Life & Balance

Essay: Like mother, like daughter

A daughter reflects on notable events in her mother's life and appreciates the worth of a mother's work.

Updated:: 2009-10-21 22:07

Published:: 2003-10-08 00:00

By: Maggie Dwyer

The making of a mother

Our mother leans down to kiss her daughters goodnight. Her cheeks are sweet with the scents of powder and rouge. Where are you going? we cry. In our cries she hears a slightly indignant tone. Where is she going without us? It must be a weekend when her father is visiting and watching over the household. She has a date with Dad.

Young love
She cherishes the first valentine he gave her. Their courtship was a simple one. He was a close friend of her brother's, and they met at one of the dances that were held in local homes in the final years of the Great Depression. Both families were members of St. Patrick's Church at Kinkora, Ont. Their grandparents and great-grandparents, early settlers from Cork and Kerry, were buried side by side in the cemetery and memorialized in stained-glass windows given to the church in their honour.

Their marriage banns were read out here, but they didn't hear them. Following the local custom, they had slipped away to attend Mass in a neighbouring parish, avoiding the initial reaction from the crush of well-wishers. It was as if they had eloped. Their friends and neighbours held a wedding shower for them at the church hall and wrote a loving letter of good wishes. They married in September 1940, after the harvest was in and my mother was free to leave her widowed father and brothers.

We always shared
Their deep and enduring love was the inspiration and foundation for their partnership in marriage and family life. We didn't always have much, she says, but we always shared. Their early married years were spent in northern Ontario at Kirkland Lake, where my father sold magazine subscriptions. Mom contracted a serious illness there and lost her first pregnancy. It would be five years before my older sister was born. Long awaited and happily welcomed.

Their next move was south to Waterloo, where he worked as a machinist during wartime and she as a clerk in a jewelry store. After a few months she gave up this job, which she enjoyed, at Dad's request -- women did not work outside the home unless economics required it. She stayed at home from then on.

Best for young feet
Several pairs of white high-top leather shoes are lined up in a precise row. It is late in the evening, and Mom has finished polishing them. The thin, chalky smell of the polish hangs in the kitchen air. This is the last on her long list of daily duties. It is after eight in the evening, and her little girls are upstairs in bed. The house is quiet, and she will sit down with her husband now, to read the newspaper and listen to the radio. My mother says she had all of us in these shoes to the age of six, in keeping with the wisdom of her day concerning what was best for young feet.

In those years, homemaking and caring for children were labour-intensive -- think of the meals, the laundry and ironing, the cleaning. Six daughters born within 10 years and the birth of the youngest celebrated with the gift of a fur coat for their mother. My sisters and I grew up in a house where the linen was fresh, the meals made from scratch, the furniture gleaming, our hair curled in ringlets and our little white shoes polished.

The true value of her work
There was laughter, music and kindness. We accepted it all in the selfish way of children. She knew the true value of her work. If we forgot to compliment her on yet another delicious meal, we were reminded. She would quietly say, "Well, I guess that tomorrow night, I'll put a bale of hay in the middle of the table....” We'd hurry to make amends and pour her tea.

On a warm afternoon in a long summer season of canning, Mom is efficiently quartering pears. I am breaking a clove into quarters and inhaling its pungent scent while I listen to a story about how she and her mother and sister managed the cooking for a threshing crew of 20 men.

She excelled in domestic arts
A woman's work on the family farm was essential, respected within the family. The work and roles of men and women were distinct and separate but complementary and accorded equal value. Women looked after the house but were not permitted inside the barn. Mom recalls that her father allowed women to come to the door but no farther. She tells us with pleasure that on days when her mother had to go to town, which meant Stratford, "She wouldn't have the buggy out of the drive before I started to bake." She was 10 when she began, and her pastry has always been light. She excelled in the domestic arts, and this excellence was the reason Dad gained 40 pounds in their first year together.

Mom has many stories and sayings about women and kitchens, recipes and providing hospitality. One of my favourites, on the occasion of unexpected dinner guests: if you haven't got much to put out, use your best tablecloth. In our house the cloth was white damask and the dishes were her mother's.

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The evolution of motherhood

Go easy on the duck
On another occasion one of us invited a boyfriend at the last minute. Before grace was said, a whisper went around the kitchen. We took such modest portions that there were unexpected leftovers. "Go easy on the duck” is a remark that still brings a laugh when we are setting an extra plate.

A 57-year-old woman in her first pantsuit. It is 1970 and my father has been dead for two years. Now, after the early intense mourning has passed, Mom has found a job. The women's revolution is gearing up. She begins working as a clerk at an insurance firm.

Life began at 57
Recently, when we were speaking of my elder sister's coming birthday, she commented, "Fifty-seven, that's when my life began again." She got a new look -- a work wardrobe -- found new friends, travelled and enjoyed her status and her own paycheque.

She has infected us with her love of fashion and good grooming. Her weekly trip to the hairdresser is a must. She delights in having good-looking clothes in her closet: a fashionable black suit, pretty dresses and scarves, sports clothes and "something lovely in the back of my closet so I am ready to accept any invitation." A pretty pair of shoes is a favourite item -- she very reluctantly gave up wearing high heels in the middle of her ninth decade. She was delighted to find a stylish coat for this, her eighty-ninth winter and beamed when I told her she looked pretty with the soft fur collar at her neck.

The women's stories
Often when I visit my mother, we take a drive "up home." She points out the handsome red-brick two-storey house and the window of the bedroom where she was born. It pleases us to see that the family name remains on the deed. She is the one who knows the histories of its generations and much about the 40 families that made up the membership of the local parish. Each person, the life and the accomplishments, has value as comedy, tragedy or drama. She is the one who remembers. Especially the details of the women's stories. She is the matriarch now, the eldest surviving on both sides of the family tree, and her status is important to her.

My mother provided a model for the role of a wife and mother that was time-honoured, the norm in our Ontario city where few married women worked outside the home. This was the world I knew, and in my youthful ignorance, I imagined that life went on virtually the same way in homes everywhere in Canada. After I left home to attend nursing school, I was shocked to hear other girls trashing their mothers by belittling their lives or claiming to hate them.

When I became a mother myself
And yet in my young adult years, all aspects of a woman's domestic life bored me. I did not really appreciate the worth of my mother's work -- until I became a mother myself. This was in the early days of the women's movement, and although woman was being transformed into goddess, it would not do, politically, to be like the most familiar of women, our mothers. The role of wife and mother was last on the list of choices for my generation.

Although I admired my mother and the way she lived her life, I knew I had choices. I wanted something more. As a teenager and young woman, I did not worry about “turning into my mother." I was determined I would not. I sharply dismissed her life as sweet but dull. I saw her as a lovely, intelligent woman who was lucky to marry the man she loved, someone who appreciated her good fortune in having her own home and in not being relegated to the role of spinster sister who kept house for her father and brothers.

A dedicated contrarian
I opted for a conventional career, certain that being a nurse would be a ticket to adventure. Through the 60s and into the 70s, I was studying, then living, really living, playing, loving and working as a single woman far away from the dull fog of domesticity that seemed to enshroud my mother.

Until my mid-20s, I resisted the idea of marriage and motherhood. The idea of a conventional marriage and family life filled me with dread. I imagined it to be the narrowest of existences. I was not so much a feminist as a dedicated contrarian -- until I fell in love and married at age 27.

Struggling to keep pace with the world
The adjustment to becoming a stay-at-home mother was shocking. I was constantly fighting fatigue and worrying that, yes, I was slipping into the dreaded domestic fog. I hadn't been paying attention; I didn't know how to mother. It did not come naturally, unlike the birth process with its inexorable rhythms. I struggled to keep pace with the world, reading the New Yorker while I nursed my daughter. I imagined that my life was taking place off to the side of real life.

It was the shock of the now. The needs of my newborn baby demanded precedence over all else. And from then on, the persistent call of my first duty to my daughters. In this transition from self-indulgent career woman to mother, I looked to my mother and others, sisters and friends, who were there before me. We talked and talked and laughed and cried -- and I learned. I saw that there were many ways, many styles and strategies I could adopt.

Humour, a mother's best friend
I found that humour is a mother's very good if not best friend. At parties, when asked that dreaded question, What are you doing these days?, I used to answer that I was working on my doctorate in chemistry -- the chemistry of laundry stains -- and that my thesis was on the differential extrusion of the banana molecule. I claimed to be attending U. of M. By this, I meant I was keeping sane and current by listening to CBC's Morningside program during the LaMarsh, Hatton and Gzowski years.

Gradually I came to understand the powerful role of mother and to know that there is pleasure in duty. That the years I spent at home were full of wonder and opportunity. That there was time for me and my interests. That in my mother's life, never so sweet, never so dull for her, there were challenges, many and varied, and I learned to appreciate and respect how she managed them.

Varying views and opinions
Over the years, Mom has also revised her views and opinions, especially on topics such as women's rights and marriage. If women's lib had been around in my time, she says, things would have been different.

She would not have listened to the doctors who insisted on the science of bottle feedings and gave her a new and improved formula for each of her six daughters. She would not have given up her job at the jewellery store. Now she understands how hard it is for young women who have been living and working on their own to stay at home with small children, even if that is what they want. "My job at the insurance company was good,” she says. "I got more out of it than the work." She got a new life. She knew her work for pay was important then. Now we know the value of all her work.

Like mother, like daughter
To her daughters and their families, Mom is always encouraging, the giver of sound advice for problems of the heart or head. She delights in all our successes and commiserates in our disappointments. Now at 89, she is so agreeable a model of how to live as a woman and mother that I try not to avoid turning into her but to keep up as gracefully as she has. Like mother, like daughter. It is a high compliment.

Excerpted from Dropped Threads 2: More of What We Aren't Told, edited by Carol Shields and Marjorie Anderson. Collection copyright(c) 2003 Carol Shields and Marjorie Anderson. Story copyright(c) 2003 by Maggie Dwyer. Excerpted by permission of Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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