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.