Oh my. Yes. Thank you for this. I often wonder what my mother experienced in the moment, while married to my father. I know it was hard for her––an un-winnable trek in a dysfunctional marriage. So amazing to be able to look back and see some of your mom's struggle and her commitment to her loved ones. And the girdles, and the expectations, and all the things to juggle, while putting ones hope and desires and dreams to the side, to be there for family, often at the expense of their own peace and happiness.
Exactly. Generations of women set their true selves aside to be endlessly available for family. And if the Vances of the world have their way, so it will be again.
Rona, this is such a beautiful/wrenching story. And the photos are lovely reminders of those years and a charming old store much like one I remember seeing in the early fifties in my home town. The old people who owned and ran the store, six days a week, had changed nothing since they went into business in 1901. It was a grocery/general store with lutefisk in barrels beside a display of logger’s tin-hats and hobnailed boots. Although my mother shopped up the street at the modern Safeway, my Norwegian grandmother would take me to what she called “the Finn’s store” where she could get “a nice piece of oilcloth” cut to the length she needed, balls of darning yarn and crochet thread, a pound of pink peppermints weighed into a little white bag, a chunk or two of the good lutefisk, a bottle of cod liver oil, hard-tack, and her cheese that looked, to little girl me, the same as her bar of Fels-Naptha soap. And, she bought the Aftenposten, a Norwegian newspaper.
Your story brought my own treasured memories to the forefront of my mind. Now in my seventies, I think of how my grandmother savored her trips to that store - a store that reminded her of the homeland she left at age nineteen and never saw again.
Thank you for pointing me down this trail, Rona. I must write more of these memories of Grandma down before I forget them.
Nancy, you absolutely must write them. This is such a lively paragraph, rich in specific detail. You sure know how to paint a word picture. That's how stories begin.
Thank you, Rona. At this moment, I’m making a list of my memories of my time with Grandma and will be adding to it. Your piece has inspired me to get these on paper.
I just published my first book, a historical novel: STILL THE CARETAKER: A LATVIAN GIRL’S JOURNEY. I’m busy with that and with plans to start the second book which will include some of the same characters. So, writing my memories of Grandma might be a good way to unwind in the evening after a day spent on marketing and novel writing.
Again, thank you for your wonderful story and for inspiring me to remember the long ago and the dearness of childhood memories.
Manitoba born & mostly raised, aside from six years in two towns in Saskatchewan. I think I told you once (as well as Joyce) that one of my English profs at the U of Manitoba told us about your mother and what a brilliant student she was (although I don't remember how or why her name came up) -- and I recognized the name because I'd read her memoir as well as her columns in Chatelaine. This was the early 1980s, probably 30 years after she had graduated. I remember you said she & Mildred Gutkin were good friends -- I never had a class with Prof. Gutkin, but she was still teaching when I was there.
I live near the McMichael now & have a membership there, and I'm always happy to talk it up! :)
Beautifully written, as always. I particularly liked 'My father had a passion for truth and beauty but couldn’t or wouldn’t get his head around the family budget', although other sentences are more poetic. You really should write a novel - you have a novelist's voice.
I love this post so much!! I have just begun writing about my father’s early years of marriage—and he’s been gone almost 30 years. I am older than he was when he died. Cleaning out my parents’ house, after my mother died (more recently), we did come across letters we didn’t know existed. We shoved them back in the box they were in. I am almost ready to read them…
I do love your comments about the girdle. My mother wore hers to the grocery store (one day per week!) and church. And she always couldn’t wait to get it off. She let all us kids know it!!
Curious about your comment about little children seeing or sensing it all—even the truths the adults hide from themselves. Wondering what it was, exactly, that you saw then???? Or are you only figuring that out now as you look back?
Etta, thanks so much. Funny how much we forget—like girdles, a big part of being female for our mothers. I had one myself in my teens.
As for what I saw, it was my mother’s desperation. Powerlessness is the defining fact of childhood, and some children will do anything to save their parents from pain. My sister clowned relentlessly in a doomed effort to cheer them up. I became a quiet caretaker for my mother’s emotions. She saw me as aloof and it looked that way, but being her loving witness was the yoke I willingly bore. These lines from OTHELLO apply: “She loved her, that she did pity them.” Yet there was nothing I could do to sve her, and by setting her needs above my own, I acquired the mental habits of a depressive. I didn’t know about these letters when I finally started therapy. My psychiatrist would have recognized the motherlode. Or should I say mother load?
This is difficult stuff. This comment is an extra piece of the story.
Have you read Samatha Clark (who writes on Substack)‘a book The Clearing, on parents who need more help than it is possible to give? I found it very beautiful — it’s also about art — and helpful, too. It somehow helps to see it through another perspective and framed through art and landscape.
The comment is the foundation of quite a few pages, as you have clearly noticed. I have written a memoir about my mother and me. It seemed to say everything but did not.
My Mother's Daughter is out of print, available as an e-book. A used copy would be ridiculously expensive for you because of postage. If you enjoyed this post, I think you'll relate to the book, although the story I told all those years ago is still missing a layer.
Ah, ok! Maybe the Substack is the place to be for this story now, in this case. These pieces as parts of a new work-in-progress. Am grateful to be getting them here, in any case.
Thanks for the elaboration, Rona. I’m glad that through therapy you have come to understandings of the impact of your mother’s loneliness upon you. ❤️❤️❤️ my siblings and I are working through similar issues with my father on our childhoods. Very helpful to read about others’ experiences. And I like Samantha Clark’s writing as well!
Very delightful reading, Rona. Truly enjoyed it. With both of my parents gone, I have so many questions to ask of them too. Although, I do have a half dozen or so letters between my dad and his mother while he served in WW II. He was all of 18 and seemed so young to be fighting in a war.
If you go a few years further back, there were lots of lonely women. My husband's mother, an alcoholic who died in her early 40s, was a partying girl in her teens/20s left alone in London with two small kids and no money during the war. We have no moving letters, but it must have been very hard for her. And, of course, she was one of multitudes of such women.
As for learning about our parents, the most meaningful letters in my life (in this case diaries) are those left by the well-known writer with whom my father had a two-year affair, about which I wrote the post "Our Many Layered Selves". It's kind-of pleasing to know (as a writer) that words can last a long time and have an impact on the next generation or so.
I remember that post, Ann. And yes, it was hard to be a woman then. Being female doesn't make a person suited to running a home and raising kids with no outside stimulation.
A world and a life in a few paragraphs! I allowed myself one Stack to read today because that’s all the time I will have and I picked the right one. This is a marvel. A novel in miniature.
I have no family letters. My Jewish grandparents ended up in Denver and then Deadwood, South Dakota after leaving Russia at the turn of the century. Like yours, they did not prosper. I never knew them.
My very slim mother wore a girdle too. I think it was something that Ladies did. No girdle was ‘sloppy’ and low class. That’s what I remember from reading Ann Landers as a child.
Elizabeth, I’m honored to be your one stack of the day. Your grandparents left Russia around the same time mine did, although what they called Russia is now Ukraine. I’ve been thinking about girdles, and the sweaty discomfort they imposed, ever since I posted this. The tiny details of lives past do not appear in family albums, yet are full of meaning. I greatly appreciated your Ann Landers memory and am starting to think I have more to say about girdles.
I think that they thought of them as a necessary evil the way we thought of pantyhose- especially control top - in our dress up careers. And now the young folks contend with Spanx.
With so much electronic communication instead of letters, there is going to be a huge hole in the historical record of everyday lives. And the everyday of our parents are the lives we would really like to understand better. I'm glad you have those letters. This line, "I couldn’t bear to see her undone. When it comes to the fears that rend a family, children don’t miss a thing." Oh so true. I know it both sides now. Thanks for a beautiful story.
Rona, I haven't ever felt 'sad' after one of your posts because you write with a tender wisdom, connecting to a common thread of humanity that we all know and recognize. I don't know if you ever read "The Human Comedy" by William Saroyan. I haven't read it in a long time. I think I was in high school the first time and it was the saddest, most uplifting book I had ever read. We all love your mother stories because we all have mothers. I think the older we get, the better we know them, even after they are gone.
I have boxes of letters, between my mother and her parents, her MIL, my dad -- all as yet unread. Somehow, I've been unable to set aside the time, but doing so lives among my stash of best intentions. I wonder about the secrets I might find there. My mother spoke, infrequently, of her father's affair. My father spoke, infrequently, of his mother's depression. And what of our own? Our children write of these in impassioned social media posts that don't seem likely to stand the test of time, pieces of their stories that likely won't follow them to old age. I'm glad you're saving these, Rona.
Could it be you are a little hesitant, Elizabeth? The time will come, and you are lucky to have these windows onto your familial past. I often wonder what we're losing now that no one writes letters anymore and even email has become old hat. Last time I checked, archives were not accepting email.
I don't *feel* hesitant, Rona, just busy. But, yes, I am confident the right time will present itself at some point. I guess those of us who've not published in print form yet can hope that musings like the ones we share here will become to future generations what letters were to those past.
I believe they can, but we need to build a more permanent home for them. This is why publishing a book still matters, even if you do it yourself in expectation of a small audience.
Oh, my, Nancy. Your mother was hard-core, so to speak. I acquired a girdle in my teens and credit it with saving me from digital rape by a posse of nine-year-old boys I'd been charged with supervising. That story another time.
There was a recent exhibit of his work at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario, near Toronto (which is an absolute treasure and worth a trip if you're in the Toronto area and enjoy Canadian art). Being from the Prairies, I loved it.
(As an aside, Rona, one of the small towns I grew up in was about an hour's drive away from Grandview, in NW Manitoba -- and another was about 20 miles from Birch Hills, Saskatchewan, which your mother wrote about in her memoir.)
Oh my. Yes. Thank you for this. I often wonder what my mother experienced in the moment, while married to my father. I know it was hard for her––an un-winnable trek in a dysfunctional marriage. So amazing to be able to look back and see some of your mom's struggle and her commitment to her loved ones. And the girdles, and the expectations, and all the things to juggle, while putting ones hope and desires and dreams to the side, to be there for family, often at the expense of their own peace and happiness.
Exactly. Generations of women set their true selves aside to be endlessly available for family. And if the Vances of the world have their way, so it will be again.
Rona, this is such a beautiful/wrenching story. And the photos are lovely reminders of those years and a charming old store much like one I remember seeing in the early fifties in my home town. The old people who owned and ran the store, six days a week, had changed nothing since they went into business in 1901. It was a grocery/general store with lutefisk in barrels beside a display of logger’s tin-hats and hobnailed boots. Although my mother shopped up the street at the modern Safeway, my Norwegian grandmother would take me to what she called “the Finn’s store” where she could get “a nice piece of oilcloth” cut to the length she needed, balls of darning yarn and crochet thread, a pound of pink peppermints weighed into a little white bag, a chunk or two of the good lutefisk, a bottle of cod liver oil, hard-tack, and her cheese that looked, to little girl me, the same as her bar of Fels-Naptha soap. And, she bought the Aftenposten, a Norwegian newspaper.
Your story brought my own treasured memories to the forefront of my mind. Now in my seventies, I think of how my grandmother savored her trips to that store - a store that reminded her of the homeland she left at age nineteen and never saw again.
Thank you for pointing me down this trail, Rona. I must write more of these memories of Grandma down before I forget them.
Nancy, you absolutely must write them. This is such a lively paragraph, rich in specific detail. You sure know how to paint a word picture. That's how stories begin.
Thank you, Rona. At this moment, I’m making a list of my memories of my time with Grandma and will be adding to it. Your piece has inspired me to get these on paper.
I just published my first book, a historical novel: STILL THE CARETAKER: A LATVIAN GIRL’S JOURNEY. I’m busy with that and with plans to start the second book which will include some of the same characters. So, writing my memories of Grandma might be a good way to unwind in the evening after a day spent on marketing and novel writing.
Again, thank you for your wonderful story and for inspiring me to remember the long ago and the dearness of childhood memories.
Please do write them! This short paragraph already evoked so much.
Lori, the McMichael is where I discovered the Jewish series. I didn’t know about your roots in my mother’s part of the world.
Manitoba born & mostly raised, aside from six years in two towns in Saskatchewan. I think I told you once (as well as Joyce) that one of my English profs at the U of Manitoba told us about your mother and what a brilliant student she was (although I don't remember how or why her name came up) -- and I recognized the name because I'd read her memoir as well as her columns in Chatelaine. This was the early 1980s, probably 30 years after she had graduated. I remember you said she & Mildred Gutkin were good friends -- I never had a class with Prof. Gutkin, but she was still teaching when I was there.
I live near the McMichael now & have a membership there, and I'm always happy to talk it up! :)
Oh Rona, I have devoured your mother’s work. Loved Raisins and Almonds as well as Family Tree . I had never known prairie Jews. Such great stories .
Thank you, Susan. There were Jews quietly keeping stores all across the prairie, knowing the locals preferred to buy from their own kind.
Beautifully written, as always. I particularly liked 'My father had a passion for truth and beauty but couldn’t or wouldn’t get his head around the family budget', although other sentences are more poetic. You really should write a novel - you have a novelist's voice.
The thought comes to me now and then. Glad you enjoyed this, Ann.
I love this post so much!! I have just begun writing about my father’s early years of marriage—and he’s been gone almost 30 years. I am older than he was when he died. Cleaning out my parents’ house, after my mother died (more recently), we did come across letters we didn’t know existed. We shoved them back in the box they were in. I am almost ready to read them…
I do love your comments about the girdle. My mother wore hers to the grocery store (one day per week!) and church. And she always couldn’t wait to get it off. She let all us kids know it!!
Curious about your comment about little children seeing or sensing it all—even the truths the adults hide from themselves. Wondering what it was, exactly, that you saw then???? Or are you only figuring that out now as you look back?
Etta, thanks so much. Funny how much we forget—like girdles, a big part of being female for our mothers. I had one myself in my teens.
As for what I saw, it was my mother’s desperation. Powerlessness is the defining fact of childhood, and some children will do anything to save their parents from pain. My sister clowned relentlessly in a doomed effort to cheer them up. I became a quiet caretaker for my mother’s emotions. She saw me as aloof and it looked that way, but being her loving witness was the yoke I willingly bore. These lines from OTHELLO apply: “She loved her, that she did pity them.” Yet there was nothing I could do to sve her, and by setting her needs above my own, I acquired the mental habits of a depressive. I didn’t know about these letters when I finally started therapy. My psychiatrist would have recognized the motherlode. Or should I say mother load?
This is difficult stuff. This comment is an extra piece of the story.
Have you read Samatha Clark (who writes on Substack)‘a book The Clearing, on parents who need more help than it is possible to give? I found it very beautiful — it’s also about art — and helpful, too. It somehow helps to see it through another perspective and framed through art and landscape.
The comment is the foundation of quite a few pages, as you have clearly noticed. I have written a memoir about my mother and me. It seemed to say everything but did not.
Oh! I didn’t realize! Now have both that and Starter Dog to look forward to reading.
My Mother's Daughter is out of print, available as an e-book. A used copy would be ridiculously expensive for you because of postage. If you enjoyed this post, I think you'll relate to the book, although the story I told all those years ago is still missing a layer.
Ah, ok! Maybe the Substack is the place to be for this story now, in this case. These pieces as parts of a new work-in-progress. Am grateful to be getting them here, in any case.
*another's perspective, not another perspective
Thanks for the elaboration, Rona. I’m glad that through therapy you have come to understandings of the impact of your mother’s loneliness upon you. ❤️❤️❤️ my siblings and I are working through similar issues with my father on our childhoods. Very helpful to read about others’ experiences. And I like Samantha Clark’s writing as well!
Yaasss, girdles!
Very delightful reading, Rona. Truly enjoyed it. With both of my parents gone, I have so many questions to ask of them too. Although, I do have a half dozen or so letters between my dad and his mother while he served in WW II. He was all of 18 and seemed so young to be fighting in a war.
Yes, ir’s often years after our parents have died that we know what we should have asked them when we had the chance.
I loved this. I felt like I was there, maybe as Marie in the background.
You wouldn’t want to be there for real, Grace! This is definitely a place to know vicariously, and I’m glad I brought it to life.
If you go a few years further back, there were lots of lonely women. My husband's mother, an alcoholic who died in her early 40s, was a partying girl in her teens/20s left alone in London with two small kids and no money during the war. We have no moving letters, but it must have been very hard for her. And, of course, she was one of multitudes of such women.
As for learning about our parents, the most meaningful letters in my life (in this case diaries) are those left by the well-known writer with whom my father had a two-year affair, about which I wrote the post "Our Many Layered Selves". It's kind-of pleasing to know (as a writer) that words can last a long time and have an impact on the next generation or so.
I remember that post, Ann. And yes, it was hard to be a woman then. Being female doesn't make a person suited to running a home and raising kids with no outside stimulation.
A world and a life in a few paragraphs! I allowed myself one Stack to read today because that’s all the time I will have and I picked the right one. This is a marvel. A novel in miniature.
I have no family letters. My Jewish grandparents ended up in Denver and then Deadwood, South Dakota after leaving Russia at the turn of the century. Like yours, they did not prosper. I never knew them.
My very slim mother wore a girdle too. I think it was something that Ladies did. No girdle was ‘sloppy’ and low class. That’s what I remember from reading Ann Landers as a child.
Elizabeth, I’m honored to be your one stack of the day. Your grandparents left Russia around the same time mine did, although what they called Russia is now Ukraine. I’ve been thinking about girdles, and the sweaty discomfort they imposed, ever since I posted this. The tiny details of lives past do not appear in family albums, yet are full of meaning. I greatly appreciated your Ann Landers memory and am starting to think I have more to say about girdles.
I think that they thought of them as a necessary evil the way we thought of pantyhose- especially control top - in our dress up careers. And now the young folks contend with Spanx.
With so much electronic communication instead of letters, there is going to be a huge hole in the historical record of everyday lives. And the everyday of our parents are the lives we would really like to understand better. I'm glad you have those letters. This line, "I couldn’t bear to see her undone. When it comes to the fears that rend a family, children don’t miss a thing." Oh so true. I know it both sides now. Thanks for a beautiful story.
Thank you, Leslie. I hesitated to post this, thinking it might be too sad, and am heartened by the warm response.
Rona, I haven't ever felt 'sad' after one of your posts because you write with a tender wisdom, connecting to a common thread of humanity that we all know and recognize. I don't know if you ever read "The Human Comedy" by William Saroyan. I haven't read it in a long time. I think I was in high school the first time and it was the saddest, most uplifting book I had ever read. We all love your mother stories because we all have mothers. I think the older we get, the better we know them, even after they are gone.
Leslie, this means so much. I’ll remember your words. Thank you.
I have boxes of letters, between my mother and her parents, her MIL, my dad -- all as yet unread. Somehow, I've been unable to set aside the time, but doing so lives among my stash of best intentions. I wonder about the secrets I might find there. My mother spoke, infrequently, of her father's affair. My father spoke, infrequently, of his mother's depression. And what of our own? Our children write of these in impassioned social media posts that don't seem likely to stand the test of time, pieces of their stories that likely won't follow them to old age. I'm glad you're saving these, Rona.
Could it be you are a little hesitant, Elizabeth? The time will come, and you are lucky to have these windows onto your familial past. I often wonder what we're losing now that no one writes letters anymore and even email has become old hat. Last time I checked, archives were not accepting email.
I don't *feel* hesitant, Rona, just busy. But, yes, I am confident the right time will present itself at some point. I guess those of us who've not published in print form yet can hope that musings like the ones we share here will become to future generations what letters were to those past.
I believe they can, but we need to build a more permanent home for them. This is why publishing a book still matters, even if you do it yourself in expectation of a small audience.
That might be the most motivational publishing pep talk I've ever come across!
So evocative. The girdle! The only time my mother didn't wear a girdle was when she went to sleep. She wore, what she called, an "all-in-one."
Oh, my, Nancy. Your mother was hard-core, so to speak. I acquired a girdle in my teens and credit it with saving me from digital rape by a posse of nine-year-old boys I'd been charged with supervising. That story another time.
I’d forgotten about William Kurelek! I feel this story.
Rachel, he did a whole series on Jewish life. You can find them easily online.
Yes, I have his children’s book on Mennonites.
There was a recent exhibit of his work at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario, near Toronto (which is an absolute treasure and worth a trip if you're in the Toronto area and enjoy Canadian art). Being from the Prairies, I loved it.
(As an aside, Rona, one of the small towns I grew up in was about an hour's drive away from Grandview, in NW Manitoba -- and another was about 20 miles from Birch Hills, Saskatchewan, which your mother wrote about in her memoir.)
I’d like to give that Marie a good slap! Heartbreaking story… it could be the basis for a great novel.
Thank you, Barbara. A thriller writer could have some fun with Marie.
This is riveting. And so, so moving.
Oh, thank you, Maria, for the encouragement and for restacking.
See above!