Grandmothers, I see you

I’ve been chasing my three grandmothers through history of late, awed by their resiliency.

Their early adulthoods were in the 1910s. Then and now, it was a hard life for anyone without money. Young women in Canada in my grandmothers’ era had little choice but to attach themselves to a man for economic survival.

I see that truth in my 17-year-old Romanian grandmother’s sad eyes in her wedding-day photo, married off rather scandalously to a Chinese man in Moose Jaw, Sask. while the rest of her family hived off to Alberta with one less mouth to feed.

I feel it in my heart for my 27-year-old grandmother, leaving children and home country behind to travel to Canada for a better future with a man married to her sister just months before, only to be abruptly paired with her after sister and babe died in childbirth. 

I’m overwhelmed by it as I learn the tragic story of my third grandmother, whose intellectual disability left her like a lamb to the wolves.

It’s still tough to be a woman, but it was brutal back in those years. Laws and processes weren’t just ineffective, they were actively discriminatory, with a particular emphasis on rendering women economically dependent and unable to prevent pregnancy. (Today, we call that “traditional values.”)

No woman coming from an impoverished background in those years had a remote expectation of a good, safe or predictable life. My grandmothers had baby after baby, and for the most part lived hard in the poor parts of town with difficult men who scratched out a living.

I see my young grandmothers emerging these days from the censuses and various documents that an Ancestry subscription can bring you – brief glimpses of people captured at a moment in time, with the amateur family sleuth's task to then knit those moments into something more substantial.

I’ve got a newspaper archive subscription, too, but people like my grandmothers don't tend to make the newspapers. Canada’s community newspaper archives are treasure troves of local history, but women generally show up only at their weddings, when they’re dead, attending occasional society teas if they're a wealthier sort, or hidden under their husband’s names (“Mrs. Richard Booth”). 

Grandmothers can also end up neglected on the family-tree side of things, I’m finding. A lot of people tend to do trees following out the male line – the surname – while the other half of the genetic and social equation goes wanting. The tradition of women taking the man’s surname when they marry adds mud to the water.

But the story takes shape as you follow out the threads, and the tiny bits weave into bigger bits. And slowly, the haze lifts and there they are: the grandmothers.

Mine emerge as children and young women, glimpsed in a moment of their regular life that was captured in the public record. Here they are living with their parents and siblings at this address or that; here they are being baptized, getting married, waiting at the border.

I see two of them getting on boats that will bring them to Canada, but am left to imagine how they ever got to that boat in the first place.

I see another one living what I can only hope was a sheltered, good life with her aging parents in Ontario, until one parent died and the other one moved away, and she was married off and moved to Saskatoon.

All of my grandmothers ended up widows. Having lived for most of their lives as “housewives” raising long lines of children, they faced even more poverty in their final years unless family members stepped up.

My one grandmother did fall in love again after her husband died, but she couldn’t marry a second time without losing the small veterans’ pension she received owing to her first husband's military service. Then her common-law husband died, too, and she was alone.

She and another grandmother frequently lived for extended periods of time at our house, staying at the houses of their various children on an ever-changing schedule, packed off here or there when somebody grew weary of their presence. If only I had thought to ask all the questions that burn in my mind these days. Grandmother, how did you endure?

My third grandmother had the saddest of endings, institutionalized and surrounded by people in her last days who knew so little of her that her birthplace and mother’s name are listed as “unknowns” on her death certificate. She was buried without headstone or marker in a pauper’s grave in Toronto.

(The search for her, so invisible and forgotten, has taught me that there are a lot of exciting ways to follow out an ancestral mystery these days. But be careful what you wish for.)

I thank my grandmothers for giving their lives to generations of women who they will never know. I hope that they’d be happy to see us now, earning money and no longer at the mercy of our sex lives, at least for the most part.

Men still rule the world, of course. But at least there’s public discourse now – and even an effective use of law from time to time - around women not being abused, exploited, underpaid, in harm’s way, alone, discriminated against, etc. There was none of that for my grandmothers.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been outraged on others’ behalf for all the grand unfairness in this world. I now see that my grandmothers have perhaps given me that fire. Their stories give me more energy for the fight.

How much better would their lives be if my grandmothers were coming of age now? Well, that’s an interesting question to reflect on.

Two of my grandmothers were from impoverished immigrant families desperate to find work in a strange new land. The other had an intellectual disability at a time when people like her either died on the street or were locked up.

A hundred years have gone by since then, and the changes in society have been extraordinary. But life is still far from good for people like my grandmothers.

No wonder moms can't get anything done

   

I've been back in a life with young children again for the last six weeks, helping out with three of our grandsons for a couple of months while their parents get up to various things. There’s much that is quite lovely about it, but being able or willing to do my usual amount of writing is not one of them.

    This new life has helped me see that in fact, I had become quite used to having time alone for writing and reflecting. But when you’re living in a house with children, forget it.

    At this moment, my 14-year-old grandson is madly playing some iPod game a mere metre away from me. The 11-year-old is steps away on the other side, charging his own iPod. Not more than 10 minutes ago, I had to stop everything to half-drag, half-carry the 5-year-old to the bathroom and then bed after he fell asleep on the couch watching “Free Birds.”

    There are magical grandma moments in there, for sure. But for the purpose of getting writing done, this life is totally unworkable. I am deeply sympathetic all over again with all the harried young parents out there puzzling over how it is that even one child can throw everything else about your life into a disorganized spin. It's all coming back to me now.

    Mostly what it means for me is dry times for my blog. I still think about things I want to write about, but knowing that I will struggle to clear three hours straight to put my thoughts together just kind of takes the fun out of it. I'm also not playing my accordion anywhere near as faithfully as is my habit, and even getting in the morning yoga is a struggle unless I can get up and at 'em by 6 a.m. before everyone else wakes up.

    But more creative days will come. Soon enough, the afternoon when we went looking for tadpoles will turn into a warm family anecdote about time spent together, rather than a memory of what was actually a fairly chaotic little walk to a muddy ditch that ended with the youngest grandson falling into a creek and getting soaked.

    Someday I’ll recall delightedly the time three of us walked through the Lazo bird sanctuary listening to the song sparrows, a walk I used to love as a young woman in the Comox Valley. I think by then I will have forgotten that in truth I could barely hear a bird cheep for all the noise my young companions were making, and that I had to constantly admonish them not to whack the heads off the tall ferns.

    Filling the well, Paul calls it. It's about experiencing something that isn't necessarily fun, at least not all the time, but is an Important Life Period nonetheless. Filling the well is very good for writers, who need a lot of experiences to avoid becoming dull people always writing about the same old thing. 

     My well runneth over. Thanks, kids.