Some people wonder why, and how, I can love my mum the way I do, knowing her predilection toward addictive substances. In fact, sometimes I wonder myself, knowing how horrified I am by parents who watch their children’s lives go by in a blur.
But my mother wasn’t like that.
My mother was a tender-hearted romantic who placed magic beans under my pillow on Friday nights; blew bubbles with me from our third-storey apartment window; read Elizabeth Barrett Browning poems to me when I was five years old, and scotch-taped my hair so that I could have kiss curls.
My mother was a generous woman whose skirts sailed out behind her when she walked. Her culinary skills—homemade oatmeal-molasses bread; radishes cut into the shapes of roses; baked stuffed pork chops; Dutch potato salad; German chocolate cake; Orange Bavarian Cream; crispy bacon; cookies carved into hearts—called me to the table as quickly as her cheerful Cape Breton voice. “Come heeere, deeear.”
My mother was a caregiver whose heart broke whenever she saw anyone in need. When I was thirteen, I had to give over my bed for several months on behalf of a young woman whose Roman Catholic family were unaware that their Nova Scotia daughter was about to give birth up in Ontario—this sort of quiet munificence ordinary in our household.
My mother was a scholar and an educator, spending innumerable late-night hours reading (politics and biography her favourite, followed closely by fiction that had been written in and about foreign lands); insisting I stay up later on Saturdays to watch movies she thought were valuable and relevant (Moby Dick; The Children’s Hour; Splendour in the Grass; Great Expectations; Hud; The Bells of St. Mary’s; The Browning Version...); engaging in radio debates (arguing in the kitchen with Pierre Berton and Charles Templeton in ways that made me laugh out loud). Indeed, my mother was the first Canadian woman to work in a university insectory without having previously obtained a degree.
My mother was industrious, often working two jobs; tending to the church library; scrubbing the walls and hallways of our apartment building to earn extra money; growing prizewinning roses along the thirty-foot fence; vacuuming; dusting; starching, sprinkling and ironing; polishing windows, glass-topped tables and hardwood floors.
My mother was a fashionista, locally famous not only for the cut of her own cloth, but because I was the best-dressed child in my school—cuffed, hemmed, collared, belted, hatted; gloriously shoed and coated—the envy of the grade seven girls who wished that they, too, had a one-inch heel on their winter boots.
Years earlier, too, I spent every sober Saturday in the barber’s chair, my hair cut to precision. And there was no shortage of bath bubbles, sweetly scented soaps, barrettes, pretty gloves, hair ribbons and smocking—everything a young girl needs to feel fit and alive.
Indeed, my mother lavished me with soft dolls, hardcover books, handmade blankets, lipstick-stained cheeks, glass-beaded bracelets...all those things she thought would help me feel safe.
My mother was comical, passionate, devoted, energetic, and soothing, always reminding me, by example, to try and be the same. She nurtured me, rocked me, held me, hugged me and kissed me, instructed me, laughed with me, delighted in me, loved me.
At other times, however, my mother was sad: depleted, worried, endlessly (sometimes painfully) charitable; completely intolerant of her own shortcomings. It was then that she drank, one drink begetting another and another, and eventually another, with little hope of ceasing.
In due course, my mother died by her own hand, devastated by irretrievable guilt and shame; remorse shattering her, overwhelming her even more profoundly, more unremittingly, than the alcohol and pills she used to snuff out her life.
And yet, as I sit here in the long, long wake of her death, what I remember most about her was how she exemplified mother, and how, despite all that she was unable to complete, she left me with a richly vivid, indelible picture of what it meant, what it means, to be utterly, perfectly loved.
