Ground work

Foundation: Groundwork. An underlying basis for something, the lowest weight-bearing part of a building, the action of founding an institution or organization.

–Oxford Dictionary

HOMES

My family home

We settled into a street-side basement apartment at College and Beverley, which we later dubbed “Fertility Manor,” and quickly became accustomed to the screech of the street car stopping outside our window and the clang of the paper box morning and evening. Charles was articling for the bar and I was happily writing publicity for Trinity College. We entertained friends at a bridge table set for four, sitting on two lovely antique chairs we had received as wedding presents, mixed in with used furniture from The Crippled Civilians (now called Goodwill). I was already a decent cook and knew how to stretch a dollar to the last penny, and quickly found the Kensington Market, then mostly Jewish. Friday before sundown was the time to shop; prices were slashed, since few of the shops had refrigerated storage and everything had to be sold before the Sabbath. I explored the network of narrow roads and alleyways, produce spilling out of doorways helter-skelter onto sidewalks, racks of pants and shirts and dresses, boards on milk crates laden with everything from pots and pans, hardware, home-baking, preserves and pickles, hand knit clothing in season. There were foods I didn’t recognize or had never eaten, like egg plants, weird looking cabbages, and dozens of cheeses; huge carp swimming in tanks, chickens waiting for ritual slaughter: “Always use the feet when you make soup, makes it richer.”

I discovered a shopping ritual. My first day in the market I found a store I liked and bought what I needed there, but the woman serving me kept giving me odd looks and I wondered why; was I strangely dressed? Young and showing my inexperience in the choices I made? not Jewish and so an object of curiosity? Carrying my purchases I wandered around the rest of the market and saw women going from store to store, inspecting the goods for sale, feeling a grapefruit, poking a lettuce, turning potatoes and squash over to examine the undersides. Animated conversations made it clear that questions and bargaining were expected. I had never done anything like that before and felt completely out of my depth, but I learned. Those women taught me, taking my first attempts seriously. I was a young woman learning the domestic ropes and respected for that.

But I was so naïve in other ways that when I felt sick a few months later I thought I had a persistent flu! My friend down the hall, similarly afflicted, clued me in. (My mother’s only reference to sex, after marriage of course, was to recommend a book. Bodies were never.… How could I know about birth control, “natural” or otherwise? No such articles ever appeared in magazines.) Everyone congratulated us, but I was I was so sick I had to leave the job I was just getting good at, with an income we needed and with broader horizons so much more appealing than staying at home, alone all day with a baby. Fortunately, I fell in love with Meg when she was born in July, 1953, when I was 23.

I walked the market warren wheeling six-weeks-old Meg in her big, grandparent-gifted carriage on our first shopping trip together. At store after store, the owner left her doorway to peer admiringly at the round little face, comment on how healthy she looked, on the quality of her clothes, and the carriage – (that’s what grandparents did, equip the baby). They were eager for information that I found myself wanting to tell: about the birth and breast feeding: details that my parents and friends didn’t really want to hear – the messy, earthy, body stuff. When I had finished my shopping rounds on that first trip, the bottom of the carriage, where Meg’s feet didn’t yet reach, was filled with gifts: fruit, a cabbage, pieces of cheese, homemade jam and chili sauce, mittens for the winter. I felt a well-earned pride I hadn’t fully known ’til then.

We moved to Don Mills just before Michael was born two years later in November. The area was one of the first planned suburbs, with several styles of houses on curving streets, instead of cookie cutter boxes in straight rows. But the interiors reminded me of the instructions on children’s toys, the ones you put together the night before Christmas, which said: “some assembly required.” We painted the rooms, bought and installed light fixtures and appliances, leveled and sodded the muddy front and back yards - even turning up pieces of discarded construction machinery. After two worrisome miscarriages Hilary was happily welcomed in the spring of 1958, to the delight of her older siblings, and baptized by Uncle Philip at St. Thomas’s Church, where I had helped with the foundation plantings and was a member of the Altar Guild.

One of the marvelous things about being a parent is how much children and parents teach each other as they grow together. I learned to open up to my own feelings as I attended to theirs, to be more physically daring when they clamoured for me to toboggan down hills with them, or jump off rafts. I reveled in being playful, …In learning how to play … Yes, and savoured sharing the music and art I loved with them: clapping small hands to Mozart and Bach, listening to the old records we took up to the cottage; being amazed and delighted at the paintings they rented every month from the Art Gallery Rental (which I helped to found and organize in its early years). Ordinarily shy and reticent, I had no trouble being assertive on my children’s behalf as they wended their way through the sometimes inane incompetencies of the school system. Stories about these years would fill a book. Another book. A different book. (Early Journal)

While the children thrived in Don Mills, I did not do as well. Suburban life was not for me. I still see some of the good friends I made in those years but I felt cut off from any other kind of life than being a wife and mother. Mostly mother. After qualifying, Charles worked long hours in his father’s law firm, rarely home before seven. During the days neighbourhoods were woman-centered; the only men you ever saw were shop owners and delivery men. I missed the hustle of downtown city streets, the ethnic mix and camaraderie of men and women, the easy access to cultural life with bookstores, concerts, art galleries, coffee shops. I longed for a break, and eventually we were able to buy an ancient car, a little green Prefect. I had qualified for a driver’s license when I was pregnant with Meg, and now this rattly tin can on wheels became my saviour, enabling me to drive my mother to and from our house so that she could give me the precious gift of a day in the city once a week. Without the children. We were trapped for several days by water from hurricane Hazel in 1954, accentuating the isolation. With parental insistence and help we moved back to the city in 1958 to an old house whose basic renovations were so extensive we had no money for more furniture. I would joke that we were pioneering a spacious, oriental look with the lavish use of cushions for chairs, and that there should be a sign in the hall with an arrow pointing to “new wiring and plumbing.” John was an unexpected but joyous house-warming gift, born in 1959 in my thirtieth year. Four children in eight years, anchor and life-long joy.

The wife of a professional man was duty-bound to do volunteer work to help her husband in his career. My mother-in-law “spoke” to her friends in the Junior League, assuming I would be pleased, but the thought appalled me. I knew they did good work, but well-meaning as the league was, I was not interested in the social caché. Not a joiner, then or now, I decided that if I must volunteer in an organization I wanted it to be one in which I could work to fill in gaps in my education and meet people who shared my interests in art and music as well as social issues. So I chose the Art Gallery (of Toronto, then), Toronto’s fledgling Opera Company and The Children’s Aid. I enjoyed rubbing minds with the women I met, and my eyes were opened to different understandings of Toronto’s upper- and under-classes. The work demanded a lot of energy and time for, unlike many of my volunteer colleagues, I had no regular household services to help with the fund-raising dinner parties, frequent luncheon meetings and my particular job of organizing the volunteer rota. My diplomatic skills were honed learning how to politely persuade Mrs. X that when her husband wanted her to accompany him to New York “at the last minute, I didn’t know,” she must find a substitute for her shift. “I’m sure you can, you’re so good at….” As well, with my sister living in France, I was the one to follow in my mother’s and grandmother’s footsteps to continue the traditions of family feast days. I didn’t seem to have a spare moment, but I too wanted birthdays to be special for my children; and Christmas magical. Which meant making jam and chili sauce and pickles and marathon baking sessions at night, when everyone was in bed and there was no danger of children being burned by hot jelly ladled into scalding jars lifted from clattering kettles. When my father retired he and my mother took a much anticipated, carefully saved for, trip to Europe. Afterwards, my father repaired everything in the house that needed fixing. Then the bottom fell out of his world … he had nothing to do … had never not worked … and he needed all the help we could give him to even imagine another kind of life, and then to learn how to live it. He came over almost every afternoon I was at home to talk and talk … and talk:

“I don’t feel old,” he would say. “I’m not old!”

“No,” I would urge, “but look at all the people who think they are. What about starting a seniors group, you could be such a catalyst, get people involved doing things they’ve put off while they were working, or volunteering.”

He did that, grumbling all the while that he “wasn’t a senior,” and hated that word (I do too now). And he also founded a group of retired small business men who consulted with big business leaders about the needs of the small business sector. At his seventy-fifth birthday party he raised his glass in response to our toast and told us all that he had had “ten of the best years of my life.” Although unsaid, it was clear that he had rediscovered some of the passion and playfulness inhibited by the stress of struggling through two wars and the Depression. His death a year later in 1967 took his pension with him, and I helped support my mother, and then cared for her as her heart condition worsened. Meg and Michael helped out on weekends, Hilary and John went over to her apartment every Friday after school to run errands and help with the vacuuming. Afterwards they would sit down to tea and cookies and a rousing game of cards, sharing memories of their grandfather, whose card playing high jinks were legendary. I was working full time by then and went over only in the evenings, getting to know her warmth, her humour and her vulnerabilities. She was so sick and so brave; we were grateful for those few years of tender closeness before she died in 1970, so young, at sixty-seven. For months afterwards her grandchildren wandered about lost on Friday afternoons and weekends.

THOUGHTS

Years later, when I was struggling to keep my head above water, I realized just how adventuresome my parents had been, each in their own way. I hadn’t just inherited their fears, inhibitions and family injunctions; they had also gifted me a never–say-die spirit, along with their grit and determination. And, as I was to discover, I inherited the cost of those admirable characteristics. Willpower can be a two edged sword: on one side, courage, determination and fortitude, on the other, powering over all physical needs and desires in order to survive – with the unintended consequences of blocked intuition, judgement, and spontaneity.

UNDERGROUND

It was sometime during her later years that my mother told me my grandmother’s story. I saw how the forced cutting of a wife’s long, sensuous hair symbolized the fear of woman’s sexuality and the authoritarian cruelty and gendered imbalance of power in the family she grew up in. The story spoke of the kinds of choices involved with marriage, career and motherhood, choices which my mother saw, yet did not see, were possible. But at the time I did not reflect on my grandmother’s story in terms of the choices I thought were available to me, or the way I was living my life.

I read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), understood and appreciated the light she shed on the stereotypes of womanhood so vividly pictured in women’s magazines like The Ladies home Journal. I could laugh ruefully at stories about the perfect wife greeting her husband with cocktails, gourmet dinner and clean, shiny children ready for bed; wince at the images of seductress and perfect hostess. There were articles about how to deal with depression (take on a new interest), nervous breakdowns (don’t let anyone know), a husband’s adultery (make yourself more attractive and he won’t be tempted to stray). As Rosemary Neering says in The Canadian Housewife: An Affectionate History: “If someone thinks it was golden, they think it’s good to have little choice.”

I could see the contradictions; recognize the impossibility of being all these people in one person – and the cost of trying. But I was enmeshed in the down and dirty, physically hard work, emotionally consuming long hours and endless responsibilities of being a loving, supportive wife, caring mother and competent home-keeper. All without betraying any sign of fatigue, tension -

…or boredom.

I had no time or energy, physical, mental or emotional, to link my intellectual understanding of Friedan’s work to a deeper recognition of how much my life fitted the popular images I laughed at, in order to find the questions which could explore how I got there, or how I could extricate myself. And so my Grandmother’s story as a representation of “where it had come from” faded from conscious memory, seemingly unconnected to my daily life.

HOMES

However, the telling of her story, not just the unspoken ways my mother had lived it, Friedan’s exposure in print of the foolishly impossible view – every man’s dream of mother/whore wife – of woman’s proper role, my chagrined seeing myself, however fleetingly, in the images of “ladies” magazines, were all seeds sown at an auspicious time. My parent’s deaths had left holes in my heart. My adolescent children were becoming more independent so that child care and housework no longer filled all of my days. Spaces were opening, inwards and outwards, for me to allow my own desires – and the mounting tension and creeping misery in our family - to come to the surface. My husband was what is still known as a traditional father, working long hours in his father’s law firm during and after his lengthy and conflict-filled struggle to qualify professionally. Those were years when I encouraged, cajoled and defended him through examination phobia, procrastination and binge drinking, excusing his fears and behaviour as being grounded in his father’s alcoholism and the distracted neglect of such families. He was proud of his children when they were born, but took little interest in their daily activities and didn’t seem to realize how much they loved him and wanted him to be involved in their lives. Soon, weekend drinking became daily, he would be “sick” when he came home, would sit without eating at dinner, morose and sullen, or go immediately to bed. Our children learned not to expect him to take them to hockey games or to turn up at recitals and school events; and then learned to be relieved when he didn’t, because he embarrassed them.

But they never stopped wanting him to, hoping that somehow …

Friends stopped asking us out, I suppose for the same reason, although no one actually said anything. Indifference, neglect, and then ever more erratic behaviour: violence, gambling, other women, professional censure - and his father, who would never confront him, (how could he, he was a drunk himself) urging me:

 “You must do something, anything, to help him straighten out. Surely by now you must know how to do this.”

My father-in-law’s family and professional associates, all of whom depended on him for financial survival, covered up his own drinking. They had well-honed strategies that would be the envy of any management consultant today to allow my father-in-law to feel and act as if he were invulnerable, and believe that other people were responsible for getting him through his life.

            Theirs was a family who preferred not to ask questions if they thought they were not going to like the answers.

I couldn’t seem to do the same for Charles. He fled to the West Indies, threatening to kill himself. No wonder! He had emptied our bank accounts to pay his gambling debts and we had absolutely no money. So I pleaded with him to come home – how could I possibly manage with no money? I was frightened and knew that a salesgirl’s salary would never support us. He was admitted to hospital with a “nervous breakdown,” was fired, in spite of his father being the head of the firm.

That must have been some confrontation among the partners!

We became financially dependent on his father, to whom I was obliged to submit weekly accounts of every penny I spent. As if I was a brainless, frivolous kept woman, had never earned or managed money, hadn’t already been managing the household finances for a long time.

Ah! Now, you can finally feel angry when you remember those degrading years.

Then, I couldn’t afford it.

Charles was admitted to hospital again, and again, on and on … still drinking. For him that “was not the problem.” And maybe it wasn’t. There were years of psychotherapy, all of us in family therapy, me in counselling to help me cope with it all. The coping strategies I learned growing up had not included dealing with physical or emotional violence. I had never been spanked, or even slapped. There were family meetings where the children and I tried to engage him, but he saw our needs and desires as insupportable demands. Close relationships had never come easily to him. Given his unstable condition they must have seemed almost intolerable. But I remember, with horror, the children’s poignant attempts to reach out to him, showing him their vulnerability and yearning. To no avail.

STANDING UP

For a long time I did a good job of hiding it all from family and friends – “the best ostrich in the neighbourhood” I called myself later (I wasn’t the only woman hiding family secrets). But the children were developing chronic physical ailments and disturbing emotional symptoms, had nightmares, their school marks were slipping. It slowly dawned on me that we never had more than family for dinner, without the usual addition of their friends around the table. I missed the fun and the conversation, wanted to know why and asked the children, casually at first:

“You haven’t had anyone for dinner in a long time?”

Faces turned away, they didn’t want to hurt my feelings. Prodded a little more, and then more, until:

“Well, you know … Dad … Well, he’s not very welcoming is he? Not much fun, just sitting there, looking awful, not saying anything, or being rude … or being upstairs and not coming down for dinner at all. And sometimes you get … you know … sort of tense. It’s embarrassing.”

I was devastated. I had believed that in spite of everything I could somehow make sure that their home was a warm, welcoming place for them and for their friends. Achingly I saw how diminished and demeaned they … and now I … felt and realized that this kind of caring – covering up, like my mother-in-law, trying to make the best of it, like my mother and father – made me complicit in perpetuating a miserable and humiliating situation. For my and our children’s sake I knew I would have to leave the man whose alcoholism had betrayed his heart and frozen my love for him.

FAMILY VALUES

Theirs is not a family

drawn closer in crisis.

Rather, they fragment, splitting

apart.

The rents in their hearts

are covered. No words.

Life goes on, as

usual.

And what is that? Behind

closed doors the whisper of pens,

the scrape of paper tissues.

At dinner

smiles and nods.

Dishes pass round, forks

lifted, inquiries of the day’s events.

            But never question eyes unmet

Each alone, layered shale

over anger and grief

until

sitting is stiff, walking,

bent over stones leaning

into the wind around islands.

I would soon have to make my own way but I didn’t have the professional skills that would enable me to make enough money to support my children. When I was offered a part-time job as a lay counsellor at a university I jumped at the chance, thinking that with all the children in school I could manage job and home. After a year the director encouraged me to qualify professionally and over the next two years I studied every night; housework and homework finished, stories read, the day adventures and problems attended to and everyone asleep. The closer I got to independence the nastier and more obstructive Charles became, but I earned a Masters degree in Counselling and Education, ignoring chronic back pain, stomach problems and the occasional bout of rapid heartbeat. I had been well trained to downplay physical discomfort and uneasy feelings. Denial rested in the assumption that as soon as I got my degree there would be less stress and my symptoms would calm down and stop nagging me. I forged my caregiving skills into a profession, as my mother and Grandmother had done. However, unlike them I could be married. A former colleague at the Children’s Aid offered me a counselling position in the Ontario Government’s Employee Assistance Program. This was a pilot program, initiated to implement a new policy that viewed alcoholism as an illness, rather than a sin or an evil character disorder. There I was, the wife of an alcoholic, counselling alcoholic employees to accept treatment, and their supervisors to change their attitude and help their employees to rehabilitate after treatment, rather than fire them, which had been their usual practice.

Still thinking you would find a way to help Charles?

Of course. I don’t give up easily!

HOMES

My single family home

After a year I knew I could support my children. I also knew, that as a parent, I would need more flexible hours, so when the university’s counselling centre asked me to come back I accepted more vacation time in lieu of the increase in salary they could not offer me. I left alcoholics and their problems behind me. Left the Civil Service. Grieving the loss in private silence, I left my marriage of 22 years. At 44, an age when many of my women friends were relaxing into more volunteer work and afternoon bridge, I refused the woman’s calling of my day to be the one who was responsible for making the relationship work. Left the only other home I’d ever known, now no longer secure, if it had ever been. But what about this new one? Would I be strong enough, long enough?

There was no one to ask. My sister was unavailable, my mother too sick to burden her with my fears, my friends confused. No one to counsel me, I later lightly joked, because: “I was the first divorced woman I’d ever met,” covering up my fear and my loneliness. (Just like my father used to do). I had guessed that I would be lonely, but of course had no idea just how much, having no way of knowing that in the circles in which I grew up a working, divorced mother’s children would be her only community. A few invitations to dinner or a movie when the husband was away or working, but for the most part, my remaining social connections withered and died.

I could understand how my new life might be a challenge to my women friends’ satisfaction with their roles of wives and mothers. It was harder to understand their (not so veiled) hostility, until it dawned on me that they seemed to see me as a sexual threat. Me! My husband had assured me that our dismal sex life was all my fault; having had no other sexual experience I had no way to question his judgment. But women seemed to fear my effect on their husbands, who now treated me as fair game. Why would I ever want husbands (or men) who treated me as fair game, like my father-in-law had?Did they suspect their husbands were straying? How could I tell them I had no interest? They would only try to convince themselves I had asked for it, and the situation would be even worse. I felt like Hawthorne’s fallen woman with a Scarlet Letter painted across my chest. What was seemly in a divorced woman with children? I not only didn’t know anyone else who was divorced, I had no time or energy for meeting new people, since it was all I could do to keep up with the demands of job and raising teenage children, which included the not so hidden innuendo that any problems they had were because they now came from a broken home. I felt as if I were jumping off a cliff into the completely unknown.

How had my mother felt in her differentness, her questioning mind often putting her outside the pale? As for my grandmother …

It was then that I realized how courageous she had been. My grandmother, Margaret Rodger Beattie, had made it possible for her children to leave home. She knew that education was the way to a better life, and she made sure, one way or another, that the older children were educated, and then working or married. They in turn helped the younger ones. When all of them were as safe as she could make them, then she could leave. My grandmother did not make her husband’s calling hers, did not follow him in his ministry to another city; she followed her own voice and came, white gloved, to my aunt’s working-class Annex flat. After 30 years of a heart breaking relationship and back-breaking housework, of raising nine children and establishing the seven who survived, she had no money, and was too ill and old to return to teaching. She offered to keep house for one of her unmarried daughters, freeing her to more fully engage in her profession, in exchange for a home.

THOUGHTS

I see now how the pain of her powerlessness had motivated her, first, to protect her children, and then to leave the man who had abused her. She transgressed the norm of woman as infant nurturer and man as protector who prepared older (male) children for the real world. My grandmother, the gentle powerhouse, was both. She was a woman of her generation whose place was in the home, a member of the Plymouth Brethren sect for whom the husband was God’s representative on earth of the natural order of the universe, and she had no independent means of financial support. To walk away from all of that! But she was sure of her daughters. Yes, family was central.

STANDING UP

I knew that I came from a long line of strong women. I was still afraid and lonely, but striking out on my own now felt more like Pascal’s leap of faith than a supposedly ill-considered, unwise, impulsive move (Impulsive! What a good ostrich I had been; that, no one knew!). What had seemed a mountainous undertaking became a familiar routine of job/school/home. We learned how to be a family of five, and then four when my eldest daughter left to live in a co-op in her first year of university. The kids learned to clean and cook and I learned to delegate and lower my standards and expectations. We planned meals around the Wednesday supermarket specials, sitting at the kitchen table (with varying degrees of interest and willingness!) making lists and menus according to our available time and skills. John graduated from zucchini casserole at his siblings’ impolite urgings, they all became excellent cooks and even learned to clean up with a minimum of acrimony. We were always short of money, we had hard times, and I know now that we all hid much of our sadness, anger and resentment from each other.

We coped.

We did more than just cope!

We celebrated birthdays, Christmas, Easter and any other occasion that served for music, laughter and being together.

Eventually all four children settled, first into professions and then marriage. I was well aware that our lives together had sometimes been tumultuous, and I often felt guilty about what my children had not had, but I told myself that I had done my very best. (“Don’t ever think you didn’t!” One of my daughters said to me years later, which was comforting.) Six grandchildren were born in five years, ushering in challenging, new worlds of changing family relationships – all part of that other book – and the unadulterated delights of being a grandmother.  

GRANDMOTHER

The space standing between mother

and daughter, and now, mother, daughter

granddaughter,

is different,

a distance, greater clarity,

and more. More joy,

more pain.

The wild, exploring part of me

knows this new child in a way

I never knew my own,

and lets me accept her,

miracle,

without mothering.

In my body, I feel, hear

and talk with her.

My head has no idea where anything is.

OPENINGS

Happily involved in the tangles, tears and joys of my grandchildren’s raising I almost made them another home, almost swerved onto the path of feeling that they were partly my responsibility. However, I was doubly fortunate. My children made it clear that I had done my job, that they wanted me to be a loving grandmother while they did the parenting. And my profession was propelling me outside the worlds of family and job, opening more doors as I met other professional people at conferences and workshops. I had more time, and the university provided funding for additional training with psychotherapy leading lights such as Albert Ellis and Fritz Perls, and pioneers in the new field of family therapy like Carl Whittaker and Virginia Satir. Especially important was a group of women therapists that formed around our mutual interests in the work of Dr. Beverly Gallean, one of the first practitioners to undertake hands-on research in the interaction of mind and body. Dr. Gallean teamed lectures on theory with opportunities to experience the inextricable link between body and mind, like learning about left/right brain characteristics and then moving, painting, singing, and meditating so that we felt the differences. This may seem old hat now, but then, it was mind boggling and physically disrupting to practice not only new ways of seeing, but new eyes to see with. For me, to share these experiences and feelings was brand new. Years of reading post-Friedan feminist literature and research had given me ideas about the world very different from those I grew up with, but I had never before openly shared any kind of personal experience and feelings - let alone new ones - with anyone. To let my feelings show, to actually talk about them, was a watershed moment for me, and deeply moving.

ISLANDS

The group met for several years and helped prepare me for the close, intimate work of sensitivity training then required as preparation for professional leadership roles in some of the social services. Without it I could never, ever, have sat with a group of total strangers and talked about myself. A whole week was emotionally and physically draining, wore me out and earned my gratitude to colleagues who had warned me of the intensity and advised me to take time off afterwards to relax. I didn’t think the university would pay for two workshops in a row, but they did; professional development was more available than salary increases with their attendant benefits costs, and I had enrolled in what sounded like a low-key workshop on an island off the coast of Maine, near enough to Boston to make it feasible for me to make the trip. And so, tired to the bone in mind and body, I set off for a place that was to change my life.

            There is an island an hour and a half by ferry from the Maine shore, named Monhegan by Indians whose arrowheads remain, marked by Columbus on navigation charts, pronounced Monhigan by those who live there year round, fish lobster in winter, only a few cod now in summer, supplemented by whatever else can be caught. Broiled, steamed or in cream sauce if it’s a day old, if you want fish, that’s what you eat. Take your pick. It’s not to everyone’s taste, this island: no electric light, no cars - except one for emergency services, and trucks for hauling traps in winter, luggage in summer. Messages to the mainland used to be sent and received through the coast guard on Manana, a small island that creates the protected harbour. Now there is electricity in year-round houses, the coast guard is automated, and there are more than three phones. The lighthouse no longer needs a keeper, the fog horn is timed and sometimes does not know when to shut off, booming in sunshine, reminding of storms and ships seeking.

The back side, from heights of Pulpit Rock and Blackhead, down Station Hill and through Cathedral Woods to Pebble Beach, is rock. Rock, like seagull, is white-grey in fog or sun, absorbing/reflecting changes in light. Rocks stand immobile in fog and storm. The seagull departs - a gliding shadow in mist, searching for food, shimmering in sun, soars over water calling, revealing, returning. The high backs of rocks, woods, meadows and gardens fenced from deer are green. I remember the astonished look on the faces of a man and his dog as they come upon me, head back, eyes to sky, exchanging notes with a bird whose voice floats from top of ancient tree down a shaft of sunlight which illumines its old mossy roots. Fisher houses weathered grey and old are tucked on the inward curve from schoolhouse to church, white to white, points of definition like folded wings. Houses of summer people climb hills. They live more on rock, higher, in sight of water and distance and their other lives. On this same low side there is one road from harbour to Fish Beach to Lobster Cove. Too rough for bicycles, fit for stout shoes and bare feet curling and the baggage truck driven by important young men, or a golf cart for those who can no longer negotiate the surface or walk its two-mile length. I remember Charlotte Selver using one after her accident, wise woman of body whose classes drew me to this island, now my spiritual home. (Journal, 1975)

Summoned to quiet by the deep, penetrating sound of a Tibetan bowl we sat on the floor of the white clapboard schoolhouse in silence - prolonged until the sound faded completely away.

 “This will be an exercise in faithfulness. Special attention will be given to each activity: getting ready, the beginning, allowing full participation and care till the very end, and experiencing the effects of this work on all activities of our life….”

A small, slim woman, about 75, iron-grey hair, brown eyes bright in welcome, which would pierce to the soul in fierce concentration of meeting. This was Charlotte Selver, sitting on a low stool in front of the school’s stage, earphones to one side, a pile of tiny sandbags on the other. We had watched her husband Charles, who led some of the workshops when Charlotte was tired, and later, when she was very old, drive her to the schoolhouse in a golf cart, slightly bent, looking straight ahead, looking old. Now, walking around the room observing us as we moved to her brief, quiet instructions, her body was lithe as a young girl. More limber, expressive, and so much less demanding than our bodies, as we would discover.

A morning exploring the weight and feel of an arm at rest, and in motion, on our own, or moved slowly by a partner. (Impossible to describe in mere words how that felt, or its impact.) An afternoon walking Monhegan’s trails, or sitting on coastal rocks, hearing, seeing the movement and colours of the ocean with fresh eyes. Attempting to quiet an unsettled mind. Other mornings I have different legs, or sense an unfamiliar place in my back, or my shoulders, inbetween my shoulders. Walking is unbalanced and then more on the ground. Sitting hurts as body parts redistribute.…

Redefined, not abolished!

… as I/they learn the difference between giving in and becoming flabby. I am im-pressed … full … fuller, and then expressing in movement, writing, drawing … but quietly. From quiet. Returning to quiet. Sitting on a rock lifting and replacing one of those small sandbags. All afternoon. With author Shungu Suzuki Rashi I am deep in the “intense, concentrated, wordless practice of being with my physical self in the moment … when the mind, through calm, ceases to work … deeper than mind awareness.” I am filled with thankfulness for the wild solitude and peace of this tiny island, for Charlotte and Charles, whose presence and teachings stir me to depths I have never before experienced.   

            There are exquisitely heightened moments. Once, during, and then at the end of each session, we sit and are invited to comment on some aspect of what we have experienced. Charlotte had been deaf since an infection destroyed her hearing when she was in her twenties. She lip reads in conversation but cannot do that in class, and uses a special set of earphones Charles has made that connect to a microphone. Settled on the floor, an eager student talks on and on. Charlotte is gentle the first time, impatient the second. The student is rhapsodizing, is all mind, focusing on “feeling about,” not on sensory awareness. The third time, Charlotte whips off the earphones: “Enough!”

Ever quiet, I am quieter. Learning the difference between fear and waiting, between sure and readiness, was the beginning of whetting my poet’s skills: the concrete, no-simile frills, no-holds barred description of everyday physical acts, sights and sounds, and my sensory responses to them. It was on Monhegan, the summer after I left Charles, that I found my first enduring friendship with a woman. As we walked the trails after our classes I heard about Margaret’s two sons who had died several years before we met. Margaret had been raised, as I had been, to be a traditional wife and mother. Now “the meaning had gone out of” her life, because “there was nothing left” for her to do. I felt as adrift as she did. Her husband had refused to let her talk about their boys, refused to listen to her feelings of loss and confusion, or to share his, until the bonds broke and she looked back over the years of their marriage and saw how abusive the relationship had always been. She inherited a little money and was able to leave him; my inheritance was of a different sort, but just as liberating.

We sat quietly together watching sea gulls wheeling in and out of their rockbound nests, or later, the incomparable sunsets - the social event of the evening – everyone met at Lobster Cove or by the schoolhouse as communal witnesses to the end of day. I remember a night that Margaret had been too tired to come out, when the Northern Lights moved in great green and white waves in the sky. I rushed up to her third floor room, hurried her to the fire escape to watch - and to listen. The lights were singing! A soft soughing filled our universe. Awestruck, we tasted our own substance while communing with another, and each other. Other times, we walked and talked about what could give our lives meaning now, our loneliness and confusion now sheltered in the embrace of the island we both knew was a spiritual home from which we could depart, from which we could begin our search, in the comfort of a friendship that endured until her death at 92.

KNOWING

As part of the university’s community outreach program I had led workshops at a local senior’s centre in memory and aging, and became interested in doing research in this area. When I was accepted into a doctoral program I interviewed Rachel, Dave and Emma, three of my elderly students, for a pilot research project, was given the green light, and forged ahead. Next summer on the island (How could I not return to this magic place?) I did a practice interview with Margaret, and then more formally with artists, musicians, writers, and year-round and summer residents whose lives were similarly enriched by this sense of physical and spiritual home. Over the next few years my conversations with them drew me further into the enticing sensory world Charlotte’s work had revealed, a world that seemed to speak a foreign language, and these conversations were later to draw my research focus towards sensory memory as revealed and practiced by older people.

One of them was Leo, a linotype operator from Brooklyn who had earned extra money making jewelry, and as a “wedding photographer to the rich.” Encouraged by friends he took up painting when he retired, going to the free life-drawing classes at the Museum of Modern Art, meeting other artists and painting with them. He said that his chief reason was to be with people: “… they inspire me, talking, exchanging ideas, learning.” He was astonished when his work became popular on the East Coast and began to sell: “Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine anyone would want to buy what I paint.” And he was grateful because the money made it possible for him to come to Monhegan every summer for three weeks without depending on his son’s largesse. A place where, as Margaret and I found, he renewed himself: “The fishermen, the sounds and smells of the ocean … getting together with the other painters … memories for painting … memories that last the winter.” When Leo was on the island his studio on the ground floor of Seagull Cottage at The Trailing Yew was a gathering place for island artists and friends. He and his classmates met in the evening to critique their work. I listened to their language, to the different ways they painted their responses to the island. Where was my responsive sensory language?

Mort was another New Yorker, a composer and pianist slowly going deaf, angry and frustrated that he was having more and more difficulty “matching what I hear in my head to what I can play.” Like Leo, he loved philosophy and a good argument. He could no longer walk the trails - “although my feet remember every twist and bend and I can see the ocean breaking off Burnt Head.” He enjoyed meeting people on the road, as he went back and forth for mail or groceries, and having a good discussion around the kitchen table at night by coal oil lamp. We talked a lot about memory, and I was particularly interested in how sensory awareness had shown him the power of his other senses. When he could “just stay with them,” he said, they could sometimes compensate him for the loss of his hearing - and sometimes not: “Being in this environment helps, reminds me there is so much more than … well … New York.” His experiences reminded me that life as a sole-support single parent didn’t have to be as circumscribed as I was making it, that I could open up to so much more in my environments, city and country.

His wife Mae was a retired school teacher who had persuaded the New York school board to rehire her after her baby died at birth: “no mean feat I can tell you, they didn’t want married women at all.” Mae taught me a great deal about how to live with “the intensity of growing old … aging is all about the body, I’d say, and about not buying into a lot of nonsense about decrepitude. Studying with Charlotte and Charles, just being on the island away from the pace of New York, which I love but not as a steady diet,” helped Mae to “just take it as it comes.” I have never forgotten sitting on their verandah, sipping iced tea and talking about life’s vicissitudes, especially aging. Her words come back to me whenever I realize I am pushing myself too hard, expecting the impossible:

“Mae, do you ever forget the anger?”

“No, you don’t.”

“Never?”

“No. But as you get older you learn to recognize it faster, you can put it into perspective more easily, and somehow it doesn’t seem to bother you so much.”

“That’s all? That’s it?”

“That’s it. That’s enough!”

            Ruth was also a New Yorker who had lived all of her adult life in Greenwich Village, painting when she could spare the time from looking after her son and her famous artist husband, “portrait painter of presidents.” When he died she came into her own, had her first solo show at 60 and was still going strong at 90. She no longer rents a cottage because she doesn’t have the energy to shop and cook for herself, as well as paint: “It’s not that I don’t have any energy; it’s just that what energy I have has to go to what’s important.” She stays at the Island Inn, which is more expensive than a cottage, and can afford only two precious weeks on Monhegan: “Get up before dawn every morning to catch the light over Manana Island … you don’t see that light anywhere else … I carry it back with me … paint from the memories and the little sketches I do in the mornings.” Ruth sees her son and his family in New York, but painting is her priority now: “They don’t need me and I need to paint; I am fierce about that now.” As I absorbed the honour of being given some of her time I felt a sense of pride, and of sadness, the same feelings I have about my Grandmother; courageous women, no complaints about living what might have been, grasping late-life opportunities with quiet determination

Francis was a summer resident whose studio looked out over a lonely path through the trailing yews to the ocean. When I look at her painting of that scene hanging on my bedroom wall, the room is filled with the peppery smell of evergreen, the taste and feel of ocean’s salt. I remember my feet on that path - and even feel the tone of her voice as we talked on the days her studio was open to visitors. She was a persistent saleswoman, and visitors often interrupted our conversations - after all her sales financed her summer’s painting on the island and her social life with other artists. “It’s important to hear what other people are doing, how they manage … I can’t imagine not being able to come here . . . the sounds, the smells, how the ocean, the sky, the light change almost every minute. There’s no other place like it. It’s what holds me up all winter.” I didn’t know it then, but the sights, sounds, smells, textures and tastes of Monhegan were to hold me up for many a winter, anticipating another summer, or during the years I couldn’t be there at all.

            And Robert! He of the in-common fundamentalist background, dyslexic, worker in thread and wool, creating visual magic while longing for a facility with words. His house is the only one on the island not greyed by the wind and sea salt. Bright pink, it stands against rock, an exclamation, visible in all weather. Laundry flaps above on a drying rack, anchored in a small patch of grass in the rocks, chairs and table wait under a folded sun-umbrella. Bells on the screen door jangle as you step down into the small, brightly coloured kitchen crammed with a neatly arranged clutter of crockery and utensils. (For Robert’s home, “too much is not enough.”) Around the end of a counter, past the beaded curtain into the living room, step up over a high door sill into the studio where he sits stitching, seated at a large table by the window, a magnifying glass in one eye, a bright light over the canvas. Behind him layered skeins of wool hang in rainbow colours, deep purple to pale red. Music plays in a corner. In front and to his right on walls and tables, Mexican jewelry and cloth brought back from winter sojourn, now for sale. He gives me a quick look and continues to work, needle and wool shaping forms of ancient glyphs, fingers working rhythmically in a random stitch he invented on the island and calls Libra point, “because anyone can do it.” Eventually I would see how his stitching, and the vibrantly coloured canvases he made are, as he said, “like words,” words which are understood sensuously, so different from the written ones on the page he has difficulty reading, and I find so inadequate to fully express my feelings and thoughts. Later I would ask myself: “Is this what an embodied description can look like?”

             And Charles would reply: “Would it need words?”

            There are so many different sorts of “pages,” different kinds of “words,” other languages and ways of telling.

A protected island whose sensuousness was not covered over with the sights, sounds and smells of the city; Charlotte and Charles’ classes, lessons in sensory excitement and quiet; conversations with people who renewed their sense of themselves and reconnected to their work through the island’s ruggedness and spirit. All of these deepened my understanding of memory and encouraged me to begin to explore the different worlds of sensory memory. Was it any wonder that I first began to come home to my body on Monhegan, to make physically felt connections I had never known before:         

TAI CHI

I remember Tai Chi in early morning,

washed in fog lifting through trees,

blissful, moving as if in dream.

Suddenly I stumble, twisting an ankle.

Jolted awake, gasping for breath as if struck,

nausea fills me, tears wash my face.

Drifting in fantasy, I was not there

in my body. Forgetting her,

I hurt her. Horrified, I knew I always had.

            When I told Charles about this experience he said, “You did not pay attention, you were somewhere else, not here (touching his body). Moment to moment attention, that’s all that’s necessary.” All! All seemed huge to me. I felt as if I were once more standing on the lip of a chasm, but this time one that was also a cave of wonders. His voice echoes Charlotte’s, the people’s I had talked to, the sounds of the island. They come to me now, sounds that are a memory of the sensory, like taste and smell, admonishing me to be awake to “direct sensory experience, the only source of memories of the sensory.” Voices urging me to be aware of how sensory remembering is different, because it happens through “forms of relationships, like rhythm and tone and colour. Or like pain, shame and fear,” unceasingly interacting to ground all memory. What endless patience I would need to even begin to grasp glimpses of the interleaving depths and layers of sensory memory: a patience so different from the silent, numb waiting of chattel women. Or is it? Who am I to say that those women were not also waiting for a door to open so that soul could walk through.

Images of my story flood my mind, take my breath away: images: of pastel-tinted pictures of right and wrong imprinted … blue/sight/fear of open eye … pale, bitter taste of sauerkraut … brown buttoned-up smell of leather in the hall … the quiet face, sound of serenity in the midst of a child’s terror… the foreboding/bonding cry of a woman through a closed door … my mother’s embodied memories of where it all came from.

What had my inattention robbed me of?

To this day my feet and the ground do not meet easily and naturally. I am always aware, whether I walk wild trails or city sidewalks, that I must deliberately focus on my walking all the time or I will forget where my body is and stumble.

MEMORY OF SOUND

Mouth opens

with the memory of sound,

wind hollowing small dark caves

of bone.

Wind whispering across lacy places,

water catching sun,

the relentless disturbance

of endless undertow making waves.

Quiet fragile skeleton holding everything together,

each little hollow a mouth.

THOUGHTS

Foundation:That upon which one stands or builds, discovered on looking down, place of departure and drawing towards, of inescapable return, gripped, fastening one to structure, becoming top-heavy and in danger of falling, caught in the “torment of the false union of concept and image, animus looking for materialistic verification as if reverie is not enough.” (Gaston Bachelard).

Which ultimately it is not, but for now must be sufficient.

For many years all of my time and energy went to home, children and profession. In a wider community of new friendships and expanding interests, I was beginning to open to body and spirit. Each time I met someone on the edge of our experiences together, the space inside me swelled to allow for other/more meetings. As my horizons expanded I saw with eyes that allowed the world in, rather than looking out warily and fixing on what had to be done for survival. I was more aware of what was happening around me that wasn’t directly connected to my own concerns. For instance, I had been too busy to step back and look dispassionately at my parenting, but as I watched my children in their turn, I could see that they were repeating oppressed behaviours that I had thought my liberation would at least ameliorate, each often stepping back from rights in relationships, seeming to act from a place of fear rather than inner power and desire. I was saddened; I wanted them to live more freely, as I was now, rather than being constricted, as I had been. But I was also curious. They were children when I went to graduate school, teenagers when we divorced. Had they not seen the ways in which I had moved away from denial, fear and dependence to becoming a more conscious agent in my own life? Not able to see? Did not want to? Did not like the mother I was now? Maybe I had I not changed as much as I thought I had. Or had they, like me, forgotten, in order, as my mother would say, “to get on with the chores.”

And then I started to notice another kind of denial, this time in my professional field. I had taken on a new job. As well as counselling students and staff, supervising graduate students, and leading memory workshops at seniors’ centres in the community, I was teaching the Ulyssean Adult, a course for adults returning to the university. I became intrigued by contradictions between how the students’ and seniors believed that their memories were not as good as they had been (even at 35), and my observations that they seemed to show few signs of memory loss in their written or spoken work (even at 75). What was the source of this compromising discord between personal belief and social stereotypes, and daily practices? Why were they ignoring their demonstrable capacity and abilities?

There was Dave, a retired garment worker in the millinery trade who had held senior supervisory and union positions. He feared that he was losing his mind in old age because he forgot appointments. And yet it was clear that retiring from his job to be at home all day had placed him in a context where “there’s nothing here I ever have to remember. Now, I don’t do anything, that’s the problem. When I’m actively involved I don’t have trouble because it’s a continuous practice, I have procedures. If I get a picture of my work and the people and what we did, how we related, I remember everything like it was yesterday. In retirement there’s a missing piece, I don’t know what it is, but I feel every time I forget as if something is missing, there’s a missing piece.”

With growing excitement I realized that what my Monhegan friends had said and implied about memory, and the questions that the seniors and students in my classes had raised could be the basis for a Qualifying Research Paper for graduate school. Years before, I had earned an M.Ed. so that I could support my children and myself: now other kinds of survival were possible. I was free to learn because I wanted to, expanding my Grandmother’s and mother’s passion for education to acknowledge desire as well as necessity, and it would not be the Protestant anathema of self-indulgence, because I would be undertaking a worthy and useful project! One which would look for reasons why older people accept the stereotypes of memory and aging, even when their lived experience contradicts them.

TIME OUT

A friend who has read these pages many times was reading them again a few evenings ago: “references to fatigue and illness seem to come out of the blue, without warning or background.”

“Haven’t I talked about any of that?” I said.

“There’s nothing of that so far. You haven’t mentioned the surgeries that held you back from separating for a year … or when you broke your back soon after you moved, or how strung out you were … I was wondering .…”

I looked at her, dumbfounded … “Oh my God, I’m doing it again. I have left out … I have forgotten … so much of my physical … even most of my emotional … I am forgetting myself. Again!”

The next day I determined to fix it, to somehow find a way to fit some of those missing pieces into the fabric of the text. But how? Then I remembered that I had already written quite a lot about “it” in other places, like the biography work I had done for my art courses. On rereading that, such strong physical sensations swept through me that I became almost immobilized. I could not write, or even read.

I began this book noticing that I forget myself. Now – right now – I am experiencing what that forgetting actually feels like: lead-heavy chest, cramping gut, an all-over burning sensation, down all the way to my feet … impossible to think. I had written on those first pages: “the felt experience of being … my concrete experiencing is not … here … not … on the page. I have forgotten to include myself as body and soul, forgotten to begin with the ground of my being, my feelings, my emotions …”                                                                          

The sound of my friend and me reading together, her/our voices noticing and experiencing absence of body, triggered the memory of those words and of my habit of forgetting my physical and emotional being, which I had also written about in an earlier poem:

. . . just say a key word,

or

call up a sound,

an image,

and I’m in it, shaking

with fury or

sagging

under the weight

of remembering

not being . .

I will not override this. I must stay here with/in all of the sensations and feelings crying out for being. Because I am living them, I am the lived, embodied experience of how . . .

there are no forgotten pasts,

only,

being forgotten

. . . no bare futures.

Only today’s cold

with going

on   unseen   unheard    untold.

Still wanting to fix it, to fit some of these forgotten fragments into my written text, I continued the routine of household tasks, a space of no word/thoughts, no … any … thing else to feel. Music. No walking, my feet are too sore.

I am going back to get them, my forgotten children, to stay with them, no matter how awful I feel.

Two days drift by, and then a small voice niggles … becomes louder, insistent:

 “How do I fit my body self into such an apparently seamless (and oh so ‘seemly’) narrative? (Never mind ‘Will I always…?’). Do I insert left-out events and unspoken feelings into the text, like an injection, or like larding a piece of raw meat to tenderize it before cooking? Or do I press them in like bits of clay on a sculpture, invisible after the addition? That would be lying, that’s not the way it happened. Do I make a list, and then try to remember it as I would a grocery list?”

Now I am remembering what I could not remember before. Writing the first layer of (some) of my/our story has exposed another layer, just like telling my grandmother’s story later on to the women’s group opened up that particular patch of top soil.

UNDERGROUND

I remember packing to leave the marital home (not my home, or our home, but the home of a marriage) after my divorce and discovering a journal I wrote when I was 19, in my second year of university. There she was in all her youthful eagerness. She loved being outside, she wrote poetry and wanted passionately to keep on writing. She wanted to study French. (I was surprised to see how much of the journal was in French.) She would also marry, have children and make a contribution to the world. She could have it all! And there was a part of her that was prescient, because she wrote about Charles’s problems as a deterrent to marriage. That part was silent when she married two years later. I was stunned. Why hadn’t “I” listened to “Her”? What had happened? I tried then to read the rest of the journal, but I could not. My entire body filled with a dreadful sadness because this “I” knew what lay ahead for my 19-year-old self, and could not bear to feel it, all of it, right then. And so, I didn’t explore that young Ann’s aspirations any further, and closed the journal. But I kept it.

BIDING     TIME

She cannot be found anyplace

Where I is,

who means well

and is so eager to greet her.

Fearful of I, She hides, curled and still,

or sits, arm raised to shield herself                  

from gestures whose intention she cannot decipher.

Bewildered, I is unaware

that the force of her desire is a wall, not a welcome,

and needs a language barely suggested in dream.

I feels accused, at fault, a victim,

that She, cowering in shadow,

seems excused, let off the hook,

unaware that for She

the strongest action is to wait

until I, empty of any demand, becomes quiet,

and hears the words She has waited so long to speak,

in a language barely suggested in dream

Now, these many years later, I am baring/bearing the feeling of being my forgetting/forgotten selves. Feelings which hurt so much they cannot find words, or places in mind. And so, because we put too much value on words, as Robert said, there is no attention to those feelings, or to what underlies them. Not to pay attention is to forget, Charles warned me. Now my body is sounding the alarm in the only way she has, summoning sensations which force me to see that she can no longer be closed, like my youthful journal. I have kept them both. I am (in) them. Remembering being told I talked too much by my grade one teacher, a close family friend, the sense of humiliation and betrayal by her, and then by my mother, who made light of my hurt and grief … and never knew I didn’t talk in class until my university years. Remembering sitting in the back of the car, burrowed into Maggie, my red setter puppy, on the long, dark drive back to the kennel … she gave my sister asthma … she had given me rare physical pleasure. Remembering the helpless emptiness I felt in the presence of my sister’s more boisterous, expressive nature, and her explosive temper. Even now I cannot write fully (although I do remember) how it affected me, because it would seem like a betrayal of her and our adult friendship. “I will look after you,” I had said when we were 5 and 4 and she had dug a hole in the lawn, and was afraid of the consequences. We were just children! But somehow I felt like a parent. How could that be?

THOUGHTS

On the surface, I had lived an ordinary, normal childhood and typical teenage years, well insulated by family and social taboos and peer group norms, always something to do - a calm, pleasant landscape, a repetitive, rhythmical, hardworking routine centered on family meals, school, chores, jobs, neighbours, friends. Now I can remember the subterranean turmoil, the silence and pervasive seriousness, the sensory deprivation, the emotional and psychic insecurity and loneliness, and turning ever more inward because of fears of being different and never measuring up. I remember how yearning to belong ground into me like cinders into an open wound. It seems impossible to find language for what being different feels like: disconnected, awkward … lonely … And a certain rebelliousness, quickly quelled … what good would it do?

SILENCE

SILENCE

My voice moves from silence to silence,

in between bird

sounds, children’s noises,

machines humming,

the traffic of everyday.

But the window waits

to be broken

into.

The door flaps open,

longing

to be locked

again

to hold the heat

of blazing autumn

dying into winter.

            Remembering is exposing me, dredging up through deeper layers, the early years of my marriage, trying to keep it all together and to pretend that everything was all right, the squeezing sense of panic, which drove me to further efforts to make it work, knocked out, shocked betrayal, a breaking heart, energy shredding away. Remembering my determination that marriage and having children had to work! I had sacrificed so much. I had denied my creative self, occasional journal entries my only writing, thoughts of poetry and a nascent book a flickering memory; a pervasive sense of sadness and restlessness, because sometimes I was not completely wholehearted about what I was doing. As I write now I feel the crumpling grief - I must forgive myself, and the hot anger - don’t ask, and the jaw clenching fear - for my very existence, and the eroding guilt - how could I do this to myself and my children?

How? After a long, long, agonizing time of wandering and weighing all my options, when I was finally on the verge of ending the marriage, I had to have an emergency hysterectomy: fibroids as a result of the early birth-control pill. Appalled disbelief, rage, helplessness. Next, a tense year sorting through 22 years of family belongings and memories, grieving over lost hopes. And then we separate. But before I can sell the house and move to a smaller place I suffer a ruptured disc: John carrying my moaning self down stairs and into the car, driving me to hospital. Indescribable pain, dread, fear: “How will I do this? Then a second surgery for a discotomy, a long recuperation - and so much uncertainty about my ability to keep on working. How can I be disabled and still manage on my own?” But I do, finally. I am well enough to move to the first home I have ever owned on my own, with John, my youngest child. By this time Meg, the oldest, is on her own. Financial circumstances mean that the new house will be too small for four people and so Michael and Hilary must find an apartment together. The pain of my guilt and sadness far worse than any back pain. Then two more surgeries soon after the move.

How could I not have included all this? Will I . . . always? . . .

Don’t go there!

An operation to repair an abdominal prolapse as the result of a botched hysterectomy. A year later, another one as the result of a brutal fall, slipping on popcorn spilled on the steps of a theatre. “Not a good thing to do after a discotomy,” said the surgeon condescendingly. Two fractured cervical discs, a striker frame for six weeks, three months disability, no money from C. (it’s not in the agreement), back to work, me on the couch, the client in the chair. The drive home, doubled over in pain, wondering if I can make it. Worried children. Worried me. Meg marries, disastrously, John leaves, Michael moves in with me so that he can write, and we co-author an article. John’s best friend is killed in a car accident and everyone is devastated … it takes months to … I spend a lot of time with that family, with John - who tells me that when you love someone a lot they leave (his Grandmother, two friends and now this closest dear friend, dead. His father, not t/here). So much pain.

STANDING UP

All through these years of struggling to accept the inescapable fact of disability and chronic pain, and then to learn how to live with it, I was taking courses and seminars to upgrade my professional skills so that I could open a private practice and create a more manageable professional life, and also to begin doctoral work. . . . I reread my 19-year-old’s journal . . . I could not bear it. I put it away . . .

She has waited so long to speak  

Time for the next step.

I told myself firmly then, as I do again now, hoping that the flavour of what was not written earlier is more palpable, will add much needed flesh to enrich the bare bones of my story; is enough for … What? To keep those memories from receding and disappearing as I proceed with the story? For you to know enough to understand?

Stay in the present.

That was how I managed to pick up the strands of my life in the midst of divorce, dismemberment and uprooting. And then, years later, living day-to-day enabled me to move forward from other dislocations into graduate work.

Shut the door on your earlier intention to write full-time once the children were grown

Hitched my desires to the more familiar helping path I had followed for so long. I wanted to be an advocate for disenfranchised older people, in the academy, where it counted!

So I applied to the doctoral program in Adult Education and Counselling and for a leave of absence from my job. Much to my surprise and gratification my qualifying paper, a traditional study of an aspect of memory in older people which my daughter-in-law, a clinical psychologist, had helped me design, earned me a scholarship, making up for the one I had turned down more than thirty years before. That, with income from my small, newly established private practice and a day’s consulting at the University, enabled me to risk leaving my hard-won financial security.

THOUGHTS

I was so pleased at the prospect of becoming a part of the academic world again that it never occurred to me that my earlier observations about the denials in my family had any connection to how the seniors ignored their skilled memory practices, and might be a part of my research. Family puzzles belonged in the private world, distant from the academy. Nor did I question whether my usually associative way of thinking, my writing style and the kind of qualitative research I wanted to do, in which I planned to create ongoing participant evaluation, would be a good fit in the academic world.

How strange: I have just written about the iteration of forgetting my physical self, and yet included some of my deepest, strongest memories “Once it’s deep you don’t forget, no matter how hard you try,” Rose would later remind me. How strange, now, to look back and see how I was so caught up then in the intellectual ferment that I ignored my constant fatigue and increasing signs of illness. Overshadowed. In the shadow, again: “We work until our dying day.”

I wake from a dream I can’t remember, except for a quote from someone in the dream: “The part you are looking with is the part that is hidden.” The dream-speaker had used a wonderful image in illustration, of a reflecting pool in the Alhambra in Spain that makes it possible to see the domed ceiling. You can’t look up and see it; impediments make that impossible. The only way you can see it is by looking in the reflecting pool. And the only part of the ceiling you can’t see is the part hidden by your own shadow in the pool.

            I can’t see myself. I get in the way.