It’s difficult to say whether I am more like my father or my mother because my mother died when I was 16 while I had my father in my life until I was almost 46. Thirty years more, from a child to an adult. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting question, worth writing about.
First how I remember my mother, Jo, what resonates with me about her. My mother was the eldest of two daughters, very vivacious and headstrong. Popular, she didn’t marry until she was 27 and when she did, she married one of the workplace heartthrobs, the “Robert Taylor of the United Shoe Machinery Company.” (For those who don’t remember/know Robert Taylor, he was a tall, dark and handsome actor from the 1930s to 1960s. Born in the same year as my dad, actually, 1911.) She lived with her parents until she married and apparently caused my grandfather some consternation with her socializing late into the evening. Back in the 1930s I think 11 o’clock was late. She was close with her younger sister, who was quite shy and a bit under her older sister’s shadow. Although my grandfather wanted both his daughters to go to university, my mother wasn’t interested in serious things. She was happy being a secretary/stenographer and just having fun. She was brought up Roman Catholic by her Irish mother but wasn’t terribly serious about religion. Loads of non RC friends, my grandfather was Spiritualist, my dad was lapsed United Church. The last summer of her life, out of the blue, she told me (I was also brought up RC) that if there ever came a time in the future where I didn’t want to be RC anymore and she wasn’t around, I shouldn’t feel that I should stick with it out of respect to her memory. Be a good Christian, that was what she said. That was something that haunted me for years; I had no clue she was sick, she told me that a bare three months before she died.
My parents married in 1939—Mom was 27, Dad 28--and my mother immediately quit work and stayed home. My parents lived in a duplex near both sets of grandparents in East End Montreal. My sister was born in 1942 and I was born ten years later in 1952. According to my late sister, my mother hated sex, it was a duty that she was glad my father didn’t expect very often. My mother never talked to me about sex. She barely acknowledged when I started my periods; thankfully my parochial school at least taught the bare minimum. My sister also said that there was a baby boy born dead a couple of years before I was born. She said that if he had lived, I would probably not have been born. My sister. ’Nuff said, she’s gone now, no way to understand the dynamics in our relationship. My cousin, my aunt’s only daughter, has also said that I was born because she was born 9 months earlier and my mother decided it would be fun to have a baby too. Possible I guess. All I know is that when I was small I fitted into her life rather than the other way around. Apart from my aunt and my cousin, she only had one friend her age with a young child. All of my friends had younger mothers—and siblings their own age.
Although my mother had loads of friends because she lived her whole life in the same general neighborhood she’d grown up in, she wasn’t involved in church groups or community organizations like my grandmother and aunt were. She seemed to prefer “for fun” groups like bridge and poker clubs, lunching with friends or her solo Monday “be good to Jo” jaunts on the bus downtown to browse through the department stores on Ste Catherine Street, listen to an organ concert at Christ Church, have lunch at Murrays Restaurant (nice British-style home cooking, creamed chicken on toast was one of the staples, neatly dressed waitresses, counter and table service.) “Be good to Jo” Mondays were a joke among all her women friends—she’d had to put up with my father’s busyness all weekend long, Monday she could relax. So the breakfast dishes would go into the oven (to be washed later that day at supper, Dad never looked in the oven but wouldn’t countenance dishes in the sink or on the counter) she’d pull on a nicer dress than her usual housedress (my mother rarely wore slacks,) stockings and girdle and ride the bus downtown. Mom didn’t drive. She’d tried to learn; my father tried to teach her but they were both nervous wrecks. She didn’t see the need to learn. Bus service was good and Dad was happy to do all the driving on our road trips.
That WAS something I remember about my mother though. Despite her outwardly bubbly personality, her ability to be the star in any social gathering, playing the piano by ear, beautiful soprano voice, laughing uproariously at jokes, she had some phobias. She was terrified of animals, most animals. Family lore was that she’d even been chased by a calf once. She was bitten by a German Shepherd near our house but luckily was wearing a fur coat and he only got the coat. My Dad said she gave off fear like a scent because she’d overreact. She wasn’t fond of cats because she loved to watch the sparrows and robins in our backyard and the local cats would prowl. I doubt she ever rode a horse. As a result, I never had a pet growing up. She also had claustrophobia—didn’t like elevators, didn’t like closed places. Only flew in a plane a couple of times in her life and didn’t like that either. She kept the house neat and tidy because Dad was a neatnik. Otherwise, I think that she’d have rather spent the entire day on the phone talking to her friends (well, she did that anyway—as soon as Dad’s car disappeared around the corner as he went to work, the phone would ring and she’d be on the phone from the time I left for school until just before Dad got back from work at 5 o’clock.) She was a great dessert maker. Cakes, cookies, pies. Yum. Regular dinners were British fare, meat and potatoes (fish and the world’s worst macaroni and cheese for our RC no-meat Fridays.)
She didn’t read books, she read newspapers and magazines. I remember someone gave her the Michener novel “Hawaii” and she said it was far too long. Reader’s Digest Condensed Books were her speed. She watched news programs and loved country music shows, which were very popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Loved the various acts on the Ed Sullivan show. I am sure she was very intelligent but, to sum up, I don’t think she ever took life that seriously. Or maybe, again, that’s because I only knew her up to age 16 and my father did all the serious stuff in our family. Her main world was the Montreal she had grown up in and those places she had heard about through her British and European friends.
So, how am I like that at all? Hmmm…. Unlike her sheltered life, I was basically on my own emotionally from the time I was 16, financially from 19. With no training, I made loads and loads of mistakes but survived. I think I had this innate fear of disappointing my dead mother and was determined to prove my father and sister wrong about my ability to survive on my own. Like her I don't particularly like organized groups. I had to belong to them during my working life and I have tried to do volunteer stuff since retirement but I find them frustrating with cliques and I hate, hate asking people for money!
I married later than she did, at 45. Not 100% my choice but it worked. Unlike her I did like sex but I was several generations apart from her, 40 years. Whole different world in that case. I didn’t and don’t have the kind of social circle she had, although I do, now, have several friends I’ve known a long time, with whom I’ve shared many adventures and dramas. Unlike my mother, I don’t particularly like the telephone although, once I am on a call, I can talk for hours. I just don’t like making telephone calls. I don’t play the piano particularly well (certainly not by ear) and my singing voice hasn’t ever been noteworthy. At parties, I like to stick to one or two people and I like to leave early. I certainly don’t like giving parties! I like animals, have had both cats and dogs. I share a loathing of housework, find cooking tedious and would be thrilled to have a housekeeper. Whereas my mother left no written journal, I have no letters, I will be leaving a TON of written emails, blog, journals, travel books, for Laurie and family to sift through.
If I lived in Montreal (or a big city,) I would be like her and trot downtown to see the galleries, browse the stores, have lunch. On my own or with friends. I DO drive although I learned how to drive later than most of my friends and sister. And I used to be a nervous driver (my daughter would say I still am) but I have driven thousands of miles, many of them alone. That's eroding though, as I feel my age creeping up. I have traveled way farther alone than my mother would ever have imagined either doing herself or me doing. When she was alive, I was very much in her and my sister’s shadows. My family gave every impression that I would probably live at home until I married someone appropriate or else die an old maid looking after my mother. I think if she is watching me from above somewhere, she is amazed. But I also think that she is proud of me for doing so much—some of which she wouldn’t have approved of but some she would probably be quite pleased about.
In sum, am I like my mother? In looks, yes. According to the family genealogy website, FamilySearch, which has a Match page where, if you have photos of yourself and your relations, it will scan them and tell you who you most look like, I look most like my mother. And then like her grandfather, whom I never met. Weird, that is. I look like my dad, but less like him than his mother…. In temperament? I think that I have a bit of her “things will be better tomorrow” outlook but that’s hard won after years of episodic depression (which could have been PTSD from the shock of my mother’s sudden death.) I think, too, that despite all the friends that surrounded her, my mother was perfectly happy being alone. And that’s me as well. Although she appeared to be a super extrovert, the more I have looked into extrovert/introvert stuff, I think she was a lot like me and relished her times alone.
Now for my father (which will be shorter.) My dad was a self-made man. His parents were quite poor and relied on him from the time he was about 13. Like my mom, he was the elder of two siblings, he had a younger sister too. Like my mother, he lived at home until he married. Dad went to high school at night, becoming a draftsman and then slowly working up to becoming a plant manager at “the Shoe.” He took many courses related to heavy metal manufacturing. He was an excellent artist, hence the drafting. He was handsome and fastidious. Photos from the 1930s show him always dressed very nicely, and he kept his cars immaculate. Both my parents were great dancers. He once told me that he would have loved to have become a sailor but his parents needed him. I don’t know why he didn’t enlist in WW2 but he worked in a sector that was part of the war effort, he was older. Dad was never a violent person, didn’t like violence. He could shout and pound the table occasionally but I never feared him being physically abusive. But he was good at stony silences.
He took care of all of the household finances, my mother had an allowance but knew nothing else about finances. She didn’t want to. He would organize our summer trips to the country hotel we usually stayed at and the road trips we took to places like Niagara Falls, Ottawa, Washington DC, New Hampshire, Massachusetts. Actually the summer family holidays influenced my own preference for vacations. Although when my parents and sister were young, before I was born, they would stay at a summer cottage on Brome Lake for Dad’s vacation, by the time I was about 5, Mom declared that was no vacation for her, having to cook and make beds, etc. So we started staying at hotels and there was never a cottage in my life again until my own daughter was small. And I quickly became of the same mind as my mother—a vacation isn’t a vacation unless someone else provides the food and someone else makes the bed. (The exception being if I am in the UK or Europe.) And, apart from my European tenting holiday, I can count the number of times I have camped on one hand. I don’t particularly like camping, am an inept camper.
Apart from our Eastern Townships summer holidays (the Eastern Townships are about a 2-hour drive from Montreal), we took the regular road trips that most families that had a bit of money in Montreal would go on in the 1950s and early 1960s. Dad once went to Europe with a social organization he volunteered with—a water polo team of all things--and came back thrilled with the experience. He was always so supportive and encouraging, excited, once I started traveling. He had a difficult time after my mother died, dealing with a 16 year old daughter he’d not had a lot to do with, and then, just about six months after Mom died, being made redundant when the Americans took over the company he worked for.
But he didn’t complain or, if he was depressed, he didn’t show it. After he lost his job, he got down to looking for another one and soon found a job as a salesman for an engineering parts company. He sold our house because he said it was too big for us (1400 square feet!) and besides, I was at university and wasn’t into housekeeping. We moved into a two bedroom apartment in a different area of Montreal; I sometimes wonder if Dad was embarrassed at the changes in his life and didn’t want to still be in the same neighborhood. He started dating shortly after my mother died and soon was “steady” with a widow friend of my mother’s whom he married a few years later. He was very opinionated about politics, about the state of the world. He became a kind of expert in money matters and despite never making a whole lot of money in his life—something that actually never bothered him—was quite comfortable in his lifestyle.
Dad never had big dreams or, if he did (apart from wanting to be a sailor when he was young,) he never shared them. When he would reminisce in his later years (he died at 87, compos mentis until the end) he never said “I wish I had….” He was, in the main, a contented man although he could get grumpy if things weren’t done according to his directions. I think he drove my sister and my stepmother a little crazy with his opinions about life and how the politicians ran things. We went on a holiday years ago with my sister and her family to Hawaii and she would deliberately wind Dad up by not having everything planned down to a T. One final funny memory about my dad was that he moved from Montreal to Ottawa because of all the separatist stuff and swore that if I buried him back in Montreal he would haunt me. “Never want to stay there again,” said he.
Okay, so how am I like my dad? Well, I think as I grow older, I have settled into a kind of contentment. Like him, I know that I have been blessed in life to have had enough to get me through. Although I lived my life far more on the edge than he did, in the end I was always responsible for my own messes and I stuck through them. I am not as artistic as he was but I am certainly opinionated! And I don’t like other people giving me advice unless I ask for it. I look after the finances for Richard and myself—not terribly well but no disasters. Richard has been able to live his life fairly divorced from day-to-day concerns because I manage them. Kind of like my mother and father. I dance pretty well but Richard never could dance so I don’t get a chance to practice couples’ dances. I am thankful that both parents left me with enough intelligence to, well, just enjoy life and to also understand a lot about it. They gave me the gift of curiosity, exposed me to enough things as a child between trips to museums, galleries, events, cities on the East Coast, that helped me progress through a very interesting and varied life.
Here is a photo of my family when I was a baby. Perhaps the resemblance is there…. Also the three photographs that FamilySearch used to declare the familial match:
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