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!
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Monday, October 19, 2009
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.
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.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, October 16, 2009
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?
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?
Thursday, October 15, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
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!
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
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!
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