Shattered Family Ties

Daughter is home today after 22 days with Mother. September 1st is move in day at her university.  I have exactly one month left of her at home.

I continue to sift, sort, trash, recycle and gift the possessions in my house.

Yesterday I opened a package that Mother has yet to bring back with her to Newfoundland.  It was the below picture, in a frame.

I held the picture for a good few minutes.  This woman has been dead for nearly twenty years.  She is my aunt by marriage.  She married Mother's 3rd brother and they were the only extended family that we had in Canada and we spent a little bit of time with them throughout my childhood.  Sister and I were flower girls in their wedding.  They came to the big life events of good catholic households:  first communion, confirmation, wedding, etc.  This particular uncle was legendary in the family since he started smoking by eight years of age and started charging interest to his older siblings for loans at about the same time.  He is now a senior banker and has resided mostly in South and Latin American countries since shortly after his wife passed on, suddenly.  He quit smoking years ago and used to run marathons with XHusband.  I believe he still runs.

I thought about how I'd love to have known this woman, my aunt, throughout my adult life.  She passed away before I was comfortably esconced in adulthood - I was merely 25 years of age and living in a town about 2 hours from where she lived.  My memories of her are of a woman that had a fabulous sense of humour and a wry take on life.  I believe I would have enjoyed her immensely if I had been given the chance to live closer to her as I raised Daughter.

And then it hit me.  The loss of this woman was preceded by the loss of another woman that I was not given a chance to get to know, even in childhood.  The loss of my maternal grandmother.  I was shattered.  I was gripping the frame and choking back tears.  The loss of these two women left an enormous gap in my family structure and the subsequent decades of dysfunction - which show no sign of abatement - seemed to mirror their deaths.

My aunt, just before she died, suddenly, in 1992.

It struck me how the glue that holds families together seems to exist in the maternal bonds.

Mother was a young adult in a different country when her mother passed away.  A country that was extremely expensive to get to or from relative to the inexpensive costs of travel today.  My maternal grandfather did his best to keep the family relationships alive and together (with a healthy dose of solid dysfunction added) but after his death in 1996 the shreds of familial connections started to fray. At this point in my life I feel very little connection to the sixteen younger (living) maternal cousins and various and sundry second cousins that are still springing forth due to the fact that I am the eldest and the youngest cousins are still toddlers (I have two uncles that reproduced as seniors).  There are a couple of exceptions to this but living in a far away country makes it difficult to maintain any sort of intimacy.

Daughter, at seventeen, willingly chose to spend 22 days with Mother.  Would I have done the same at her age?  I was not given the choice since both grandmothers were dead at that point in my life. I do know though, that most of my entire life I have felt like a buoy that is not anchored.  Yesterday was the first inkling I had that the anchor I missed having was real and not just a product of years of reading self help books that described dysfunction in detail but rarely beyond the immediate family.  My maternal grandmother was an anchor that kept my maternal family afloat and her tragic loss before her family had grown left a gap that still reverbrates. And the loss of my aunt did the same - shattering the one meager extended family relationship I had on the new turf her, my uncle, and my parents chose as home.

And today, having found and named the lost anchor I feel I have actually sealed the cracks in my foundation. Mother is writing a memoir about her mother.  I eagerly await getting to know my lost anchor and feel enormous gratitude that Mother's anchoring presence is still in my life.

We rise again.

Incredulous.  That is the look people would give me after I responded to their asking me if I was wearing my boyfriend's university jacket.  The jacket is black leather and has the University of Waterloo crest on the front and big white letters spelling out University of Waterloo on the back.  On one arm is 90 which signified the year I finished (and planned to...the choosing of this year for the sleeve was a bit dicey since that meant a commitment to finishing the program on time or looking foolish for the year/years that you hung around afterwards).  The other sleeve says HONS MATH.  The Honours Math thing makes me chuckle even now.  I picked this generic sleeve label since I switched programs within the Math Faculty about a dozen times before settling on the program that I actually completed which was an Honours Mathematic degree Operations Research major with a Computer Science minor.

I proudly wore that jacket and enjoyed the incredulity on people's faces when I would say, um, no it is not my boyfriend's jacket it is my own and why would you think otherwise?  These questions always came from people not on the University of Waterloo campus since I am happy to say that there were quite a few of us women sporting these jackets on campus in the late 80s.

Other than these first glimmerings of cultural bias against women (a woman studying math in university?  whoa) I lived in a cocoon throughout my youth.  My mother raised me on Michele Landsberg, Marlo Thomas and Our Bodies Ourselves and I believed that the hard work of early 20th century women had paved the way for equality for my mother and my own generation.   I neglected to listen to the stories my mother told of inequality because I felt she was just angry and perceiving sexism where basically it did not really exist.  I mean, even those questions about my jacket were kind of quaint in a redneck way, right?

It wasn't until I became a mother that I started to see how awry our world was.  Once I turned into a breeder the whole world got turned upside down for me.  I perceived everything differently.  And giving birth to a daughter made me recognize how connected all of us with wombs are.  The day I gave birth to my daughter I visualized the literal extending of the womb back behind me throughout my maternal ancestors.  Generations of women giving birth had led me to the birth of my own daughter.  I was connected to these women.  Permanently.

It was powerful imagery that remains with me almost over seventeen years later.  For the first time I had tapped into the strength of my feminine power and my blood memory was activated.  I could no longer think any sexist action was quaint or excusable.  Sexist against men or women but far too often it is directed against women.  Women with no voice.  Women with no choice.

As an exercise in hope during these darker regressive days for women I now invite you to play the below song while perusing the following hashtags on twitter (you don't need to belong to twitter to do this...that is the beauty of twitter).  While doing this I ask you to also think about the image of all of us descending from a womb and the chain of wombs behind you that allowed you to walk this planet right this very minute:  #IDidNotReport #MissRep #SlutWalk.  It is time to Rise Again.  Enough it enough.

Aboriginal Irish Blood Memory

I have been searching for a word lately. The lack of this word has seriously impeded my ability to communicate on this blog.  The word, or rather the lack of the word, has been the metaphorical brick blocking my creativity.  My writer's block had become a word and the lack of it was preventing me from writing.

I was in northern Ontario, Kenora, recently.  My dear friend has lived there for nearly twenty years now and it is only the second time I've gone up to her.  Now that my own child is nearly grown up I can avail of the independence both of us now have.  I am enjoying being able to make the time for trips and people I deeply care about.  This friend in Kenora is a special connection that I hope continues for many many more years and with many more shared trips such as the one I had last month.

In the early 90s, this friend of mine got her teaching degree and obtained her first position at the school I first attended in Toronto.  I only attended this school for not quite two years (junior and senior kindergarten).  My parents moved to Brampton before I finished kindergarten.  My friend and I thought this was an interesting coincidence since she moved to the very area I spent my early youth exploring with wild abandon.  She was not long for the city though.  Whilst knocking herself out in her first years of teaching she embarked in Ojibwa lessons at night so that she could move north and teach on a reserve.  She has native blood and it was screaming at her during our early friendship so she honoured this and arranged her life to be more in touch with this calling.

It is fitting that during my trip up to see her that she introduced me to the native concept of blood memory.  I had been mentioning a research article I had recently read that announced the fact that yes, the cells of our maternal ancestors never leave us and as mothers, we carry the cells of the all the children we have ever borne.  That moment, when she connected the native blood memory legend to the scientific reality of it was like turning on a light bulb to me.  I have always been drawn to native lore.  I think most people can't help it. Everything they talk about resonates with clarity in my being.  I heard Clayton Thomas-Muller, the noted indigenous activist, talk last week and not only did that one lightbulb of blood memory awareness get brighter but an additional stadium of lighting got lit up in my mind.  [If you want to see Clayton in action yourself, check out this fantastic 25 minute video of him talking about the indigenous perspective on the Occupy movement.]

My people are pure Irish.  I am Canadian born but my Irish ancestors go back at least two hundred years and most likely for thousands.  The burning of nearly all Irish records hinders the ability of the Irish to prove this reality.  The practical ramifications of the pillaging of Irish culture by the British means that we can not go back more than seven generations or so.  During the live talk that I attended, Clayton mentioned the many native legends about the seven fires prophecy.  I started to tingle when he mentioned this.  You see, while I was in Winnipeg I had written the following quote, penned by Lois Riel, and transcribed by myself into my brand new travel journal gifted to me by my Kenora friend, on Manitoba's Lois Riel day 2012:  "My people will sleep for 100 years, and when they awake, it will be artists who give them back their spirit."

And yet another interesting thing has happened as of late.  My maternal grandmother has visited me recently in my dreams.  This has occurred in the past and I've always found comfort in these shadowy meetups.  She died when I was quite young so have very fleeting memories of the last trip I had to Ireland when she was alive.  I was four and I'm the only descendant of my generation to carry any memory of her since I am the oldest of my cousins.  My mother is working on a memoir of her life and I eagerly await it.  There have been other Irish-themed occurrences that have demanded  my attention as of late.  An Irish friend gave me a necklace crafted in the manner and form that my ancestors would have done and in the area where my maternal line descends from.  In this relatively new blog I've already written twice (here and here) about ancient Irish celebrations.  Orangemen Order references by high school mates.  I reconnected with an Irish acquaintance who had been not far from my thoughts.  Etc, etc.

And now we return to that metaphorical brick, the word I was seeking out.  I felt it was Irish even though I do not speak Irish.  And after talking to my mother today and trying to suss out the word I realized that perhaps it wasn't a 'word' at all.  Perhaps it was my aboriginal Irish blood memory screaming for a voice.  And so here it is.  For me, the prophecy of the seven fires now includes the Aboriginal Irish.  We too are awakening and joining indigenous people across Turtle island.  Our ancestors, the ones oppressed, starved, murdered and culturally nearly annihilated are screaming in my blood.  I am listening and writing, once more.

This quilt was made by Kim Ratuski and is one of seven exquisite quilts made by her and are
 hanging in the music room at a Kenora high school.