Christmas 2009

My second Christmas without my husband. The first year alone is behind me, the traditional year of mourning. It was also a year of much uncertainty as we struggled to come to terms with what had happened and was happening to my husband.

Christmas was a very quiet Christmas this year. Each family celebrated alone with extended family from the other side or with friends. No big piles of gifts to be opened, no noisy visiting and laughing, no big piles of food to be prepared and devoured - we had brunch at the nursing home, came home for tea and visted with friends over tea and supper and all went home early. This morning we went back to the nursing home for coffee and a late breakfast, my daughter and her family went shopping and I came home to a lazy afternoon reading the paper, listening to music and then reorganizing the camera pictures taken in 2009 and updating the memory card for my husband's digital frame.

After the stresses of the last years, my sense of self is returning. I am now free to reestablish the connections with my own background, to be myself, to "do my own thing" in a way that I haven't had the freedom to do and be for many, many years. I am happy to reclaim the things I grew up taking for granted and have missed. It won't be the same as it was because I am different but I expect it will be better because I don't take it for granted any longer. I always knew I would go back when I had the opportunity, and so did my husband, which he seemed to begrudge me but also envy. Very strange! Why not appreciate and enjoy our differences instead of resenting them? Different is - just different - not necessarily better or worse. We learn more from our differences than from our samenesses, but too many people find differences threatening. Life is always interesting; always something new around the next bend, another new year coming, new experiences, new friends, a new life. My year of mourning has come to an end; it's time to live again.

The Hand of God

Somedays are worse than others. Memories come flooding back and almost overwhelm one with sadness. And then something unexpected happens and you are reminded of the hand of God reaching out to you when you most need it. Yesterday was one year since my husband left. My uncle, my mother's brother and the only uncle I have left, phoned to wish me a Merry Christmas and thank me for the Christmas letter. What a delight to hear his voice.

Today was one year since we buried my husband's sister and admitted him to the hospital. This morning a longtime friend of my husband's family from Alberta phoned to wish us a Merry Christmas and update us on her family news. What a lovely way to start my day. After dinner I went over to visit my husband but as he was absorbed in watching "Miracle on 34th. Street", I went downstairs and was wandering around when the chaplain came along and asked if I would like to go for coffee. She was a former student of my mother's and comes from my church background. Our coffee stretched into an hour as I talked through the difficulties of the last years and I knew it was no coincidence that we met in the hallway at that moment.

This day is almost at an end and I am ready for a new beginning. I have done what I could for my husband and it is time for me to move on and build a life of my own. Visiting the nursing home will still be part of that life but not to the extent that it has been. My life is elsewhere.

Looking Back/ Looking Ahead

Today is the beginning of a new year for me; the beginning of my second year alone. As I look back on our almost 44 years together, some things were good and some things could have been better. I married to keep my family, my husband married because he wanted family and that aspect of our marriage was good except that my husband found it difficult to accept my daughter as his own and she found this very hurtful. He also made it more difficult for me to maintain close contact with my first daughter because she was uncomfortable around him. He no longer stands between us because he is not at home with me.

My husband also married because he wanted his own social life. That turned out to be defined as people from his own background, church and family and tended to exclude people from my background, church and family. For years I maintained those connections alone and now they are what sustain me. My husband's church family is in crisis and his birth family has died except for one sister who dropped us shortly after our marriage.

My husband's family's opposition to his marriage made our life more difficult than it should have been and destroyed the trust that should be part of every marriage. Because he could not trust his mother, sisters and brother, he was also unable to trust his wife and so I never felt sure of him. That was too bad and quite unnecessary but that seemed to be the way that family operated. We also had financial difficulties during the first ten years of our marriage but eventually that also stabilized.

My husband was not one to express his thoughts and wasn't interested in hearing me express mine and so our relationship often left me feeling lonely. He seemed to me critical of many of the things I valued, my ethnic community, my church, my education, my taste in music, even my taste in clothes. Being critical was another trait that his family seemed to embody. Since my mother was a critical person, I was used to it to a certain extent, but also very sensitive to it. Now, my critics are gone and I can be myself, whatever that means.

That's the past and I am glad to be able to put it behind me. I now enjoy long evenings reading, listening to classical music and look forward to travelling in the future. I am reconnecting with friends and family and think life will be better in the new year for me than it has been for many years. The last four years particularly were a bit of an endurance test but I'm still here, and hope to be here for a while yet to enjoy - and just be!

O Christmas Tree

For 44 years my husband and the children decorated the Christmas tree with occasional help from me. This is the first time I have ever decorated my own tree alone and so I had to think about "What did I want?" New concept so I went out and bought new decorations and decorated a tree to my taste. My grandchildren enjoyed looking for all the new decorations and next year, I'll get some more special decorations. Christmas will never be the same again and although I don't look forward to Christmas this year, maybe at some time in the future I will again.

It's a year today since my sister-in-law died and set in motion the series of events that brought an end to my married life and changed life for me forever. My husband has forgotten that it's a year since his favourite sister died; he was more concerned with the fact that he hadn't won a prize in the beard growing contest which was judged at the nursing home today. He also wanted his beard shaved off as quickly as possible because he found it irritating. He no longer remembers one day from another or what date it is. His life is measured by events at the home, coffee social, wine club, church, sing song, bingo, movies, breakfast, dinner, supper, bedtime. He says he is happy and glad to be where he is. I am glad for that. My life doesn't concern him unless I miss his teatime too many times and forget to bring his cookies. His life has taken on a new rhythm. Mine is coming together more slowly but my life's opportunities are broadening instead of narrowing so that takes time to work through. In four days, it will be a year that I have been living alone. In times past, a year of mourning for a loved one was considered appropriate and then you took off the black armband, put away the black clothees and started to wear colour, dance and go out again. We no longer mourn openly because no one wants to be reminded of our grief, but the mourning still goes on inside.

Maybe the new year will be different, and better. This new way of life is becoming more familiar and more comfortable. Day by day, the shadow of the past is lightening and the future seems brighter now.

Christmas is a' coming!

Christmas has always been about excited children, gifts and a Christmas tree in our home. An abundance of candy and a big Christmas dinner were features added later to our celebrations. Intergenerational celebrations also became an intrinsic part of our traditions but as the older generation is slipping away, Christmas is going back to an emphasis on the little ones, as each of my families makes plans to celebrate Christmas in its own way. Piles of gifts, copious amounts of food, endless candy and sweets, these no longer excite me. Soft Christmas music, the twinkling treelights, children laughing and enjoying themselves, smiling friends and relaxed family members, these are the special things of Christmas for me now.

What are my memories? As a child, far from extended family, Christmas Day was always a bit of a downer. Early in the morning we opened our gifts, attended church service, had a cold lunch of pluma moos and buns and then were admonished to play quietly while mom and dad had a nap in the bedroom after a tiring month of preparing for the school and Sunday school Christmas festivities. Friends were visiting their grandparents and playing with their cousins but for us, no visiting was allowed because this was a family day and we were not part of any of the local families.

After I married, Christmas became the day for grandparents to indulge their grandchildren. The year I married, my youngest brother died and my other brother moved to England and so my children became the focus of Christmas for my parents. For them, there were decorations, cookies, candies, gifts, Christmas trees and plans that dated back to August of each year as my mother began her Christmas preparations. Christmas for my parents was synonomous with the presence of my children and so that became our annual Christmas tradition, our gift to my parents, as it were.

Until the year my father and my mother-in-law died and Christmas changed. No longer did we travel to my parents' home every Christmas; our home now became the meeting place as my mother and my husband's sister and husband became part of our new Christmas tradition. A big Christmas supper, piles of gifts that my mother and in-laws enjoyed watching the children open and lots of cookies and candies became essential to our Christmas celebrations.

Now, it's time for new traditions. We're giving Christmas back to the children to celebrate as they choose. The generation for whom Christmas was totally child centered is gone; piles of gifts and mountains of food for those who grew up doing without, will no longer be the highlight of our family Christmasses. Time to enjoy each others company, time to relax, sit back and just be - together with family, friends, whoever needs to be together at this time - that's going to be Christmas and perhaps it will end up being the nicest kind of Christmas yet. It will still be child centered, but the child will be the child born in Bethlehem, not the children of today whom we shower with things but hardly have time to be with and for. We only have time, and that is the most precious gift of all that we can give each other at Christmas. Merry Christmas to all!

Moving On!

This has been our home for 27 years, come January, and now I'll be moving on. There were a lot of happy memories here and the willow tree in the front yard was a favourite tea time place. Then the city came and cut it down because a neighbour, who had long since moved away, didn't like the way the willow shed its branches when the wind blew.

I was 27 when I got married so I have lived in this house as long as I had lived my whole life before I married. I moved about twenty times before I got married and we moved another ten or so times in the first ten years of our marriage. I wanted a home, a place where I could stay and not be constantly on the move. From this house I went to work and from this house I retired. Here we entertained friends from the United Church we both attended and here we stopped entertaining friends when Clarence's sister and her husband became a part of our lives one year after we bought this house. Our lives changed and began to revolve around Clarence's brother and his sister and there was no longer time or energy to entertain friends. From this house, I returned to the church I had grown up in as a child and finally became a member and felt I was where I belonged. The United Church was going through growing pains and had decided it could not tolerate intolerance, not realizing the irony of its stance and thereby discouraging those who would have chosen a gentler way. I no longer fit and my husband was uncomfortable with my being there, in "his church", so I went back to "my church". Here in this house we had family suppers every month to celebrate birthdays, holidays and other special occasions and here in this house, my husband fell one night and was never the same again for ten long, question filled years, until he fell again the night before his sister's funeral and never came back to this house again. Now I will be leaving and moving on, not only to a new place to live but to a new way of living. It's time to say, "Good-bye, house" as I said good-by to so many others over the years but none as much a part of our married life together as this one. There were many special times and times that could have been better. We said good-bye to our first grandson at nine weeks old from this house. The marks in the carpet from his carbed were there long after he was buried in the prairie graveyard beside the grandfather he had never met. A bride and a groom left this house to start their own families and three young mothers celebrated the christening of their babies from this house. Those were good times. The furniture is almost all gone now; only what's going with me is still here. The guest rooms, the family room downstairs, all are empty and waiting for new owners to fill them with life. The bookcases are empty, the pictures are down from the wall and packed away and the patio furniture and outdoor fountain have gone to new homes, as has also the dining room table around which we gathered so often. It's been a long good-bye, a long knowing that we had to go, and a shorter knowing that I would be going alone. Alone, but not alone. I'll take the good memories with me and leave the others behind. It's only a house, only a yard and garden, and only furniture that I'm leaving. I'm taking "ME" with me and will continue to, wherever I may go from here.

Introvert/Extrovert?

Thought I wasn't coming back, did you? Well, here I am again, still. I feel like a pillow that has been sat upon too long and at long last, everyone has gone home and I am free to expand to my own natural form again.

When I was a child, the most frequent admonishment I heard was "Sie nicht so utjeloaten!" roughly translated as "Don't be so extroverted." My mother was an introvert of the most introverted kind, my mother-in-law was introverted and so was my husband's older sister to whom he was very close. None of them were good at expressing their feelings or accepting themselves as they were. My husband married me because I was different from his mother and then spent the rest of our married life trying to fit me into the mold of the women he was familiar with, repressed, quiet, unable to speak up for themselves or cope in a world where there wasn't a male protector to look after them. When I expressed opinions, he tried to shush me, my clothes were too bright colored for his taste, my friends not to his taste and so it went. He flourished in an environment where he could socialize, be the center of attention as an actor in dinner theatre and hold court at family dinners where his stories and his voice dominated. I was, however, to take the place of the adoring mother and sister who had raised him and was forever, a square peg in a round hole. Now, he no longer speaks and I am free, free at last to be an extrovert if that is indeed who I am. Do introverts love red, and large social gatherings, and laughter and loud music? Do introverts want to meet everyone in the place and put a name on everyone in the congregation at church? Do introverts speak up regularly in public meetings and feel quite comfortable leading meetings and suggesting ideas? I had always considered myself an introvert until I read a book about young children and how they express their introversion and extroversion very early in life. I may have been mislabelled by others who tried to mold me into their own acceptable pattern. Good-bye, introvert! Hello, ME! World, here I come. The real me is emerging, somewhat hesitantly, but definitely, no more watching words or actions in case I offend my husband or his family, no more concern over what will my mother think. I am my own person now. I hope my children always feel free to be their own persons as well. I could wish nothing better for them because they are not me and I am not them. One of them is an extrovert, (the one who always clashed with her father) and the other two are introverts. The introverts have a difficult time understanding the extrovert but oh, how I love watching her swing dance with her husband. That's living!

Remembrance Day

I kept hoping our life together would improve - when we no longer had major financial worries, when my husband's family was no longer actively attacking us, when my husband's siblings and mother reestablished contact with him, when we were settled in a permanent home -but although all these happened, the trust had been broken and the love and intimacy that I had hoped would grow out of our initial friendship never materialized. I waited for things to get better and then they got worse.

The job on the Goodale Farm enabled us to get ahead financially but when the responsiblity for the farm was transferred from the Crop Science Department to the Veterinary Medicine Department, the focus of research and the priorities changed and my husband was seen as no longer the right person for the manager job. We moved to the farm in 1976 and by 1980, I could see the situation deteriorating and , after seven years at home with the family, accepted a job offer as an auditor at Revenue Canada to provide financial security in case my husband's job ended. By 1983, he suffered his first major injury since our marriage and it was time to get off the farm. In January, 1983, we bought a house in Saskatoon, and in 1985, my husband left the University farm.

That same fall, a friend from church offered him a temporary job with Agriculture Canada which turned into a ten year position and which he enjoyed. In 1984, my husband's oldest sister and her husband moved to a home a few blocks from us and my husband focused his energies on rebuilding his relationship with his sister. Our friends were neglected as he emphasized socialization with family. By 1987, I was finding the socializing only with one couple that didn't really communicate with me, oppressive and began attending the church of my childhood for a break. My husband asked if that meant I was leaving him, as he was aware that his negative attitude toward me in order to gain favour with his sister was affecting me but my goal was to get some relief from his critical attitude towards me and towards my oldest daughter, with whom he had avoided speaking since she was about 14 and becoming a typical teenager. He was also very critical of the church I had grown up in which my daughter had also joined and married into.

We entertained a lot because in company my husband was sociable, outgoing and friendly while in the family he was critical, uncommunicative and unhelpful with anything to do with housework. This was different from the first twenty years of our marriage but seemed to be a reaction to trying to please his birth family at the same time as maintaining the priviledges of his own wife and children. He doted on his two younger children, who could do no wrong in his eyes, and had only criticism for our oldest daughter, who could seemingly do no right in his eyes.

Because my husband had never come to terms with his past, it continued to haunt him and prevented him from fully enjoying the present. He wasn't able to accept what his mother and siblings had done to him and so had to project that rejection on to others who turned out to be me and my daughter. His rejection took a passive form of little criticisms, lack of praise, lack of physical warmth, flirting with other women and hugging and kissing them in front of me and generally behaving in a way that made me want to limit the amount of time I spent with him. Many a time I drove up to the front door and wished I could just drive away and never come back but it wouldn't have made my life better. He didn't actually want me to leave but he didn't want to trust me either in case I proved in the long run to be untrustworthy.

We spent twenty five years together in our house in Saskatoon. Our sharing became limited to eating together, breakfast, morning coffee, lunch, afternoon tea, supper and conversation centered around "What would you like to eat?" as it was the safest topic and one that wouldn't elicit critical remarks or putdown comments. In 1999, my husband landed in hospital with a parasite picked up in bad water and was never the same again as his mind had been affected. As micro-vascular disease gradually took his skills and abilities, our lives became even more narrowed. Death began to encroach on the family - one brother in 2000, the next one in 2004, my mother in 2005, a brother-in-law in 2006 and finally, my husband's oldest sister,now a widow,in 2008.

The family conflict that had plagued my husband for so long was done. He no longer had to please anyone but himself. The day after his sister's death he raised a toast at the supper table "To us", he said. His health was not good, he was having trouble walking but we looked forward to peaceful and happy times with the family. But it was too late. The stress of the previous years had been too much and he could not be free. Four days after the death of his sister, my husband had a stroke, fell and cracked a hip, and left our home never to return.

He is contented now. He says he loves it in the nursing home, they couldn't treat him better. He can do nothing for himself anymore except feed himself if the meat is cut for him. He visits with the other residents, is cheerful with the staff and watches TV and the pictures on his digital frame to while away the time. Today was Remembrance Day and a friend asked him if he was sad because a tear was rolling down his cheek. "Yes", he replied but didn't specify what made him sad. His mother, his brother and his brother-in-law were all active Legion members so perhaps he was remembering them or perhaps it was the occasion. It was a very beautiful service. The theme of the service was peace and at last he seems to have found peace.

I am still married but I no longer have a husband, is what I tell people. Actually, I lost him already in 2002 when I also lost my mother. The bodies were still there but the roles they had played in my life they were no longer able to play.

So now I am free. I have paid the debt to society that resulted from the birth of my first child. Why I owed a debt to society, I am not sure, but it seems to have been put behind me. Everyone else has forgotten, it's not so easy for me to forget but I am trying.

I would not have chosen the life I have lived but I would not choose to change it because it changed me and I am at peace with the person I have become. I enjoy friendship with my children and my children-in-law, have a circle of friends and relatives that extends to South America and across Canada, and enjoy a variety of activities. Today I am alive and healthy and can enjoy life. I have no guarantees for tomorrow but I also have no regrets. It's been good and I have never been bored. Before I married my husband, I told him that although he might not always be happy, he would never be bored. I've kept my promises, what more can I say?

Time to sign off. I have things to do, new people to meet and new things to learn. What's done is done and can't be undone. The future is now.

Cold War

The peaceful life as a wife and mother that I had hoped for didn't materialize. Within two weeks of our marriage, I was sick again and it took weeks for me to recover. Within a month of our marriage, we were moving into a new community and had taken on more debt in order to buy a house there. When we moved out of my husband's house in Lanigan, his mother informed him that he had broken her heart. She tried to hold on to her children's love by putting a guilt trip on each one, playing one off against the other and giving money to her grandchildren whenever they came to visit. She expected her children to earn her love and was quick to reject them if them didn't toe the line she had drawn for them. None of her children ever called her on the games she played with them because they all felt guilty for resenting her. Although she was basically a sociable, intelligent and loving woman, she had become bitter through the illness and death of her husband and the financial struggles they had faced throughout their marriage. She felt life had been unfair to her and took out her resentments on my husband and me because she could.

Three months after our marriage, my youngest brother was killed in a car accident. I felt very alone with my grief as my husband tended to run from problems as he had done all his life in order to survive. Because he had never dealt with his own griefs, he could not help me with mine. His reaction to loss had always been to injure himself accidentally, the gravity of the accident coinciding with the greatness of his grief. With recurring illness, I found it difficult to keep up with the daily routines of housework and looking after a child and a year and five months after our marriage, I had heart surgery to repair a scarred mitral valve in my heart. Two weeks after the surgery, I was pregnant with our first child.

One year and eight months after our marriage, my husband's oldest sister's husband died. She was left virtually penniless at the age of 48. She and her husband had been supportive of our marriage but after her husband's death, she fell in line with her mother, brother and sister in becoming very critical of us although she still tried to put on an appearance of being our friend to our face. It became very difficult for her to stay friends to our face and run us down behind our backs when she was with her mother and sister. This inability to stand up to her mother and sister and brother made her relationship with us uneasy for the rest of her life. She loved her brother although she wouldn't stand up for him but tolerated me only because I was living with her brother.

Our daughter was born two years and three months after our marriage. Three years after our marriage we moved to a rented farm but there was no sale for the crops we were growing. We survived on garden produce, raised our own chickens, had a milk cow and sold cream for groceries. My parents brought a box of food every time they came to visit and bought winter clothes for the children because there was no money coming in from farming. My husband sold his mobile feed business almost four years after we were married, but unfortunately, the banker talked him into co-signing the loan for the two young men who purchased his business and machine. The bank promised to notify my husband immediately if the purchasers missed a payment. Instead, seven years later the bank came after my husband for more money than the orignal purchasers had borrowed because they had wrecked the machine, and had missed payments for years.

Shortly after my husband's brother-in-law died, my husband's family proceeded against him with a court case. We had already made arrangements to move to the farm so money that should have gone to groceries went to a lawyer instead, who, unfortunately, put no effort into reaching a settlement or trying to mediate the situation. In court, five years after our marriage, he basically left my husband to dangle in the breeze. With the court case pending, we left the farm a year after moving to the farm and moved to Davidson where I had obtained a job. The first winter in Davidson, my husband stayed home and babysat our two-year old daughter and the second winter, he lived in Saskatoon and attended Vocational Agriculture. After two years in Davidson, I got a job in Saskatoon and we were able to live together once again. Three months after my husband graduated, our son was born. Almost immediately after his graduation, my huband got a job with the University of Saskatchewan and we were able to buy a house, using money I had received from my parents as birthday and Christmas gifts over the years as a down payment.

During the spring of 1976, the bank came after my husband for payment of the debt incurred by the purchasers of his mobile feed mill. My husband was making $400 a month and our house payments were $100 a month. We had three children to look after and the bank wanted $10,000. We were afraid we would lose everything after finally finding a bit of security. However, a lawyer whom we knew through the church arranged settlement with the bank for $1,000, the sum of our savings, and life finally became more peaceful.

My husband's oldest brother, who had been overseas with the Armed Forces in Germany, returned to Canada and on learning what had transpired in his absence, contacted my husband and encouraged him to visit. In October, 1976, my husband started a new job as farm manager for the University Goodale Farm which came with a house and a wage more than twice what he had been receiving. We sold our house in Saskatoon and moved to the farm where we remained for the next nine years. In 1977, I visited my brother and his wife in Vancouver and made a side trip to Vancouver Island to look up the brother-in-law who had contacted my husband. After receiving their assurance that they would welcome a visit from my husband, he began making regular annual visits to his brother which continued until the death of his brother in December, 2000.

With the encouragement of friends in Lanigan, my husband reestablished contact with his mother although she never mentioned what she had done to him in the past. She also avoided speaking to me and if I spoke to her, she would give her answer facing someone else. My husband's oldest sister remarried a year after her first husband died and this couple also visited occasionally. The brother and sister who had instigated the court case against my husband, however, refused to talk to him for the remainder of their lives and whenever they came to visit their sister in Saskatoon, they never came near our house.

In 1984, we moved back to Saskatoon and in the fall of 1985, my husband started a job with Agriculture Canada where he continued until 1996. His oldest sister and her husband purchased a house a few blocks from us in 1984 where they remained until they died. They were at our home for supper at least once a month all those years and celebrated Christmas with us every year from 1989, when my husband's mother died, until they both died. Since they had no children, our family became their family but in all those years, I was always the interloper, the one who had been the cause of all their family problems, tolerated but only because of my husband. The burden of the past was too much to overcome. Having seen how quick her mother and siblings were to reject the one who had cared for his mother for 36 years, she was afraid to stand up for what was right because she didn't want to be rejected also. In order to live with herself, and to continue to enjoy the favour and friendship of her mother, her sister and brother, it was easier to pretend that her husband's wife had broken up the family rather than that they had tried to break up our marriage. Taking the easy way out can make life very hard in the long run.

Target Practice

It had been my husband's dream to own a farm of his own. When his father died in 1943, my husband dropped out of school at age 13 to help on the farm. The farm consisted of one section of rented land worked with horse machinery. The six children in the family left the farm over the years to get jobs and marry, leaving my husband to look after his mother on the farm. In 1961, the farm came up for sale but my husband was unable to get a loan to purchase the farm, so he purchased a house in town and invested in a mobile feed mill with a friend.

When living together with my mother-in-law turned out to not be a viable option, we purchased a house in Nokomis and my husband left his mother in his house, telling her it was her home for the rest of her life and he would look after the property taxes and repairs for the house. By the following year, her son and two of her daughters had convinced her that she needed to get the house into her own name in case her son dropped dead and I would inherit the house and evict her. In response, my husband and I drew up a detailed life lease agreement with a lawyer, detailing the promises he had made to her. Her daughter advised her not to sign the document because there would be nothing for her other children to inherit in this case and persuaded her instead to pursue a court case against her son.

Four months after my surgery and after the death of my husband's oldest sister's husband, my husband informed me that he had signed a document giving his mother joint title to his house. I asked him if he wished to give his mother joint title to his house. When his answer was no, I said that in that case I wouldn't sign the homestead rights. His mother then decided to pursue a court case against my husband on the basis that he had used her money to buy the house in Lanigan. Since it had taken my husband and his brothers two years to pay off the hospital bills after his father's death, the horse machinery on the farm had been discarded and replaced with tractor operated machinery, the mother never took an active part in farming as she didn't have a driver's license and her education had ended at Grade Six in Scotland and the proceeds from the furniture sold at the final farm auction in 1961 as well as grain proceeds on a regular basis had gone into her bank account, this was totally untrue. Her daughter and her son-in-law hired a lawyer who took the case to Family Court where the normal rules of evidence were not followed. When the lawyer, after my mother-in-law had perjured herself by claiming her son never gave her any money, asked my husband if his mother was a liar and he unwisely replied, "I suppose so." the judge called an end to the hearing and ordered me to sign the homestead rights away.

I had received a summons to appear in court but as soon as court began, the lawyer admitted there was no reason for me to be there so the summons was dismissed. The purpose of the summons was of course to compel me to sign the homestead rights paper eventually. When I received the summons the previous spring, I wrote a lenthy letter to my husband's sister who he considered to be his friend and whom he trusted. I explained that farming was not going well with a ten bushel quota in three years, we were struggling financially and I was going to have to find a permanent job to support my young family and my husband. I suspected that without her help, the court case against my husband could not be proceeding but the family was pretending that the mother was doing this alone. I put a sentence into my seven page letter that referred to my mother-in-law by a derogatory name and said I was not willing to go to work to support her. I expected the bait would be irresistible to the family members who were actively involved in this court case and who wanted nothing more than to find fault with me. That was precisely what occurred and so we were able to determine that two of my husband's sisters and one brother were the instigators of the court case. As we left the court room that September day of 1969, we had lost the battle but won the war. It was the first time my husband had ever stood up to his mother, who had already cost him three long term relationships and a chance at the RCMP career that had been his dream.

What do you do with half a house, shared with someone who has no money? We had emptied my husband's bank account to pay off machinery bills, anticipating an attempt by his mother to garnishee his bank account. We moved the car into my name since I needed it for the travelling job I had obtained with the Davidson School Unit as a Unit Librarian. After my mother-in-law's unsuccessful attempts to have my husband pay for her lawyer bills, she had the lawyer garnishee his bank account, taking the whole twenty-five dollars that was in it. She then sent the sheriff out to get our car, but being warned by the Unit Secretary, I left town to do some work in the neighbouring town of Viscount and the sheriff didn't make another attempt. My mother-in-law wanted my husband to put a new furnace in the house for her but he had no motivation to do this. Finally, a lawyer in Davidson made arrangements for her to pay my husband $1200 for the house which had cost him $4800 and which his sisters thought was worth $10,000. She then owned the house outright and was responsible for the rest of her life for all the expenses which she had thought she shouldn't have to look after. The son and daughter who had promised over the years to take her in if ever her youngest son should marry, were also off the hook as they had no desire to live with her or provide any support for her. Culture shock indeed for someone who came from an environment where no one would go to court and it was assumed that children would lovingly care for their parents throughout their lives.

My husband enrolled in University as a mature student and graduated with a Diploma in Vocational Agriculture. His dream of owning his own farm had been shattered but he farmed for the rest of his life and was adequately paid for his work. As his confidence grew and he became successful, his mother and oldest sister renewed association with him, after not speaking to him for ten years, but I became the guilty one who had caused all the dissension and family problems since before I appeared on the scene, everyone, except my husband, was happy with the way the family was operating. On the other hand, none of my husband's family members ever again tried to tell him what to do or to take advantage of him in any way. He became their golden boy and I became the kicking post, a position I held firmly until all of them were deceased.

I sometimes wonder. What happens when we meet on the other side, or do we? Shall we all be transformed into something better than we were on earth, or do we have to come back to earth to work through our shortcomings until we reach some stage of perfection? And yet, when we look into the past of each of the people who made our lives hell on earth for a while, you can understand why they did what they did. The only thing you cannot do is agree with it.

Marriage

In September, 1964, I left for Library School in Toronto with two suitcases. In December, I came home for Christmas and the man who had asked me in June to marry him, gave me an engagement ring. We made plans to marry in July in Saskatoon which was my parents' choice of place and church.

In May, I returned to Lanigan from Toronto. When the bus stopped at Lanigan, there was only one person waiting so I realized this must be the person I had promised to marry. In the year away, I had forgotten what he looked like. The invitations were out so although I was not enthusiastic about marrying someone I hardly knew who was also quite a bit older than I was, from a different culture and with quite a different personality from my own, I decided that I had previously felt it would work out, it would be best to go ahead.

I asked my husband to be why he wanted to marry me, since he knew me no better than I knew him. He had lived with his mother all his life and said he wanted a home, a family and a social life of his own. That seemed to be something I thought I could provide so we were married ten days after my return from Toronto.

After a three day honeymoon in Waskesui, we returned to Lanigan to find the house in a terrible mess. I had to unpack wedding gifts in order for us to sleep that night. The next week was spent cleaning, painting, tiling and getting some second hand furniture to make the house livable. Two and a half weeks after we were married, we went to Osler to visit my parents and to celebrate my youngest brother's 23rd. birthday. When we got back to Lanigan, my mother-in-law had arrived back from her visit to her son in Sexsmith, Alberta and was furious that we hadn't been at the bus to take her the two blocks to her home. She had been cool towards me ever since she found out we were getting married but I had assumed that she had doubts about my character since I was an unwed mother and would warm up as she found I was doing a good job of looking after her son. It turned out she was much more concerned that her son should be looking after her and treated me as a divorced woman might treat the woman who stole her husband. Her daughter said her mother was going through the same grief she went through when her husband died.

A month after our marriage, with my mother-in-law still not speaking to me, we purchased a house in Nokomis and moved to Nokomis, about twenty-five miles from Lanigan, with our young daughter. I had had undiagnosed chronic rheumatic fever since my first year of teaching and became ill again the a week and a half after our marriage with all the extra cleaning and stress associated with getting our house in Lanigan livable. With each recurring bout of rheumatic fever, I had less energy and spent much time each day in bed, getting up to make breakfast and lunch for myself and my daughter and supper for my husband.

A year after our marriage, we decided to take a holiday trip to visit my husband's brother in Sexsmith since he had not come to our wedding and I had not yet met him. My mother-in-law asked to come with us so we changed our tenting plans to motelling it and drove to Sexsmith. I had again come down with a sore throat but had heard that persons who had had rheumatic fever could get free penicillin. I went to the doctor who referred me to a specialist in Saskatoon to be seen in August of 1966. While we were in Sexsmith, my mother-in-law used the opportunity to complain about us to her son looking for sympathy by making false statements about her furniture. After we arrived home, my husband's brother phoned him and scolded him for the things his mother claimed, falsely, that we had done. The brother made it plain that he did not wish to be friends with us and would not speak to us or associate with us until he requested a deathbed reconciliation through his son in 2003, rather too late for any relationship to be rebuilt.

The referral to the Saskatoon specialist resulted in my having heart surgery on November 1 of that year which gave me a second lease on life. As well, our first daughter was born nine and a half months after the surgery, not really approved therapy for recovery from heart surgery but all went well.

During my time in hospital, my husband's sisters and his mother put pressure on him to sign over the house that he owned in Lanigan into joint names with himself and his mother, presumably to provide her with a secure home in case something should happen to him. The transfer, however, could not be completed because he was married and as his wife, I had homestead rights and would have to sign these away. His family had made no objections to our marriage before the fact, in which case, I would have called it off. Instead, they waited until after our marriage to try and break it up. Had it not been for the birth of our daughter so soon after my surgery, they could well have succeeded.

Survival

I was free, but faced with problems I had no idea how to solve. Two weeks after my child was born, I was called into court. The purpose of the court was to have me sign away all rights to my child. When I was unwilling to sign, the court was adjourned for another six weeks during which time I was not told where my child was and was allowed no access to her.

On the morning of the second court hearing, my mother came up to the room where I was living and told me she had bought a crib and would look after my baby for me if I wished to keep her. So we went back to the court and told the judge I had a home for my daughter. I made arrangements to pick up my daughter after summer school was over and in August, 1962, I saw my daughter for the first time since she was born.

My mother had resigned her teaching job in June when she heard about the birth of my daughter with the intention of applying for a teaching job in southern Saskatchewan, in other words, running away from the situation. By August, however, she had decided to look after her grandchild instead.

For the next two years, I taught high school German at Lanigan while my parents looked after my child. She was a happy, outgoing child and charmed her grandparents with her manner and they in turn, spoiled her outrageously as grandparents are wont to do rather than bringing her up as parents would. For the first year, my mother stayed home and looked after her granddaughter, but the following year she returned to teaching and hired local young women to look after her. The young women of the 1960's weren't as compliant as the village girls that my mother had hired in the 1940's and she went through a number of housekeepers in that year. In August of 1964, with no new housekeeper hired and school soon to begin, a dear friend offered to take my daughter in for the year while I attended Library School in Toronto.

Teaching had provided me with sufficient finances to pay for my daughter's care but after two years, I was asked to resign from my teaching position because "my discipline" was not good enough. This was the customary reason used to remove a teacher when the school board was unwilling to give the teacher tenure. A couple of local people who were aware that I had a daughter couldn't resist spreading gossip which resulted in a mentally unbalanced colleague writing condemnatory letters to all the school board members about me, hoping to get me out of town so that she could apply for my boarding place.

The same week that I was asked to resign, I received a scholarship to attend Library School and so my next direction was clear. That September I arrived in Toronto and began my studies at the University of Toronto School of Library Science.

Meanwhile, local gossip had also inspired local bachelors to check me out and after marriage proposals from three of them, I accepted the one that my landlord and landlady recommended and agreed to return after my Library School year to marry him. I wasn't enthusiastic about the idea of marriage after seeing what my parents' marriage was like, but it appeared to be the only way I would be able to get another job, support and live with my own child and live a relatively peaceful life.

Childbirth

No one is pregnant forever; it just seems that way. That morning I had stomach cramps. I went to class, wondered what to do next, so after dinner I went downtown to Bethany House, the Salvation Army Home for unwed mothers, and talked to the lady in charge. I hadn't talked to anyone previously except "him". She asked me when I was due - I didn't tell her I was in labor - so she said there was nothing they could do for me - I should make an appointment with my doctor and when the time came, I should go to the Emergency Department of the City Hospital. Then I walked home.

At 8:30 I phoned the father of my child for a ride to the hospital. He told me to take a taxi, he had his car up on blocks with all the wheels off (In June?). (I had already spent many months, like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland practising believing the unbelievable, but still not very good at it.) At 10:30, I phoned him again and he drove me to the hospital. It was getting dark by then. He didn't walk me to the door; he said he had a very painful plantar's wart and couldn't walk. I managed to get the door open by myself, booked in and at 12:30 a.m., my daughter was born. The doctor held her up on his hand and showed her to me. I couldn't touch her and I wasn't allowed to see her again after that.

Later that day the social welfare worker came to my bed and gave me some papers to sign. You have no way of looking after your child, she said. We will look after her. When I went to the nursery and asked to see her, I was refused. That was Wednesday. I went home Friday for my brother's birthday. No one commented on my sudden loss of weight.

Two weeks later, two ministers from the church my parents had said I should join instead of the one I grew up in, came to see me. I was now to make a public confession in a special church meeting of my "sin". They also went to see my parents who expressed shock at hearing of their grandchild.

My father drove me to the church in a town twenty miles away. I read my confession and my former Sunday School teacher told me what a blessing it had been. Another word to add to my list of words to be suspicious of. (There we go with a preposition at the end of a sentence, again!)

When I came home after the ministers' visit to my parents, my mother's first question was if I had "talked to anyone". When I ensured her I hadn't, she expressed relief. I had almost died, I had done through hell, but she didn't ask about that. She told me, with disgust, I was obviously just like my father. We never had another conversation. For the rest of my life, I avoided being alone with my mother, and by the time I was unavoidably alone with her, she was blind and deaf and in a wheelchair and it didn't really matter any more.

I had felt unloved as a child and now, unloved as an adult. The kittens on which I poured affection died, my dog had to be given away, and now, I had something of my very own to love, but it also was threatened. But I was finally free - I had survived a situation that my mother couldn't face and her facade of "Do what I say and don't ask why" had crumbled. She was no longer the perfect authority and I wasn't like her - according to her own words. Hallelujah!

Crabs

He said he didn't get the letter I sent him that summer, trying to break it off. It must have gone to his uncle of the same name ( the imaginary one, that is, son of the grandmother who unexpectedly came to visit when we had made arrangements to go out to my parents' home to meet). When he came back to town after the summer away, he brought two girlfriends, one attending University and one attending Teachers' College. He also brought crabs. That was the low point for me. In December, I went for a walk in the snow to the ski jump on a Sunday. I wasn't going to walk back. I wondered how long it would take to freeze to death. I could see no hope for a future for myself. However, I was carrying a child and death for me meant death for the child which I had no right to decide. So I walked back because there's always another day to die if it becomes too hard to live.

He had suggested abortion, or adoption. A friend who had an inconvenient pregnancy died in October at the hands of her husband, a pre-med student who successfully completed the abortion but botched the anaesthetic. That ended his career and her life. Would the child have had red hair like him? Did it not also have a right to live?

I always thought I would be incapable of murder. By the time I saw the last of him, I knew better, but it was not an innocent child I would have cheerfully murdered - slowly! It's important to learn to know oneself, and avoid situations that invite one to be what one does not wish to become. And so I learned what love is not.

I liked German music. For Christmas he gave me a record set of Mahler's Weltschmerz. I had been thinking more along the lines of German folk and dance music but the Weltschmerz was really appropriate, even if unintended on his part, since he knew no German. Can't stand Mahler since then.

And the crabs were all part of it. It was before bikini shaves and Brazilians. You got a special shampoo and shaved, twice, ten days apart. He claimed he picked them up off bedsheets in a hotel. Perhaps. Sometimes you don't want more details. Shame was a concept that was foreign to him as was honesty. Trust me, he said, so I added that phrase to my list of red flags for trouble and learned that trust comes from what you do, not what you say.

It was a long winter. I wrote things like "I walked with death and an unborn child" and "Death angel, stop looking over my shoulder" as I struggled to survive and give a chance to the new life that had been entrusted to my care. I gained five pounds and bought a size ten skirt at the Saan store. Friends and family looked the other way and I had no money for medical care. My heart, literally and figuratively, was permanently scarred as stress, unbeknownst to me, brought a recurrence of rheumatic fever that long winter.

Choices and Freedom

We make choices in life - or do we? Are we free to choose, and how free? My mother was a reluctant participant in life and after ten years of marriage, cooking, cleaning, children, divorce was an idea she toyed with. Get more education, get a better paying job, don't talk to other women, students or colleagues, maybe I should get a divorce! My father cried that night in the teacherage bedroom we all shared, and life became less safe. I was nine and couldn't wait for the day I could get away from the tension and unhappiness surrounding me at home. Behind the door in the living room, hidden in a book, I passed away the hours, days and years until I could be free.

At 17 I left home to go to Teachers' College. Not my choice but the only one offered to me. No money to take a University course; girls just get married and raise children, we save our money to put your brothers through school. Mother made the decisions - her mother sent her to Normal School and teaching became her life - so it was to be for me. I couldn't wait to be done with the mind numbing routines of school, the regimentation, always a square peg in a round hole. I didn't want others to tell me what to do and I had no desire to do that to anyone else.
I endured Teachers' College and hated teaching.

So began the years of trying to leave the classroom permanently behind me. I was on the way, get an Arts degree and then Library School and a safe retreat to the wonderful world of books.

And then the rules, and the patterns of behavior I had been taught, failed me. It was a new world and I floundered, as I tried to get this person who had forced himself on me out of my life. "I'll kill myself. I can't live without you." he lamented when I wanted him to go and leave me alone. I had felt such suicidal despair as a child in my parents' home. I couldn't let myself be responsible for doing this to another person, could I?

It wasn't my choice to get pregnant. How many times in the year and a half that I knew him? Five or six times - I used to know exactly, when and where. Never consensual but always the French safe, until the last time when I had tried again to break it off with him again. Was it deliberate on his part? Getting even? Did he have a sociopathic personality? I only knew him a year and a half, not long enough to say definitely he did or didn't have but still, a year and a half too long.

Not to worry. We would get married, he assured me. The day the results came out he cried and said he couldn't marry me because he had a responsibility to his other girlfriends who were new to the city that year. How touching, how unbelievable, how hilarious. Later that year, I walked down the street crying and laughing at the same time as I wondered how to care for my unborn child and thought of his incredible sense of "responsibility". Periodically throughout that year he would say, "Maybe we should get married". He only came to see me after dark and then at last, it was summer and he was gone, finally and permanently.

That last night of summer school he came to my door and whispered, "Good-bye, my love, good-bye." And I stood on the other side of the screen door and thought, "You can't even be original. He was quoting from my angry good-bye letter to him.

Safety

Safety! It's an illusion, isn't it? And of all illusions, what's safe about a French safe? Apparently he always carried them, and 50 years ago that was not something everyone did, certainly not anyone I had ever met up with. Why did he do 'what he did' , I asked? It was my overwhelming irresistibility and instant love on his part, so he claimed. Now if that wasn't straight out of a storybook. Ah! But storybooks are not real life.

Real life was something I had had very little exposure to. (There we go, ending a sentence with a preposition. But as Churchill said upon being reprimanded for doing the same, "Up with this I will not put." So, there!) My mother chose to retreat from life, it not being to her liking, and built a sheltered life for herself in a Grade Two classroom where she was always very much in control and she could feel safe. At home, she continued to be the authority, distant and not to be questioned and if "It says so in the book." it was not to be questioned. The book might be the Holy Book or a textbook, or some other book? It was in the book, wasn't it?

But what we long for in our dreams and what life is really like - now that was not in the book, or at least not any book I was permitted access to. The facts of life were limited to "What every young woman should know", a curiosity provided to my mother by my grandmother and passed on to me by my mother. Inadequate and misleading, later reinforced by well meaning teachers who assured us that every word of the Bible is true and meant to be taken literally. A woman who has "slept with" a man, albeit unwillingly, must marry him or be stoned as stands in Leviticus. No decent man will "have" a woman who is no longer "pure".

Rules intended to keep us safe, not ever to be questioned, protecting us from real life, from "the English" surrounding us, who were not to be trusted, who were not like "us". God was on our side, protecting us, keeping us safe, if we didn't question the rules (and kept away from the English).

If I had ignored him when he said "Hello" to me that first day. Then I would have been safe - or would I?

REMEMBERING

Here I am, tiptoeing through cyberspace, with millions of others. Alone in a crowd, nobody knows I'm here; noone is following me. Am I safe? How long is it since I felt safe? I can't remember.

I don't remember an October like this. It's snowing today and it's been snowing for a week. Will it ever quit? It all started in October. I used to look forward to October, that was my birthday month and special because my mother always made sure I had a birthday party. Her mother put on a birthday party for her 21st. birthday, the first one she ever had, and invited 100 people, at least so mom said. Mom always complained about that party, too many people, not really about her, but she always put on a birthday party for each of us and birthdays were very important to her.

It was the second month of my first (and only) year at university. I was taking a catch up course in High School French. Life was exciting and full of endless opportunity. I was putting myself through so I worked ten hours a week at the library for $1 an hour, cooked chicken noodle soup from chicken backs and wings, learned to eat lamb and fish, which were cheap and ate at the MUB once a week for $.40 (if you didn't buy the meat dish). Coffee at $.10 was a luxury (besides, I didn't drink coffee).

When a fellow student walked home with me from class and asked me out, I felt I had arrived. The storybooks I had devoured since I was a child were coming true. After a pleasant evening, he wanted to show me pictures of his family. I had never heard of pick-up lines and lying was a sin; the devil and his followers told lies and were easily recognizable by their unpleasant manners, horns and tail. Or were they?

Seems there is more than one kind of tail, liars can seem charming and "No means No!" wasn't enough. So ended the dream and began the nightmare.

That's enough remembering for one day, isn't it? It's still snowing.

Tradition

I have a bun in the oven, a Scotch currant bun, that is, in my gas oven. That was traditional in my husband's family and has nothing to do with buns (or Scotch, for that matter; his mother belonged to a temperance young people's group in Scotland). Where did that expression come from anyway? It's so cutesy and totally does not describe the experience. Must have been invented by a male.

Spent the afternoon with friends sorting memories, picking them up one by one, looking at them and setting them aside. But some memories are too heavy to pick up so one keeps on stumbling over them and bruising oneself. Maybe, in time, those memories can be set aside as well but now it's too soon. It's only been 50 years. So how long does one have to live to be able to forget? Or should we remember? It's sometimes hard to remember to forget.

Good Night, my someone, good night!

Why Me, Lord?

Today I agreed to help a friend set up a blog. How do I get myself into these things? Of course, it's made for an interesting life. But who needs interesting? Shouldn't I be at the stage of life where I can sit back in my rocking chair (Oops, it's out in my son's shop collecting dust because his wife gets nauseous in a rocking chair. You figure that out.) knitting something or another? I know there must be some knitting needles around here somewhere.

Meanwhile, my friend wants to post pictures and I am supposed to explain how to do this. Hmm! Well, let's give it a try. (And surely no one has so little to do with their time that they would actually waste it reading this drivel. At least, I'm hoping.) Well, there I am. There's a picture of me. You take your choice as to which one I am.

That's enough learning for one day. I'm off to learn about alliums now, and drink some coffee.

Cheers!