m tempted into Olympic-size self-pity, even a naturally half-empty-glass gal like me can acknowledge that there’s room for gratitude amid this crummy experience. There’s lots of information and support available. My employer took it on the chin and is cutting me some slack. My lump placement couldn’t have been better for early detection. I had a skilled surgeon and a mercifully quick surgery date. I’m blessed with a sturdy constitution that, remarkably, tolerates and regenerates after each new treatment onslaught. I have a wonderfully supportive spouse, family and friends. I have a secure job, high-quality public health care and two supplementary insurers underwriting everything from prescription drugs to faux hair. I’m aware that not every cancer patient has all these soft landings. I also don’t know a single person who hasn’t suffered an episode of job hell, or relationship hell, or some version of unsolicited and undeserved misery. Tempting as it is occasionally, nurturing a grievance against the universe would probably be misguided.

  By

  Choice

  Hildegard Martens

  When I was a young girl in the 1950s, the thought of getting married was merely a misty, unfocused image in my mind. I never dreamed of a trousseau, a wedding dress or a wedding day. I was struck much more forcibly by the sheer need to survive on our cold and isolated farm in Manitoba. New life and gruesome death seemed to be present everywhere—the horror of witnessing slaughtered animals juxtaposed with the joy of finding a new litter of kittens in the barn loft or seeing a newborn calf.

  My parents seemed exhausted much of the time, and we children had an endless list of daily chores—milking cows, feeding calves and chickens, washing the cream separator and the dishes, helping with the cooking and the hoeing in the garden. Electrification did not come to our area until about 1950; this meant melting snow for the wringer washing machine, baking bread in the wood stove in the kitchen and chopping wood or carrying coal from the cellar to feed the Booker stove in the living room.

  During this time, I would often look at the postcards and black-and-white photographs my parents had brought from Russia. There were scenes of cherished homes and orchards that had been left in haste, of relatives dressed in quaint clothing looking stoically into the camera and of corpses in open coffins. The pictures spoke to the tragedies my parents had endured when they were still teenagers. My father’s oldest brother, mother and father died from typhus they contracted during the flight from their homes following the Russian Revolution of 1917. My mother’s family had been well-to-do estate owners who lost everything. Relatives who stayed behind often ended up shot or exiled to Siberia.

  I would also study a photograph of my father as a young man in northern Ontario, where he first worked in Canada, holding his baby in his arms and standing beside the open coffin of his first young wife. These pictures both fascinated and frightened me and in a strange way exerted an influence on my life. The potential for tragedy seemed greater than “living happily ever after.”

  I know now that people who experience horrors of this kind often don’t have the emotional energy to deal with their immediate lives but continue to be haunted by their pasts. While saying little about their own lives, my parents would recount incidents about their relatives in Russia over and over again, but in time I tried to shut out their stories and struggled to avoid taking up their burdens.

  Psychologists claim that we live out a script, the main outlines of which are set down in childhood. My script seemed to be that of the misunderstood and tragic heroine. I never felt wanted or understood. After a day’s work, my parents had little time or emotional resources left over, and as I was the youngest of five, my plea for attention could be the “final straw.”

  At fifteen I stayed at home to do my Grade 9 by correspondence, at a time when my brothers and sisters had left the farm to attend school or to work. That winter, I became an avid listener of CBC’s Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on Saturday afternoons. I particularly liked the romantic tragedies and identified with Desdemona in Othello and with Violetta in La Traviata—I was capable of a deep, abiding love that I felt sure no man could match.

  Boys were certainly in my thoughts throughout my time at residential high school in the late 1950s. My first boyfriend there dumped me with a rather unsentimental letter, so, even in those days, I felt that boys were undependable and innately promiscuous. And perhaps, quite perversely, I wouldn’t have been interested in those who were loyal. It felt easier to be the wronged party, perhaps because of the measure of freedom that it afforded.

  The only time in my life I ever tried on a white wedding dress was when I was sixteen. I was visiting a girlfriend, who persuaded me to try on her older sister’s dress—I remember how its stiff lace scratched my skin and how I felt simultaneously embarrassed and doomed. At the same time, a thrill went through me as I thought of the sexual pleasures I would experience when I married—in the fifties, and in my world, sex before marriage was still a taboo.

  By the time I went to university, after a stint of working to earn some money, a second powerful theme began to emerge in my life—equality and financial independence nurtured by the lectures of my favourite professor, a flamboyant Marxist. It seemed to me that the doctrines of Marxism offered an explanation for what had been determining forces in my life. Unequal wealth along with unequal power explained so many things: why, for example, my maternal grandparents in Russia had been stripped of all their wealth by envious poor peasants, and why men, including my father, seemed to think they could simply impose their will on their wives and children.

  While I was opening up to a new understanding of my past, boyfriends were still an important part of my life. I was considered pretty, even beautiful, by my classmates who selected me as Snow Queen in my second year of university. The event caused conflicting emotions—pleasure because of the recognition and anguish because I was afraid of being valued primarily for my looks.

  Wide reading in feminist literature told me that other women were also chafing against the restrictions and limitations of the times. Books like The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan and The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir confirmed my feeling of being trapped by the demands of the traditional female role. The world that opened up through my reading seemed to offer a chance to do what I really wanted—to be financially independent, not beholden to any man; to be an actor in my own life, not a satellite. If someone was to have any glory, I wanted it to be me.

  This desire for independence became so strong that it invariably won out whenever I was faced with a choice to marry or not, first with boyfriends in Winnipeg and then again with men in Toronto where I had gone to do a Ph.D. in sociology in 1969. I did agree to marry one man in those early years of graduate school, but I could not accept his notion that if we had children, his money would remain his, so we parted.

  In my mid-thirties, I came up against a problem facing unmarried women of this age who have focused on their careers. What about children? Maternal feelings had been deeply buried for a long time. My lovely Persian cat, who shared my room during my years in student residence at the University of Toronto, returned my mothering with purrs and devotion, but the longing for a human baby would not go away.

  I sought out a Gestalt therapy group. Developed by the psychoanalyst Fritz Perls, this therapy was part of the “human potential” movement popular in the sixties and seventies. It seeks to help individuals become fully aware of their wishes, desires and constraints and then to make conscious choices based on this self-knowledge. “Don’t tell me what you are thinking,” I was told by Gestaltists,
“but what are you feeling?” At first, the answer was “nothing.” And it seemed that it had been “nothing” for a very long time. After all, who would want to go back to feeling like a wronged heroine?

  But Gestalt had an impact, as protective layers were peeled away and I was able to risk feeling vulnerable once again. I subsequently fell in love with an idealistic younger man I met at a Gestalt group meeting and we decided to live together. I felt lucky to have met someone who valued my independence and seemed to want an egalitarian relationship.

  The next two years should have been bliss, but they were not. I was thirty-seven and I had my Ph.D., but I felt that time was running out for me to have a baby, and the desire to be a mother was something I couldn’t let go. My partner, being seven years younger, did not have these same pressures, and he would not agree to my becoming pregnant. Now I was face to face with a momentous decision. Should I break off this relationship and do it alone, or should I give up my wish to have a baby?

  The worst thing I could imagine was to give up my wish to have a baby and then have the relationship with my lover founder several years later. I thought this was a distinct possibility, and that my sacrifice would then have been in vain. We finally separated after wrenching arguments, and while I felt great pain, I also felt a surge of hope. I would do it alone. I didn’t have any role models except an early British suffragist, Sylvia Pankhurst, who in 1928, at the age of forty-six, deliberately became pregnant and had a baby boy while single. The chapter in the book The Fighting Pankhursts that describes this event is appropriately titled “A Woman of Principle.”

  I started to put things in place. I secured a good job in government with a pension plan, bought a house and set to furnishing it. I contemplated many methods for becoming pregnant, including asking friends. In fact, one friend considered it briefly but bowed out after consulting his lawyer.

  I discussed my plans with a few select women friends and with my oldest sister. Nearly everyone was sympathetic, but most counselled caution. Two friends who were single parents because of divorce pointed out that being a single mother could be difficult; however, my Gestalt therapist, also in her late thirties, gave me her full support, saying, “If this is what you want, do it. Follow your heart.” That felt right to me. I did not give a lot of thought to whether this was a socially appropriate course of action. By this stage of my life, I felt that many social conventions were meaningless or even perverse. After all, social conventions had limited women’s opportunities for decades.

  The end result of my quest to become a single mother was settling on a means I could ethically accept, and in 1983 I gave birth to my son. He is an exceptional person, both intellectually and emotionally, and we share many interests—including a love of Persian cats!

  Looking back after nineteen years, I can say that being his mother has brought me the most intense joy imaginable; I have never regretted my decision. In loving my son, I’ve been able to understand the nature of men in a whole new way. Of course, there have been times when I felt emotionally and physically exhausted—during the nineties I twice became the victim of the “restructuring and downsizing” so commonplace during that decade. My fear of job loss was enormous, not only because I was solely responsible for raising my son, but also because I remembered vividly what it was like to be poor, and how my parents and grandparents had suffered in Russia. And even though, with considerable effort, I was able to find new positions and continue working, those were times when I would have welcomed having an understanding, capable partner.

  Did my career suffer because of my choice to become a mother? In many ways it did, primarily because the workplace has largely refused to recognize women’s dual roles and to offer more flexible work environments. As well, erroneous assumptions were often made about whether I, a woman with a child, was serious about advancement.

  My son may have his own story to tell someday about the extent to which he missed having a father in his life. When he was a little boy, he would often say, “I’m so glad you decided to have me.” He certainly knew he was wanted! As he moved into adolescence, we had our share of conflicts, but what is life without differences of opinion?

  Ever since my son’s birth, my mother, a widow for the past twenty years, has come in the winter to spend a few months with us, visiting, helping out and, in a way, mothering me so that I can in turn mother my son. Even though she is now well into her nineties, her capacity to give to us is undiminished.

  Remaining single and becoming a single parent by choice can raise eyebrows even today, and in many ways these topics remain an area of silence in our society. I’ve seldom been asked why I didn’t marry. To those who do ask, especially if I feel they are merely being nosy, I answer, “Just lucky, I guess,” although obviously more choice than luck was involved. And as for my choice to become a single mother, very few people ever question me about it. Let’s just say if I had to do it all over again, with the same set of circumstances, I would.

  Virgin

  Crone

  Marianne Brandis

  Virgin, Mother, Crone. It’s a well-recognized triad, the pattern of most women’s lives. The Virgin at a certain point becomes a Mother, and eventually a wise woman, a Crone.

  But there are some women who bypass the Mother phase and go straight from being a Virgin to being a Crone. This is the kind of woman who, as her younger years pass, reaches an age when she realizes that she is unlikely to marry or, perhaps almost unaware, has chosen not to. She has no children. The woman I’m focusing on lives alone, or virtually alone, so that she has considerable autonomy and solitude. She doesn’t fit many of the conditions usually taken to define women’s lives. She has a different centre and different priorities.

  The Virgin-Mother-Crone triad assumes that the experience of being a Mother is essential to the Crone’s wisdom: it’s the only kind of experience that’s even considered. But what kind of Crone does a woman become who has never been a Mother? What kind of person is the middle-aged woman who is not a Mother but is definitely on the way to Cronehood? Is the wisdom of the Virgin Crone different from that of the Crone who is a Mother?

  It was in my early twenties—in about 1960—that I began thinking about marriage and singleness. I got along well with men; also—but on a different track, as it were—I had frequent and mostly humiliating crushes on them. I disliked the idea of spending the rest of my life alone, but at the same time I was attracted to solitude and independence. I realized that I was most fully myself when studying, researching, reading, writing.

  The crushes were an imaginative search for the kind of husband I could visualize having. In spite of vague visions of being married, however, I never pictured myself as a housewife and mother. The only kind of marriage I could contemplate was one without children.

  I began to realize that I might remain single. Sometimes I regarded the prospect with a gloomy sense that there was no other possible destiny for someone as awkward and eccentric as I. At other times, I was more positive: if I was single I could travel, be free, live as I wanted to.

  Examples of married life were all around me, in real life and in books and movies, but I knew very few older women who were single in the sense that I’ve defined it. The single and solitary women around me were either young, not yet married but intending and expecting to, or they were widows, mostly with children and grandchildren. Women who had jobs or professions also had husbands and children. None of these were models for the sort of life I was warily contemplating. The one or two older single women I knew didn’t talk about their lives, and I didn’t ask them. I should have. I should have regarded them as Virgins on the way to becoming Crones, possessors of a wisdom far more rare than that of a Mother.

  In my journal I was trying to weigh the alternatives, visualize both kinds of life—the novelist-to-be sketching scenarios, writing imaginary biographies. It would have been helpful to have more images of how a single woman lived, both outwardly and inside herself, images that might have guid
ed me through all the innumerable choices, many of them unconscious and instinctive, that shape a life.

  There were very few. Older single women at that time were mostly silent about their lifestyle, knowing that in spite of their professional and other achievements—which might be considerable, and highly respected—they were regarded as living incomplete lives. Nobody articulated this; nobody needed to. With women friends of my own age I talked about men, but never, to my recollection (and according to my journal), did we discuss the possibility that we might remain single. We didn’t consider how we would design our lives if (heaven forbid) that was what happened. Being single would mean being a reject: you didn’t contemplate that, let alone plan for it, least of all choose it.

  Therefore we were living provisional, temporary lives. Sooner or later this transitional period would end and “real life” start. While waiting, some of us had a good time. I did too, occasionally, but as I moved through my twenties I felt increasingly uncertain, unfocused, depressed, desperate. The year of my M.A. studies was particularly bad. Where was I going from here? Should I work toward a Ph.D.? Find a job? What sort of job? Writing, which was what I really wanted to do, would almost certainly not earn me a livelihood, so something else was needed.

  There was no one moment when I decided to remain single. None of those men proposed to me, so I never actually said no, though I must have been giving “no” signals to them as well as to myself. I was eccentric and introverted, and for these and other reasons I was probably best suited to single life. Though at the time it was socially impermissible to live according to this inner blueprint, I did remain single, and I did become a writer. While I was half-heartedly trying to do the expected thing, something inside me followed my individual blueprint as much as possible.