— A.A. Milne, “Disobedience”
The sad truth, though, is that mothers who are lost are not simply mislaid, they are gone forever. You will never again be able to come crying to that lap for comfort, or to whisper your nightmares to her in the dark and have her make them go away.
For those who lose their mothers young, there is no one to help you choose your wedding dress while remembering her own, no one who can presume to talk to you about the fickleness of passion and the vital importance of honesty in a relationship.
There are lots of routine reminders, large and small, of the things you lost when your mother died. For example, you lose your roadmap for aging, the ability to estimate when your hair will go grey, or menopause will hit, or if your hands will be covered with liver spots by the time your reach sixty. Will your voice go whiney, and your children become embarrassed by you? Or might you develop a weakness for the bottle, turning the occasional drink into a series of empty bottles that, laid end to end or even side by side, fuse into a vast chain of misery?
If I only had her here even for a day I think that I would ask my mother what she hoped and dreamed and how she felt about her life. Everyone has always told me she wanted most to be a good mother and have lots of children, but we are real now, people not promises, and I would like to know if she is happy with us all. What would she have thought about John’s difficult divorce and Terree’s illness? Did she mourn all the responsibility that Penny was saddled with, or would she have been proud at how her first daughter rose so admirably to the occasion?
And what about me? Would she have understood me?
You can look at losing a mother in so many ways. Another meaning of the verb “to lose” is, of course, “to be defeated,” which is quite apt in the case of the death of a mother if you think about it. If “losing mother” is a game with odds, then the odds are great that she will predecease you, but only by twenty or thirty years or so, not by almost an entire lifetime. But some of us get beaten by the odds. My mother predeceased me by forty-three years and still counting. That is too many years to be without the unconditional love and wise advice I imagine one might reasonably expect from one’s mom.
I draw strength and understanding from the best children’s writers. Robert Munsch wrote a wonderful children’s book about mother love called Love You Forever, which contains the refrain: “I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always, as long as I’m living, my baby you’ll be.”
It is the “as long as I’m living” part that trips some of us up.
The Great Chrysanthemum Massacre
I was at home by myself on a Saturday afternoon, getting ready for a night at the Delta Gamma House, when my father, Dean, called me from the University Hospital to tell me that Tessie had died.
I didn’t even know he had gone to the hospital. We had taken to visiting more sporadically and only when in the neighbourhood of the hospital since, for some time, Tessie had seemed no longer to be aware of our presence at her bedside. By chance, though, I had visited that morning, after my classes, and the rasp of her laboured breathing and her still, blanched body had sent me running from the ward. I can still hear the slap of my sneakers as they hit the institutional granite of that long, long hospital corridor.
I learned later that the doctor had called Dean just a few hours after I had been there and told him to come right over. He knew what such a summons meant, of course, but after so many years of looking after her, he reacted painfully slowly to the information that suddenly Tessie was dead.
When Penny flew in from California a couple days later, one toddler clinging on to her skirt and a baby in her arms, she was met with a chorus of “Thank goodness you are finally here.” No arrangements had been made for the funeral service or a wake; she was, as usual, expected to take charge of them all.
Guided by the funeral home, Dean had managed to provide something for my mother to wear. I am guessing here, but likely he chose the swirly pastel chiffon dress and coat she had worn to Penny’s wedding because by then her only other clothes were nighties. He had also decided that the casket would be closed; in fact, locked.
Not surprisingly, we all behaved weirdly through the next week or so. We ate casseroles made by neighbours and the ladies of Saint Mary’s Church Women’s Auxiliary. Penny looked after her infant and helped the rest of us to put one foot in front of the other.
Penny must have looked after our sister, Terree (short for Theresa), too. I have no recollection of Terree or John or what they might have been feeling or doing during those dreadful days and nights. I know that, when I wasn’t over at the university attending classes, I lay on the bed in my attic room listening to the song “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music over and over. I do not even know if the sound carried downstairs.
Mainly I remember sitting with Penny in the living room on the day after the funeral, surrounded by the dreary floral tributes that were all a place like Edmonton could possibly muster in the autumn of 1965: rust coloured chrysanthemums, every one. Hardy flowers, chrysanthemums. They can last for weeks. Dean and Tessie were well-liked and there were morbid autumnal arrangements everywhere that you could see.
I do not know what galvanized us, but suddenly Penny and I began to gather up all the flowers, the newly arrived and the slightly worn, the golden-hued and the just plain dun, throwing them energetically into the garbage cans in the alley out at the back of the house. I think John happened by and joined in the frenzy, and that maybe Terree did too. All I remember for certain is that we kept throwing away flowers, many still in their vases, smashing the lids of the garbage cans down on their blossoms and snapping their stems, until there were no more of them inside the house.
When we retook our seats in the living room, Penny quietly commented, “Now that’s better.”
For my part, I never liked chrysanthemums in the first place, especially those in autumn colours, and I feel absolutely no guilt at having been part of the Great Chrysanthemum Massacre of 1965.
Stepmothers are Natural Villains
Three years after Tessie died Dean met and married Doreen in a whirlwind romance.
I was delighted for my father because he’d had no real adult companionship outside of work for many years, unless you counted our series of elderly housekeepers. Since I was already off living my own life, I expected Doreen to be a comfort to my dad in his old age.
My stepmother had a superficial resemblance to my mother. She was cool and elegant and had false teeth. But she did not love me and she never would.
To be fair, she never had a chance. I was already grown up and rarely around. And I was brittle and self-absorbed, and glib and secretive. In other words, hard to love.
Of course, my dad doted on me.
Doreen had an adolescent daughter, and a history of loneliness and loss of her own. She had suffered that most terrible of parental tragedies, the death of a child.
The story, as I was told it, was heart wrenching: Around 1960 Doreen had taken the brave step of divorcing her alcoholic husband and raising her two little girls on her own. Not long after, on a beautiful summer’s day, she and the girls were at a family cottage and a group of people decided to go boating on the lake. Somehow the boat overturned. Doreen’s four-year-old daughter, Cathy, was trapped underneath and she drowned.
The detail of adults diving and diving under the boat to find Cathy sticks in my mind, as does the terrifying picture of a beautiful day turning suddenly malignant.
Based on the photograph Doreen always kept on her dresser, Cathy was a classically lovely, fluffy little blond girl. Lesley, Doreen’s surviving daughter, was a dark, sleek nine-year-old. The catastrophe not only affected Doreen, Lesley sank into a depression and had a very hard time recovering.
It was a decade later when Doreen met and married my father and Lesley became my stepsister. Poor little lost Cathy would also have been my stepsister.
Dean and Doreen had a whirlwind courtship, both of them eager for another chance
at marital happiness. Suddenly Doreen found herself with four stepchildren, one of whom, my younger sister Terree, was still living at home. Terree and Lesley were both teenagers, and they liked each other. But Lesley was disoriented by her mother’s sudden marriage, which entailed moving to a new city, and Terree was heading toward schizophrenia. For Doreen, suddenly being asked to cope with both of them was a nasty twist of fate.
Things still might have been all right if someone had taken the time to think about the forces that were at work. I am not suggesting that Terree could have been saved from schizophrenia — I don’t think it works that way — but she might have been kept from being so disruptive to the relationship between Dean and Doreen.
Dean had recently retired and he was eager to share his life with someone who would appreciate what he had accomplished. He had enough money to live, with occasional luxuries, and he was eager to enjoy them with Doreen. He liked her family, too.
Unfortunately, my siblings and I, at least the sane ones, initially were too self-involved to recognize that Doreen had value as an individual, not just as Dean’s new wife. After her divorce she had been forced to earn her own living and she had built a successful banking career in Winnipeg before Dean suddenly arrived, married her, and took her away.
My siblings, Penny, John, and Terree, and I were all in the thrall of various forms of motherlessness, and we did not even stop to think what we wanted from Doreen. The truth was, we all wanted to be loved.
Doreen did not know we wanted to be loved. Even we didn’t know the extent of our own need. And in the final analysis, all of that not knowing kept Doreen and her stepchildren from ever being anything very real to each other.
Trying to Understand the Past to give Meaning to the Present
I took a long time to become interested in rummaging about in family history. During the uncomfortable summer of 1975 in Montreal, I had concluded that while everything else in life takes a turn at seeming transitory or unreliable, your blood relatives are stuck with you, and you with them. But I hadn’t done much to follow up on that notion in the years that followed, unless you count having more children as a way to ensure that you have more blood relatives to be stuck with.
In our family, like so many others, the Second World War played a very important role. I grew up amongst photographs and souvenirs of Dean’s military service, and between my elder siblings and me the war was the source of the “great divide.” Penny and John had been born before the war, while Terree and I were part of the baby boomer generation. Dean and Tessie’s enforced separation during five long years of war inevitably changed their relationship. Dean’s experiences as an officer in Europe had made him more worldly, while his return home meant Tessie had to play down some of her hard-won self-reliance.
My generation, saved from having such a devastating backdrop against which to play out our own lives, still managed, through diligent effort and considerable self-indulgence, to traumatize our children in new and different ways.
I spent my thirties and forties being a mother, a lover, a career woman, and a feminist, although not always in that order. It was not until I was approaching fifty that I began to think that I might be less “self-made” and more the result of genetics than I had previously acknowledged. Finally, I began to wonder where my family had come from and what kind of people they had been.
I knew surprisingly little. I did know the maiden names of both my grandmothers, and that all of my grandparents had come from England. I knew where they had settled in Canada, but nothing about where they had lived in England.
Unfortunately, I had begun my poking around in the family archives too late to obtain much help from the living. All of my grandparents were dead. My mother had been dead for twenty-five years, my father for ten. Undaunted, I decided to start with the Whittakers, because my sister Penny knew the name of the place in the north of England they had migrated from, and William and I were already in London on holiday.
According to Penny, the source of our Whittakers was Haslingden, a Lancashire town in the Rossendale Valley where my grandfather had operated a small side business repairing bicycles, called the Hazeldene Bicycle Works. Learning this, the fact that my grandparents had named their four children Hazel, Ivy, Ross, and Dean, suddenly struck me as rather touching. Either they were profoundly homesick, or they had demonstrated a remarkable lack of originality, or perhaps both. Mind you, my older sister’s first names are Penelope Dale, which could suggest more nostalgia or simply that parents go a little crazy when they have their first chance to name a child.
Hazel, Dean, Ivy, and Ross Whittaker, in Kaslo.
Armed with a map showing the location of Haslingden, the names of my grandparents, and the naïve notion that it shouldn’t be hard to find traces of people who had emigrated a mere hundred years ago, we set off to gather information on what I had no doubt would prove to be humble origins.
From A Mill Town in Lancashire
William and I rented a car in London and headed for the north of England. It took a lot longer to get to Haslingden than I had expected. Mind you, I am not much of a map reader and know very little about British roadways and distances.
My experience with former mill towns was non-existent. I had yet to encounter the evocative paintings of L.S. Lowry, so the blackened-brick bleakness of Haslingden was a little shocking to me. It seemed at first glance that there was little or nothing of the romance of history to be found in that soot-darkened, northern town.
After a night in a congenial hotel with a supper that included help with local pronunciations, “ossletussle” for Oswaldthistle for example, we set out with enthusiasm the next morning to explore and research. The trip to the local library was instructive, as was the local telephone book. Hundreds and hundreds of Whittakers had once called Haslingden home.
In Accrington we ran into the first of the many very helpful people who have made my research so interesting and exciting. By combining my husband William’s journalistic skills with my bits and pieces of information, and the considerate help and guidance of the registry office staff, by lunchtime I had my Whittaker grandparents’ wedding certificate in my hand.
To the uninitiated, the amount of information on an official British marriage certificate is a wonderful surprise. Suddenly I knew the names of both my great-grandfathers, the addresses of my grandparents at the time of their marriage, their occupations, their ages, who witnessed their marriage, and what religion they professed.
The year of the marriage was 1899. The certificate listed my grandfather as working in a mill as a bleacher, while my grandmother was described as a weaver. Although Haslingdon is an old mill town, the fact that they were both so representative of their community still somehow took me by surprise. It did seem obvious to me, however, how they must have met. Mill weaver meets mill bleacher. At least they should never want for sheets and tea towels.
In our own premonitory version of the new, popular television programme Who Do You Think You Are?, William and I drove immediately to the addresses listed on the marriage certificate, two humble stone row houses with two rooms up and two rooms down. Yet I found it fascinating that at the foot of my Whittaker grandfather’s street were rolling hills that, if followed far enough, become the melancholy moors of Bronte country.
There was an old bench, clearly located to face the view, and I sat there for some time looking out at the verdant hills. I wondered, perhaps a little fancifully, if my grandparents had sat in this very place, talking about their plans. And I tried hard to imagine the situation in 1899 that led a young couple to leave that town, the mill, and the people they had known all their lives to emigrate to the Canadian Rockies. Of course, I didn’t know much about work in the mills at that point, nor had I yet heard the extraordinary clattering racket of a mechanical loom.
Politely speaking, Kaslo, British Columbia, is an inaccessible town. You can take the plane from Vancouver to Castlegar and then drive north for an hour or two. Or you can come in throu
gh Cranbrook and then drive nearly the same distance, but with the addition of a car ferry ride, featuring excellent cinnamon buns, across Kootenay Lake. For those who like a bit of excitement, Castlegar has a definite edge. Because the airport is surrounded by mountains and weather conditions up there can be pretty dramatic, you never know for certain whether you’re going to make it down between the peaks or if the pilot is going to decide, for safety’s sake, to just fly on by. Food lovers prefer the ferry.
My grandparents emigrated over a hundred years ago, so getting to Kaslo from Haslingden must have involved a train, probably more than one, to Liverpool, an Atlantic crossing in steerage from Liverpool up Canada’s St. Lawrence River to Quebec City or Montreal, a 2,500 mile train journey to Cranbrook, and a long steamship voyage up the Kootenay Lake to Kaslo.
Of course, it was not just the getting there that was so arduous and difficult, it was also the unlikelihood of ever getting back. You had to say goodbye to family and friends without any real idea of when you might see them again, or even if you ever would see them again. So I sat there thinking about the challenge of moving partway around the world to start a new life — the romance of the notion causing me to underestimate the inevitable hardship and feelings of loss that would be involved.
Margaret Isherwood, born April 9, 1876
Jane held the new baby in her arms and smiled happily. Her first-born had been the son John wanted and needed, and he had proudly named his boy after his own father, Matthew. Now Jane had the girl that she too had dreamed of rearing, and she and John had already agreed to call her Margaret.
The Slaidburn Angel Page 2