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.
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