StoryWorth

I recently celebrated a birthday – for some reason they still come around once a year despite the fact I’m not interested in getting any older.  It gets harder every year for people to find a gift for someone who wants for nothing – there is little I need to add to the collection of things I’m already trying to cull but, here’s the kicker, I still love presents. 

In her search to find the perfect something for someone perfectly awful to shop for my daughter found something perfect. – a one year subscription to something called StoryWorth.  The gift arrived in an email with an explanation:

You’ll get weekly prompts with an easy way to record your life, and at the end of the year you’ll receive a beautifully bound book of your stories.

Here’s how it works.

• Every Monday, we’ll email you a question that was has chosen for you, for example “How did you get your first job? or “What were your friends like in high school?”
• All you have to do is reply to the email with a story. You’re welcome to attach photos as well.
  

This wouldn’t be everyone’s idea of a perfect gift but for someone who has been in the market for a project and who likes to write and was running out of things to write about, it’s ideal.  Apparently there are several hundred questions in StoryWorth’s  arsenal to be used to prompt a weekly installment to the story of my life – I received my first one this week:

              “What was your mom like when you were a child?”

I’m off to the races – I’m not certain StoryWorth is ready for what’s coming their way….

What follows is not a blog post – it is a written commitment to this project.  I don’t plan to share all the installments as I write them, this is an attempt to take this project seriously and commit to something bigger than my good intention.

This is a work in progress and will probably change a hundred times before it’s worth sharing but for what it’s worth here is the beginning.

The first question...

What was your mother like when you were a child?

That’s a big question – I think I should tell you about my mother first

My mother was born on June 13, 1925 – smack between two world wars and prior to the Great Depression and the Dirty Thirties. She was the third child in a family of five sisters who all had a younger brother who stole the show. I’m to understand Mom was a quiet little girl; a skinny, raven haired beauty who was stuck on her dad.

Her family was well established in Winnipeg, involved in the community and the church. Mom grew up following in the footsteps of her two older sisters and breaking ground for her two younger ones. I was always fascinated with stories about her olden days – she could spin a tale in the fashion of the generations of story tellers before her. I loved those stories and could easily imagine her life growing up in the middle of Canada, in the middle of the twentieth century not far from the shadow of the First World War. 

Mom’s sense of humor was legendary, people were always drawn to her, she was popular in a fashion I only ever dreamed of. By the time she was a teenager the world had been pushed to the brink of war again  – the boys she went to school with joined the forces in droves. Mom worked as a soda jerk back in the day making coke floats and banana splits for the young men headed off to places afar.  In my mind’s eye I can see her joking around with those boys, scooping ice cream and making light of the situation on the other side of the world.  She wrote letters to some of those young men after they went to war.  She told me she would hold her breath when news from overseas arrived and cry if the name of a fallen friend was added to a growing list displayed in the foyer of the school.

The times in which we grow up shape the people we become. Mom grew up during a time when people painted smiles on their faces even as their hearts were breaking, they were brave when they felt afraid and they shed their tears in private. They were strong because they had to be.

Some time after the war my mother met my father. He had joined the navy when the boys all marched off to Europe and did his service on the North Atlantic. Their paths crossed at a wedding they were both attending – my dad took one look at Mom and decided she was the girl for him. There was one small problem, Mom was engaged to marry someone else at the time – Dad had to work very hard to woo her away from her handsome fiancé. But he did – they were married on May 20, 1950.

For as far back as my mother could remember her goal had always been to get married, have some babies and make sandwiches for the rest of her life. The marriage thing turned out to be the easy part – having the babies was another story. After wishing and hoping and trying to have a baby for three years a healthy one finally arrived. Me.

***

I was born on July 9, 1953 – the story of my birth always varied with the person doing the telling, suffice to say everyone was relieved and excited when the doctor presented mom with a fat healthy baby girl.  She had been told not to expect miracles, not to get her hopes up and to wait until after the baby arrived before doing any preparations to bring it home.  I slept in a dresser drawer for the first few weeks of my life.

My mother’s heart had been broken in the September prior to my birth – her beloved father passed away during a holiday he was taking with my mom, my grandmother and uncle. They had travelled to Ottawa to welcome the second child born to mom’s older sister. I’m sure mom was happy for her sister but I’m also sure she felt like motherhood was passing her by.  Being close to his daughter I think my grandfather saw the heartache written on her face – he promised there would be babies for her one day soon… And then he died.

I grew up thinking my grandfather arrived in heaven and made good his promise by sending me to his grieving daughter.  I think maybe mom felt the same, she treated me with kid gloves – I was special and breakable, something to be protected from any harm that might come my way.

It wasn’t long before mom and dad welcomed more healthy babies. My brother was born a year after me and a sister the year after that. Mom had her hands full, she didn’t have time to be the same doting mother to all of us.  She was stretched even further two years later with the arrival of my youngest sister.  Unfortunately the die had been cast and I was the neediest of all the kids – I was stuck on my mother in the fashion of a joey kangaroo, I would have lived in her pocket if I could have fit.

I don’t think mom knew she was creating a monster every time she told me to be careful but she was. The other kids were bombing down the street on their two-wheelers while dad still ran beside me on mine.  I never learned how to skate or had the confidence to try things my siblings did so naturally, I wasn’t brave enough to even do a somersault. I was as careful as careful could be – I was afraid of everything.

I don’t have a vivid memory of the first few years of my life – we moved a lot.  We left Winnipeg shortly after my brother was born, my sister was born in Port Arthur (now Thunderbay).  We moved to Regina after that and then on to Calgary where my youngest sister arrived.  This is where my memory and childhood really begins.

***

Ours was the second last house on Hilton Avenue, the pavement stopped just beyond our neighbor’s yard – from there the open prairie stretched for as far as the eye could see.  I remember wind and the sway of brittle prairie grass, the whiff of long awaited rain and ordinary days. I think I was a happy little girl but I was never carefree – I worried about things worrying could never fix.