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.