Marriage

Time seems to stand still and everything seems a bit unreal.  My head knows the end is near but my heart doesn't want to believe it.  45 years +. 

We were married on a Monday, on Tuesday we had our wedding pictures taken and left for a three day honeymoon to Waskesui Park north of Prince Albert.  It was cold and we had practically the whole park to ourselves.  It was lovely.  Friday we returned to attend my 10 year high school reunion and that evening we got back to our married home to find the whole house in a mess and not a clean sheet in the whole place to sleep on.  I opened some wedding presents to find clean sheets for the night and we spent the next two weeks cleaning, painting and repairing to make the place fit to bring a child into.

His mother came back on my brother's birthday which we had gone to my parents' home to celebrate. It was the last time I saw him alive.  She was furious that we hadn't been there to take her the two blocks from the bus depot to her home, she was furious that we had cleaned and painted and got replacement furniture while she was away, and she was furious that my three year old daughter had been sleeping in her bed while she was away because there was no other place for her to sleep.  She refused to speak to me and didn't speak to me for the rest of her life, another 24 years.  After 10 days, we moved to a house we had purchased in the neighbouring town and began a happier stage in our life. 

Unfortunately, the cleaning and stress had brought on another attack of rheumatic fever and I was unable to do much work in our new home.  I kept my child fed and made supper every day and the rest of the time, I rested.

One year after our marriage, we planned a vacation trip to northern Alberta to visit my husband's brother and his family who had not been able to attend our wedding because they weren't done seeding.  We planned to tent until my husband's mother asked to come with us.  We didn't want to subject a 70 year old lady to tenting so we motelled it.  I had expected to spend at most 2 days at my brother-in-law's but he assumed my husband was there to help him with farm work and so we spent the next 10 days working on the farm and visiting for a short time after supper each day.

On the way home, my mother-in-law wasn't speaking to either of us but provided no explanation for her ire.  About a week after we arrived home, my husband's brother phoned him and berated him for mistreating his mother.  Although my husband explained that the accusations his mother had made against him were false, there was no apology from his brother nor did he seem to care about the discrepancy.  At Christmas we sent gifts to the children as my husband's older sister had been doing for years and received a letter in return asking us to send no more gifts.  That was our last correspondence from my husband's brother until he was on his death bed 37 years later.

The month after our return from Alberta, I was diagnosed with a serious heart problem and booked for heart surgery in November. While I was in the hospital, my husband's mother and sister pressured him into signing half of his house over to his mother's name.  He had given her the right to live in his house for the rest of her life, had put the offer into writing as a legal document and had told her he would look after the taxes and the maintenance since she had no income except the old age pension.  She rejected the legal document and did not sign it, according to the lawyer, on the advice of her daughter, who said she wouldn't have an inheritance to leave her children unless she got the house into her own name, quite true, of course.

In February, my husband's brother-in-law died and his widow went to live with her mother.  In February, my husband told me about the title transfer which could not be completed because I had homestead rights.  I asked him if it was his wish to transfer the house title to his mother.  His answer was "NO" and so I said, "Then I won't sign."  The next month I found out I was pregnant and five months later, our first daughter was born.  My husband was over the moon and couldn't wait to tell all his friends.  His mother's deflating response was, "I'm glad that's over."

It had been my husband's life-long dream to own his own farm.  When our daughter was eight months old, we took out a three year lease on a section of land with a view to eventually purchasing the farm.  We had a 10 bushel quota in the next three years so the family allowance and cream cheques paid our groceries in the winter and we lived off the garden in the summer.  There wasn't much money around so my parents brought boxes of groceries whenever they came to visit and winter clothes for the children in the fall. 

My husband's family brought a court case, accusing my husband of using his mother's money to buy his house.  The family had lived on rented farm land and when the father died in the 1940's, after seven years of illness, it took the teen-age boys two years to pay off the hospital bills.  In time, they replaced the horses and the horse machinery with a tractor, truck and combine.  The mother never worked outside the home and expected her young sons to support her.  She had no money to buy more than her own clothes.  Her son provided all her living expenses, including the groceries because she had nothing.

We spent some money that should have been spent on groceries on a lawyer, hoping for mediation and some common sense but the family had a one track mind.  My husband would be brought to heel or else.

Four years after our marriage, with two young children to look after, I went to work to support the family.  We took defensive steps, emptying the bank accout by paying off what we could on our farm loans, transferring the car license to my name and distancing ourselves from the oldest sister, now a widow, who was assisting her mother, brother and other sister in their attack on my husband. 

We left the farm and moved to a town where I could find employment and my husband applied to attend Vocational Agriculture at the University.  Eventually, the family succeeded in taking my husband to family court where his mother perjured herself and my husband, whose only records were in the house his mother was living in, had no defense.  The judge believed the lovely old lady with the saintly face and the Scottish brogue, supported by her family members and ordered me to sign the homestead rights.  It was the first time in his life that my husband had stood up for his own rights.

Standing up and losing was the best thing that could have happened because in order to make any improvements and to avoid losing the house, my mother-in-law ended up having to buy my husband out.  She also had to pay her own lawyer bills which she had persuaded the judge, my husband should pay.  She garnisheed his bank account and got $25.  She sent the sheriff after the car, which I needed for my job, but the secretary warned me and I left town for the afternoon.  A lawyer in our new town made a settlement for us and we didn't see or hear from my husband's mother for another five years.  The family never tried to push my husband around again.  They also never forgave me.  Since they hadn't impressed me as the kind of people whose friendship I valued, this didn't particularly trouble me.

My husband finished his Diploma course, got a job at the University, we had a son and bought a house and life gradually improved.  By eleven years after we were married, he had a good position with the University, we had our family of three children, a church home, and a circle of friends as well as a good relationship with cousins of my husband's with whom he established contact after his immediate family turned on him.