In the 1950s, there were almost no successful female role models. I was deeply imbued, not by my parents but by the culture of the times, with a sense of inferiority. Women had intuition rather than intellect. Dick and Jane’s father went to work, and their mother was waiting at the door at the end of the day, in wasp-waisted dress and red lipstick, fresh and cheery, having spent all day readying the house for his return. This enraged me, once I was old enough to think about it; yet by then the damage was done. I’d absorbed the insecurities of my generation. Museums celebrated the accomplishments of men, in both the arts and the sciences. Men were explorers, athletes, musicians, physicians, lawyers, engineers. Women were bad drivers, incompetent, helpless, destined for blowsy, bosomy middle age.
I spent the middle years of my life—from first period to menopause—battling this early self-image, and creating the person I wanted to be. It was a time of marriage, motherhood, homemaking, career-building, enthusiasms, despair, perfectionism, and above all, busyness. Too busy to dwell in the present, I lived the moments of my life with increasing despair since I tried, endlessly and without success, to control my circumstances. Trying to be strong and whole, I battled a sense of inadequacy that made me both furious and fearful; I held a created image of myself up like a paper with a high grade so that I could safely say, “See? This is me.”
When I was in my mid-forties, depression did its work, broke me down as rain batters a dead leaf, until I found qualities within myself never before acknowledged. I learned to listen, but also to speak. I learned to be quiet in a group of people and not feel I had said nothing. The many sides of my personality blended, and I learned to be one person, the same person, always. It was a wondrous process, as satisfying as planting tulip bulbs, learning to sing or recovering a lost sense.
Then, at the age of fifty-two, just when I feel more often happy than not, capable, tender, at peace with my strong body, it begins: the great pause, the death of fertility. Strangely, and fittingly, it burns away. My body blazes—flushed, sweating—as if fertility, like any dead thing, is most thoroughly cleansed and transformed by fire.
• • •
On a February night, it’s freezing cold in the unheated bedroom of our old house. Peter and I are snuggled together under three blankets and a quilt. I’ve got a hot water bottle between my knees. When I went to bed, my nose was so icy that I pulled the blankets over my head and made a breathing-cave.
The instant I begin to drift off to sleep, I feel the subtlest touch, like a fingertip pressed on the skin, or a mouthed message. Here I come. My body responds with a flight reaction. Panic, starting in my legs; the need to run. Then my mind catches up. It fills with despairing thoughts, and is suffused with doom. Oh, God. I kick off the blankets, heap them between me and the silent mound of my husband. I roll onto my back, haul up my nightgown. I am being consumed by an intolerable heat. My heart races, sweat prickles between my breasts. I slide my legs restlessly, seeking coolness. Beneath my shoulder blades, the sheets begin to dampen. I imagine flames coming from the soles of my feet, and lay them against the bed’s wooden footboard.
Did I think this room was cold? I wait for the inner furnace to subside, for my sweat to dry. Sometimes I let myself get too cold. Then I cling to Peter, shivering.
On and on it goes, sometimes every hour on the hour. I wake, in the morning, tired. I face going to bed like a chore.
I sense the same bewildered ache I had when I was fourteen and felt I’d lost my tomboy self. Now I wonder what will become of the strong, youthful woman I sought for so long, worked to create, and finally found? For I’m at the start of another passage, and this one ends in death.
• • •
I’m feeling a sense of sadness about the woman I no longer am, and yet she is the one who enables me to have the good sense to accept what is happening. I develop humility, humour and perspective, new tools I recognize as blessings, since I’ll have them well entrenched when, in the next stage of my life, I may face far more debilitating losses.
I’ve chosen not to take hormone replacement therapy—my woman doctor has never recommended it. At first I think, “I can deal with this, it’s only discomfort, and won’t last long.” After a few years, however, I see that the process needs my attention and respect. But I have to go about it the way I tamed a wild pony who could not be touched. I spent an entire winter singing to her, my head bent, never attempting to pat her. One day, I slowly raised my arm to stroke her neck and she lowered her head to my breast. She changed me; I changed her. Finally, I slid onto her back and we moved as one.
I decide it is time to systematically try vitamins and herbs—ginseng, vitamin E, black cohosh, dong quai—until I find something that calms the daily and nightly waves of roaring heat, and the insomnia or anxiety accompanying them. I’ve learned that menopause is far more than the absence of a period. It is an enormous change—emotional, physical, spiritual—and is as irresistible as the contractions of birth. Day after day, night after night, year after year, I’m faced with the evidence of how I’m like the sea, or the moon, or the seasons. Heat rises within me, my blood vessels enlarge, my skin sweats. When this happens, I have no choice but to stop what I’m doing, wait patiently, and endure, since resisting, like fighting contractions, makes everything worse.
Lack of resistance, like singing to a pony, is not passivity but wisdom.
• • •
My granddaughters and my mother pull me beyond the narrow circle of my own perspective and teach me about what I think of as “the authority of the self.”
Bridget, eight months old, spies a blue-eyed stuffed dog on a shelf. She crawls toward it, making imperious barking sounds. “Ha. Ha.” She reaches up. Reaches, reaches. Her tiny, strong hand grasps the edge of the shelf and she pulls herself onto her feet. She stands, wobbling, picking up the dog with delight, entirely unaware of her precariousness. And Maeve, in the tub, declares, “I’m dog/fish/woman.” And she’s absolutely right. Her perfect female body is fully stretched, fish-like, in the dappled water. She reaches her arms forward, swimming, while her feet kick kick kick, with puppy-like abandon.
My mother, at eighty-one, thinks of death as a beginning, and is certain that something amazing will occur when she goes forward into her next life. She wears sneakers and jeans; works out with a personal trainer. “Punch, punch!” the trainer shouts, and my mother jabs body blows at a leather bag. She and my father still live in their drafty old farmhouse, and she breaks from our phone conversation to tell me what she is seeing at that moment: the blood-red amaryllis on her desk, glowing in sudden sun; a cloud of pinkspeckled blossoms on the crab-apple tree.
They persist, and insist, both tiny girls and elderly woman—embracing life, discovering it, delighting in it. This is what I am going to do, they declare. They accept the conditions of their life.
And they also see more clearly. Time confers clarity. There is so much time, for the little girls, that it’s like an ocean. There is so much less, for my mother, that it’s like an exquisite wine, drunk in smaller and smaller sips and held longer on the tongue. Yet in both cases, the extremity of time’s perceived dimensions, either expanding or diminishing, sharpens perception of the present, tipped, as it is, on the lip of either a long future, or a long past.
And I realize that I am beginning to regain a clarity of vision, made necessary both by the incontrovertible facts of my condition, and a sense of time’s value.
• • •
We make a small campfire next to the driveway, beneath the snowbank left by the plow. We’re the Gypsy family again. I’m Zingarella, Maeve is Marshmallow, Bridget is Fire, and Peter is the Pretend Gypsy Dada.
We have some firewood, matches, newspaper, a snowbank, five stale (hard as wood) marshmallows, a toboggan with missing slats. We have sunshine that makes the snow glitter. We have time, all afternoon. Raggedy Ann is wearing a paper diaper that is falling off.
“It doesn’t matter,” Marshmallow says dismissively. “She’
s outside, she can poop on the ground.”
Fire falls asleep in the Gypsy Dada’s arms while I’m pulling Marshmallow on the toboggan and so we wrap Fire in a sleeping bag and lower her into a cradle we’ve pummelled into the snowbank.
Marshmallow feeds her doll with an invisible spoon. Thin blue smoke rises. A raven, flying overhead, wavers, tips a wing downward, and cocks its eye at us.
Children, old people and birds, I think, know how to make not much into a great deal.
• • •
I’m three years into menopause, and it’s still happening. Every day, struggling out of a sweater, mopping sweat from the back of my neck, I wonder when it’s going to end. But I, too, persist and insist, enjoying life with a different kind of delight—it’s heavier, richer, like afternoon light. I sense how my patience has grown, like any skill. I see that I’ve learned how to make do with things as they are.
Sometimes, now, when I’m boiling hot, I slide out of bed with my pillow and lie on the floor. It’s lovely: hard and icy cold. Walls and furniture loom, misshapen, like elephant flanks. This, I think, calmly observing the shadow-warped, gigantic bureau, is a new perspective. Or, rather, a deeply familiar one. It’s how Maeve and Bridget must see the world.
If this strategy doesn’t work to cool me off, I go downstairs in my polypropolene, sweat-wicking, long-winter undershirt. I slide open the sunroom’s glass door, go outside and stand barefoot in the snow. I spread my arms, not from ecstasy but to expose every possible bit of skin. The stars glitter, silver, blue-green, smoky red. I feel a bittersweet yearning as I behold the solemn vastness, so seemingly close, so alien. This, I think, is how my mother, sleepless at eighty-one, sees the stars.
There I am, captured in a black-and-white photograph, posing in my very first formal. But I colour it in with memory—a lush emerald green dress. No dress has ever seemed quite so perfect. Daringly strapless, it was all the rage with its chiffon “balloon skirt.” Tucked in snugly at the waist, it fell lightly, then puffed out at the calf-length hemline. I can feel, once again, that anticipatory excitement, though I could not have known then that the High River High School Banquet would be the beginning of something special.
It was 1959, and I was fifteen. I had just been asked to the banquet by Orm Mitchell, whose mother had manoeuvred the matchmaking. My mother, who was the English teacher at my school and knew the backgrounds of all the boys I might date, was always wary. “I don’t think you should go out with Doug—his father drinks like a fish.” Or “I wouldn’t like you to get in a car with Jimmy—he might have a seizure.” I never objected to this; I was not rebellious and, critical as my mother was, she was often right. So, when Orm asked me out, I waited apprehensively for the assessment. Nothing. That was hopeful.
As I cast back over this evening, my parents are not in the scene. Did they say, “You look beautiful,” or “I hope you have a good time”? Perhaps my mother was going over her reply to the toast to the teachers, or perhaps, she, too, was thinking how she looked in her fitted black satin dress with the shimmery green stripe through it—one of the yearly presents my father bought for her.
Orm’s parents had asked him to bring me by the house before the banquet. I had never met his father, and didn’t know that he was W. O. Mitchell, a famous writer. To me, he was simply Bill Mitchell who didn’t work regular hours and couldn’t pay his bills, including one at my father’s store, Way’s Grocery. Orm led the way down the steep basement stairs and, as I tottered after him in my unfamiliar pumps, I heard loud “hurrays” and “Judas Priests” overtop the TV hockey commentator. Petite, dark-haired Merna was curled up on the couch, cigarette in hand. W. O., in scruffy sweater and jeans, smelling of pipe tobacco, was sprawled out beside her, feet on the coffee table. I stood before them, wondering if I should move aside so they could continue watching the hockey game or sit down—but where? Every chair was cluttered with books, papers and laundry.
“Oh, my dear,” Merna burst out, “what a lovely dress!” “You look simply bee-you-tee-ful!” exclaimed W. O. “And your hair—it sparkles!” I had sprinkled it with glitter, which, forever, seemed to him a remarkable thing. I was Cinderella at the Prince’s Ball.
W. O. presented me with a flower, “an orchid,” he explained, “from my own greenhouse.” It was mauve with a frilled velvet magenta throat. “Look,” he demonstrated, “if you hold one of these big babies up to the light, there is an internal incandescence as though the petals are all crystal.” It was simply stunning. But how was I to wear it? The stem was immersed in water in a discoloured test tube with a red rubber stopper. “Don’t take it out of the water,” W. O. cautioned me, “and as soon as you get home put it in the fridge. It will keep for ten days, maybe two weeks.” At that moment, I didn’t think I could keep my dignity at the dance for even ten minutes with that yellowed tube hanging from my haute couture dress. Somehow Merna attached it with crumpled tinfoil and a pin. I was wrong. All my friends were in awe of such a gift—an orchid—right out of Hollywood glamour magazines!
I fell in love with Orm; I fell in love with his family. I was fascinated by the pageant of activity in the Mitchell family—hearing amazing stories, meeting famous visitors, listening to Jake and the Kid with the author right there, discussing literature, life. For me it was like going from black-and-white television to Technicolor movies. I was slightly abashed, though, by their emotionalism. Merna and W. O. hugged and kissed and lauded everyone—not just the family (and me—to my surprise), but neighbours, the babysitter, the CBC people who visited, even relative strangers. As a child I had been hugged, but I do not recall my parents’ arms around me when I was fifteen—perhaps my father’s chapped and roughened hand on my shoulder. Though I never felt unloved or unsupported by my family, displays of emotion—happiness or tears—were uncommon.
The Mitchells would effuse, “We love Barbara.” My parents would say, “We like Orm.” The Way lexicon was one of taciturn moderation, the Mitchells’ one of excess. “Love,” “the best,” “wonderful,” “beautiful” were common words in the Mitchell vocabulary. My family kept those words intact—burdened with a virgin purity. I don’t remember saying out loud to my mother or father, “I love you,” though I would sign my letters “with love,” and I did love them. But Merna and W.O. fell instantly “in love” with people. Later I realized that they sometimes expended a lot of “love” on people who turned out to be unworthy of it—a “brilliant” filmmaker who, in six months, plummeted to a “bastard.” Amazingly, they never felt guilty, or ashamed of having wasted their affections. While I began to understand that the language of love did not need to be bartered out stingily or, worse, avoided, I was bothered by questions of meaningfulness and sincerity.
Soon our families were socializing. A dinner at the Mitchells’ was like watching a tennis match—back and forth between the two players at either end of the table while we, the spectators, were left to ooh and aah. Merna would begin a story—perhaps about the evening that the “goddamn horses” escaped from the pasture two blocks over and came trotting down the street, right by their kitchen window where they were having dinner with Bruce Hutchison. W. O. would interrupt, “For Christ’s sake, Merna, get the story right. Let me tell it.” Merna would give way, interjecting, however, with clarifications. “Shut up, Merna,” W. O. would roar, “don’t interrupt me.” I suspect my parents wondered if this marriage would last.
I was on tenterhooks when my parents were invited to the Mitchells’. My father, who never raised his voice or swore, must have been overwhelmed by the Mitchell bombast. I can visualize him sitting uncomfortably in the living room, waiting for the customary rye and ginger. I nervously wondered how he would fare in the conversation, but there was only one moment of embarrassment that I can recall. One evening he told a joke that so mortified me I blurted out, “That’s not funny; that’s in bad taste.” He said later, at home, having more tact than I, “You are a snob.” I recognize now how much I must have hurt him. The Mitchells, at t
hat time, could do no wrong in my eyes. I had dressed them in godlike apparel.
My mother enjoyed the literary talk, and their swearing did not upset her, as she, too, could swear a blue streak (though only at home and at inanimate objects). I enjoy thinking of her cursing “the Christly store” that made my father late for dinners or tossing the unripe tomatoes, just sent up from Way’s Grocery, on the counter, saying, “God’s teeth! Why can’t they send me edible tomatoes?” This, and her other favourite, “Hell’s bloody bells,” were so antiquated they seemed Shakespearean. In spite of these at-home outbursts, my mother kept her emotions in check. She had a privateness, a closeness, that mystified me. Her age, finances and health, in that order, were taboo subjects. I see now that it must have been uneasy for her at the Mitchells’, as she and W. O. had attended the same university. But she had let me believe that she was younger than he, though, in fact, she was eight years older and fourteen years older than Merna.
My mother was slightly disapproving of the Mitchells. When my relationship with Orm became serious, she was unable to prevent herself from trying to protect me, subtly warning me that Merna and W. O. were unrealistically optimistic and self-centred. But her cold truth and their affection for me clashed. Though still hesitant and suspicious, I tried to learn their language of affection. My parents must have felt displaced. Having now experienced this mixing of families as a mother and mother-in-law, I am conscious of the territorial issues involved. But then I was innocently drawn to the Mitchell realm, to the spectacle and drama of their family. My parents could not compete. Who could?
I did not know that my parents and I would have so few years for connecting and for sharing family stories. I moved away to university and, soon after, my mother became ill. I was just twenty, my sister sixteen, when I was called home and told that mother had six months to live. Before university that fall I married Orm, my mother standing pale and thin beside me. I went off to university while she fought with doctors, insisting on radiation and chemotherapy. She won that fight—and a four-years’ grace from death. When I became pregnant with my first child, she said to me how strange it was that she, too, looked pregnant. I knew she meant that mine was life; hers was death.
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