for mothers

Lately I've been looking at old photos. I stare into the faces of my grandmothers, my mom and my mother-in-law and think about motherhood. Why we do it. How we deal with it. How it makes us.

Mothers

You are

the you you used to be

the you you could have been

the you you will never be

the you you feared you would become

the you you could still be

You are the person others see and the person you see in your mind's eye

You are the life you live out loud

and

the inner life no one will ever know

You are your childhood

You are your imperfect memories

You are the stories you were told and the stories no one would tell and the stories you tell others

You are the things you think you know and the lessons you never learned

You are the places you've been and the places you go in your mind

You are the art on your walls

You are the flowers in your garden

You are the song in your heart

You are the tears you cry when no one hears

You are the dreams you lived and the dreams that died and the dreams that may still come true

You are your hopes and fears for your children

You are everything your mother taught you 

You are everything you teach your children, whether you mean to or not

You are in every breath they take and every choice they make.

Sometimes... 

you feel that you are nothing to anyone

But always...

you are everything to someone.

Nicola vs Chair: Part Two

Just before we moved I started restoring an old platform rocker. You might have read about it. If not, here's the link.

I did not complete this job before we moved. The chair sat in the garage in the new house for almost another year before I got back to it. Another coat of paint.  Still a little pink bleeding though on one arm. Len installed the high quality seat made by our friends Bruce and Kelly. It fit like a glove and is rock solid. I bought upholstery fabric, didn't like it, sold it and bought something else. I ordered foam, made a cushion and reupholstered the back using a staple gun. Then added the trim. 

When it was all done,  I sat down. And I smiled. It is a comfortable chair.

But I won't say I was 100% satisfied. There were drips on the paint. There's still a pinky undertone. I did not paint the underside which is still rough and reddish brown. I did a pretty amateurish job on the upholstery. But it was serviceable. The biggest problem was that it felt like you were going to topple over backwards when you sat in it.

Our friends Glenn and Sheila came for a visit. We made sure they didn't sit in the chair. But Len did. As we were enjoying our cocktails on the veranda, there was a popping sound followed by a crash as Len went straight over backwards, narrowly avoiding punching a hole through the screen door. Somehow he managed to keep his drink aloft like a pro.

Closer investigation revealed that one of the springs had snapped. Back the chair went to the garage. New springs were ordered. In the meantime, I found almost the identical chair- in a much better state of repair- in Calgary for $90. We could have bought it, but we didn't. Stubbornly, I wanted to fix the chair. I needed to fix the chair. It had become a symbol to me. But a symbol of what?

The springs arrived, costing almost the same as a better version of the chair. And they weren't the same as the old springs.  Len discovered the old screws holding the springs to the chair did not match. And they were painted to the chair. With some mineral spirits and elbow grease, they were removed. After a few missteps, the new springs were attached- two per side, much less bendy than the originals and with six screws per side.  Much better than one loose rusty spring and two mismatched screws.

Looking more closely at the underside of the chair, we could see evidence of previous repairs. Blocks of plywood had been screwed in to hold the bits together. A couple dozen rusty old tacks had held down the two layers of upholstery. A mysterious wire seemed to be holding one leg in place although it seemed unnecessary. We left it where it was.

I continue to ponder what the chair means to me. I know it has something to do with preserving the past in a new place and something to do with creating a home.

In many countries people don't move far from where they were born. Their memories and their history surrounds them. Their sense of place and where they belong is set. For better or worse, their history is inescapable. In Canada though? Most of us have come from somewhere else.  We carry our history and geography inside us-invisible to the world- although the result may bleed through. The stories of our ancestors, their successes and joys, their tragedies and injustices- both endured and inflicted-are known only to them. Our sense of who we are and where we belong is something we make for ourselves. This fact of our existence may be freeing, but it's also sad. 

I imagine when the chair was new. I imagine a family bringing it to a pioneer home in the Peace Country. I think about the first person who sat on it, perhaps smiling as I did. I imagine the woman of the house standing back and admiring her new furniture with a sense of completion, maybe feeling that now, she had arrived.  

Since that first family owned the chair, generations of people have seen something in it worth preserving. With its mismatched screws and bits of plywood and mysterious wire, it has survived many transitions. It is part of the past yet it continues on into the future. Just as we humans move forward, carrying our past with its secrets and joys and broken bits held tenuously together. Knowing what we know, we try to be our best selves wherever we are.

My great-grandparents' farm near Brantford

Our Dawson Creek house

Our Slave Lake house

So here we are in our new home, in a town with dozens of temporary residents in fancy vacation homes. We are making friends in this place where every day is a holiday and who you are in another place and time doesn't count for much. What counts is who you are now and what you're going to do today. 

Winter came. We moved the chair from the veranda to the bedroom where our new grandson would sleep. The house-now fully furnished with bits and pieces cobbled together - is home. 

I am home.

You've Come a Long Way, Baby

 K, I don't know who needs to hear this, but International Women's' Day is a SOCIALIST day. It's not a feel-good celebration of how cool women are. It's about the rights of women and how they have been and continue to be denied for women around the world. Girls that can't go to school. Women who don't get promoted because they put family first. Women who aren't allowed out in public without a man. Women who don't get paid the same as men. Women who afraid to run for office because of misogyny. 

All day today I have seen posts like "Here's my daughter, I am so proud of her." or "Here's my mom, I loved her so much". 

Yeah, ok. 

Cool.

I love my daughters. 

I loved my mom and my grandmothers. 

it's good to celebrate the sisterhood we feel with other women.

But let's think about what this day is supposed to be about. 

International Women's' Day was established by the Socialist Party of America as National Women's' Day in the US in 1909. It expanded to Europe the next year and became International Women's' Day in 1911. The Russians took up the cause in 1913. In those years, it was closely tied to demands for universal suffrage for women as well as demands for equal pay, the right to run for public office, improved working conditions and equal rights for women. 

Women have fought for their rights in Canada and around the world for generations. There have been many gains but the battle is far from done. We can't just sit around being all proud of being female. We need to keep up the fight.

Grandmother Marion, back row on the far left.

Granny Muriel Fryer

In my own family, my maternal grandmother Jane Marion McNaught was accepted into nursing school but instead followed her family to northern Alberta where she taught school and married, then worked in a munitions factory in the UK before she was legally allowed to vote. My paternal grandmother Muriel Frances Fryer came from England to Canada where she became a nurse and matron of a hospital before she could vote. She went on to give birth to seven children and ran a soup kitchen out of her Vancouver home during the Depression. Following the death of her husband, she lied about her age so she could keep nursing. 

My mom was an excellent student who wanted to be an accountant but was told "that's a man's job." Three university degrees later, she was a teacher in small town Alberta. 

Mom getting her Bachelor of Commerce degree.

They were happy and fulfilled women, but who knows who they might have become if barriers to their dreams were not put in their way because of their gender? Who knows what they might have contributed to society?

We have two daughters. One holds a PhD from Cambridge and works for Oxford University. The other is a geophysicist with a Masters degree who lives and works as a scientist in Victoria BC. They are smart, hard working and successful. The opportunities they have had are far better than those of their grandmother and great grandmothers. But I would be lying if I said there have not been hurdles to their success based on the fact they are women. 

I wrote about all of this before. But now I see what seems to be happening with this day, and I'm getting a bit annoyed. Are people just not getting the point?

Who else remembers Virginia Slims? A cigarette marketed to women. Their ads co-opted the women's civil rights movement in the US by equating a woman's right to smoke to the civil rights women had attained through concerted effort and protest. Will International Women's Day go the same way? Just some watered down day celebrating women in a generic feel-good way? If that's all it is, what is the point?

Generations of women have struggled and fought to gain equality with men. In Canada, we have come a long way, much further than places like Afghanistan. But there are still miles to go, brothers and sisters. Miles to go before we reach true equality around the world.

The world is hard. There are barriers everywhere that prevent people from reaching their potential. International Women's Day is one way we can promote the issues facing women by not just celebrating their achievements but also acknowledging the struggles women face around the world.  By joining in the fight for all people. Let's not diminish these very real issues by making it a meaningless Hallmark holiday.