valeriesbookofme

September 1968. My mother hasn’t been well all summer. She’s been tired. Even while on holiday and visiting friends she’s excused herself midday to have a nap. I hear whispers from the adults that she’s drinking too much. My father has taken to measuring the bottles of sherry and port wine in our liquor cabinet.  Worry over my mother’s health in those September days was an escalation of the fear I’d felt since I was 13, three years previously. When she came home from the doctor’s and she and my father sat me down and explained she’d been diagnosed with a heart condition. That she could die if she overexerted herself. I immediately volunteered to take over the vacuuming and the ironing. Anything. Anything so she wouldn’t die.  I knew though in my teenaged heart that mothers die. It was a theme that ran through my books: fairytales, even young adult series. Disney movies. I didn’t want MY mother to die at the same time as I grappled with fear that she would.  So for three y...

After my rather "political" post last week, I decided this week I would return to my usual style of memoir writing. Today's post is about my childhood, no deep psychological ruminations, just memories. Enjoy! When I moved there in the early 1950s, Rosemount was a very new suburb of Montreal East. Carved out of small plots of farmland in response to the influx of new immigrants from post Iron Curtain Europe and newly middle class factory workers, returning soldiers and the Baby Boom, post-war housing sprang up. These consisted mainly of smallish row houses and duplexes that hardly held the members of some large Catholic families. For example, my friend Brenda, with her eleven siblings, springs to mind. My friend Danielle, who because she was the only girl among five brothers, never had her own room and slept on the living room couch, keeping her clothes in the hall closet. But our bungalow had been built in a smaller section of the area. All of the bungalows in the neat av...

1971. I was 19 years old and still caught between wanting to embrace the new women's liberation movement and also wanting desperately to be loved. So I chose to be dependent on a boy/man who smirked at my going to a women's lib meeting at my university. I never went again.  But that song kept ringing in my years through the years. And there were lyrics that I repeated to myself when I was told that I couldn't do certain things. When I was promised things--by men--and then disappointed. Lyrics such as "You can bend but never break me, for it only serves to make me, more determined to achieve my final goal." And, later, the more poignant, "Yes I've paid the price, but look how much I've gained." Meanwhile, on the public stage I saw women making steps forward and steps back. In Canada, we had Kim Campbell as our first female Prime Minister for five months in 1993. In Canada you can become the Prime Minister by taking the helm of the governing party ...