I Am A Consolation Prize
I Am A Consolation Prize
mum + me :: my origin story :: part 1
I am a consolation prize. I am a consolation prize that G-d gave my mother after she suffered terrible abuse and the theft of her youngest daughters from her by their dad and a woman she believed was her best friend. I am the only diary of her experience and life. I am the living record of her self-restoration.
Before I continue I will say that her faith community, the Catholics, didn’t help mum, they watched her suffer and they judged her trauma responses. Men and women alike. Lay people and priest alike. They watched her suffer abuse and they never held the abuser accountable in any way. They did nothing to relieve the suffering mum and her family, my 5 siblings, endured. If gossip could solve this problem it probably would have, people talked and that’s all they did.
My early childhood was spent watching my mother walk that walk of projected shame with class and grace. I had no idea what I was watching until just recently, when, in an ebb of grief, I had some horrible clarity about my mother’s life and her immense silent and hidden suffering.
Let’s begin, shall we?
In 1966 my mother had to flee her home for her life. She had been married 17 years and had 5 children ranging in age from 16 to 5. Her husband tried to strangle her. After years of abuse that included throwing her down stairs a few times and breaking her leg twice, beating babies out of her pregnant body, mum decided to leave. My brother once told me he thinks mum had 10 pregnancies and 5 of them survived.
Assisted by her 16 year old gay son, mum left. They had to break in after dark to steal pots and pans and items she would need to live independently—my sister, who was 5, remembers hearing Walter and mum breaking in. Women’s shelters didn’t exist. Her catholic family did not offer her refuge. No Catholics did. In fact they denigrated her for leaving, apparently she should have stayed to follow the Vatican law, even if it meant dying. Because G-d’s church cares so much about women and children. Anyway, that’s a story for another post.
Mum took a small room in the sketchy slummy part of town, Langside in Winnipeg, near the U of W campus. She worked as a librarian for the university. Her French language skills were an asset and easily she got temporary government administrative jobs and she worked in the University of Winnipeg library. She had one nice outfit she would wash nearly daily by hand. Walter helped her and so did my aunt, slipping her a twenty here and there. Mum gave everything to Walter and Matante would get mad and tell her not to give everything to her son. Matante didn’t understand motherhood despite her piety. Walter had to care for his own siblings and the three eldest lived together for a time. My sisters, 9 and 5, were stuck with their dad and his new woman, mum’s supposed former best friend, who was apparently an abused single mum of 5 herself.
My parents met at the U of W, the university in downtown Winnipeg, in the library. Dad was a student. He was a windrush immigrant living with his uncle and going to university to get his degree. He was gonna get the degrees and be somebody. Dad was very smart and worked hard to get university entrance, he didn’t get schooling beyond 6th grade and as a young man did lots of independent study under Katharine Birbalsingh’s grandfather, the village headmaster.
My mother wasn’t what my Aja wanted for his son. He stopped speaking to my dad for 6 months. I had no idea as a child how many people never wanted me to exist because I’m an unnatural abomination or an unfair burden of competition to my siblings or something similar. I wasn’t planned, I was a yearning and a prayer that mum didn’t believe would be answered. At 37 with one fallopian tube left, having suffered a rupture of her other one when an ectopic pregnancy nearly killed her—that’s the last pregnancy from her first marriage—Mum said she didn’t believe she could conceive. Did she trap my dad? I don’t know. Now I don’t think that way: he was a big boy and made his choice to have unprotected sex. So that’s that. G-d opened her womb, the way She is said to have with Sarah and Rachel in the Torah. I didn’t always think this way about dad and today I do. I see many things differently now. Anyway.
Also, in 1967 interracial and interfaith romances were taboo. I was born into a story that had begun 18 years prior, when my brother was born and my mother was a young bride with an abusive husband. Bernie didn’t love mum but asked her to marry him because Gloria said no. Mum wanted to get out of her parents’ house, so she took the ticket offered her and in 1949 my mother was married for the first time in a fancy dress at a church ceremony. We had that photos of my mother marrying another man for years in our family album alongside my baby photos and photos documenting my parents early life in our family’s life. Maybe my sisters have these wedding photos of their parents now. Incidentally, the marriage was annulled, meaning erased as though it never happened. What does that mean for the progeny it produced? I don’t know. The Vatican twists humanity to promote its own demented ends.
The shadow of grief and pain looms larger within mum when I look back at my childhood. I see it often in her beautiful periwinkle blue eyes. Weird how it wasn’t consciously apparent to me at the time. I knew the story of my sisters, these mysterious creatures whom I could feel in my gut that mum loved so much and whom I saw from afar a few times and whom I didn’t know or understand even after I met them at aged 10. I just knew mum loved them so I should too and I should want them because mum did. My mother’s grief for my sisters bathed my young nervous system from inside the uterus. I knew that it hurt her heart to be away from them. Like no one else—because I heard her heart beating in grief for 9 months. No other child of hers did, only I began my life this way. I always tried very hard to fill that emptiness for mum. Without knowing. I tried to be a good consolation prize. I was made to transform grief into joy and gratitude, perhaps.
When I was 5 many people pressed mum into signing adoption papers for my two sisters in an attempt to appease her abusive ex. Including our parish priest. Including my dad. Including the woman who took them from her, her former “best friend” from bingo whom I mentioned above. I came home from school and found Erma sitting in our kitchen and mum serving her coffee. I later learned Erma had come to intimidate mum, when she knew dad and me would be out of the house and that would make mum a perfect target. I remember that we saw Erma around downtown once more around this time period, she showed up at the edges of our life in a subtle stalker kind of way. She would show up at our church prayer meetings for a while. There’s more to this adoption story and I will tell that tale in time—now is not the right time.
When I was 7 I remember seeing mum mail a letter to one of my estranged sisters for her 18th birthday. I remember when mum received the letter back unopened, RETURN TO SENDER it said. At my mother’s funeral my sister told us that she had just seen that letter recently, she didn’t know it existed. I judged my sister unfairly all these years for a thing she never did. She was a victim like mum was. My sister looks just like our mother and I always remember that Diane was punished for looking like mum by those who hated mum. Her resemblance of our mother is a blessing to me, a reminder mum is still here in the legacy she left us. Dear Mum, I get everything now. Sigh. I’m very sorry, mum. For humanity. For my dad. For myself. I’m sorry mum.
Mum kept so many things for and from us, she kept them in her heart. And I watched her and I carried this stuff and I still do and it’s time to put it all down on digital paper now. That’s all for today. Next Friday I will continue this story.
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Final thought. Female sex based rights are everyone’s rights, without them everyone suffers terribly, as my sisters can attest to and as our mother’s story demonstrates. Motherhood is only and always female. This is a fundamental truth of humanity that must NEVER be erased. Look at every society where women have no rights and are abused and denigrated and disrespected fanatically and liberally and ragingly and compulsively by men. Those societies are fraught with hardship and misery and poverty and destruction. Because women are the spirit of life and connection and when you destroy us you destroy that spirit of vitality in society.
Remember the Torah? A life is a world. Well, then a mother’s life is a galaxy. My mother’s life was galaxial.
Shabbat Shalom.