Kay S - Winnipeg folklore writer and dreamer

My mother was born in 1911 in a tiny rural town settled on the border of North Carolina and South Carolina. When she was eight her parents and their four children moved to Windsor, Ontario, and later to Detroit across the river, where two more children were born. She met my father at a Halloween party at her church, and they were married a year later – she was seventeen. Her first child was born the next year, and nine years later I appeared in the world, the first girl. Five years later we moved to south Florida – my parents, my oldest brother Allen, me, Janet, and Jolene, all bundled into our 1944 Packard. My mother, who never learned to drive, sat in the backseat with the girls while fourteen-year-old Allen sat up with my father.

To read more of Kay's story of her mother, including a short story she wrote inspired by her mother's garden, go to Ultimate Challenge.

Mother's Story Workshop

As requested by Scarbie I have changed the font of these Mother entries. Instead of Arial small this is Georgia normal and I hope it's readable on Mac. Please let me know if there are still problems.

Last Wednesday I started the first Mother's Story Workshop at Unity of Vancouver. It will go for four weeks, every Wednesday night from 7 - 9, and it's exciting and scary for me to deal with "pedestrians". As you may know this project was started amongst my friends - women actors in Vancouver. I just threw out a challenge - tell me where your mother was born, to who and what happened next, in 2000 words - and some of the women who responded knew how to write, some just wanted to talk about their moms, some wanted to "play" with their friends, but all of us had the experience of telling stories on stage. We basically knew what we wanted to say and how to say it. Or we didn't get involved. At this workshop, I'm working with people (men and women) who have maybe not written anything beyond a grocery list or business report since they left school. They have sketchy memories of their moms, and feel bad about that, but they also want the experience of learning how to talk about her. So that's what we're doing.

I've told them we're writing instead of just talking because it's important to keep the focus on mom and not get sidetracked into our relationship with mom; this is, after all, not therapy. It's important that we systematically organize our memories by date so we can see the potential relationship of different events. Yes, 1942 means there was a war going on somewhere, could this have been a factor in her story? Yes, when she was five years old there were 4 older siblings, 2 babies and 6 more on the way - what was growing up in that household like? I've given them assignments to write about the major events in their mothers' lives and I have no idea what will come back next week.

A woman stopped me on the way out, confessing she didn't remember much of her mother and I told her of the women in our actors group who lost their mothers when they were very young and how by writing down what they remembered, it allowed more memories to surface. She said she didn't remember much of her own life either. She seemed pleasant enough, no sign of obvious trauma but who was I to know? Maybe this was a common thing amongst regular folk - no past, no memory. What was I supposed to do now?

Then I remembered having to sit down in my 20's to consciously link up what year I had done a play with when I had moved to that apartment to when I was going out with that guy. My whole grid system for memories had disappeared once I'd left school and I needed to create a new one that was tied to something beyond what grade I was in. Without a regular job, regular house, regular boyfriend, there were no constants by which to gather events in my memory - everything was strewn around like the clothes in my bedroom.

Perhaps this woman just hadn't established a grid for herself yet; I could solve that (maybe). But it made me realize that maybe this gathering and telling memories of mom was going to take longer than 4 weeks. I knew "talking about mom" involved breaking a big taboo and caused people all kinds of anxiety, but what other fundamental things would I have to teach them? What other unknowns were going to arise?

I had written another story here of another woman stopping me on the way out and her story of "the dark things" but upon reflection I've decided that as much as it shows that we need to write these stories if only to release ourselves from the thrall of history, I must respect the privacy of the people talking to me, if only until their stories have settled within themselves and they are truly released. Suffice to say, wondrous things are happening.

Elizabeth R - Vancouver

Three large boxes of Tupperware lids missing their bottoms; 22 boxes of books; 594 cups and mugs, several emblazoned with gold and yellow flowers and one dedicated to “the world’s goofiest golfer,” nine travel alarm clocks; 142 pillow cases in assorted patterns and colours; seven exercise contraptions with hand grips and foot stirrups connected by a stretchy steel spring: all of this was just a small portion of my mother’s collection of stuff.
I helped her sell, donate, ship and trash her stuff when she moved to Florida this summer. I handled so much stuff, that I feel like stripping my own house bare, sleeping on moss and eating off slabs of bark.
My mother would never do that. Stuff means a lot to her. Born in 1917, she is a tiny woman whose quick steps and busy hands mask a hip replacement and decades of arthritis. She has been busy since she was 12. She cared for her younger brother while her parents struggled to keep factory jobs. It was the Depression, so the jobs were on-again, off-again. Her family ate meals of potatoes and not much else. My mother blames the plum-sized bunion that pains her today on her parents’ inability to buy their children proper shoes. When I helped pack her stuff, she had 63 pairs, most unworn.
She also had tricks: two vanishing-ink pens, nine magic ring tricks and 14 assorted card tricks with folded instruction sheets. And she had accumulated 82 books on training dogs, raising various breeds of dogs and housebreaking puppies. But she never owned a dog. I found a book on Shetland sheep dogs in her library. “My friend has two shelties,” I said.
“Take it and give it to her,” said my mother, adding the book to the sofa-sized pile of stuff she had deposited in a bedroom for me to take home. “A lot of people have dogs. It’s nice to give them a book.”
My mother has given stuff to friends and family, but seldom to herself. All those unworn shoes? All of the 21 blouses I found in a closet with price tags still attached? She will probably never wear the stuff, and she probably never had much of an intention to.
She toiled most of her life taking care of five children and my dad, a demanding, irritable man. In a letter she wrote to me before he died last year, a letter I tossed away because I could not bear to ever again read a certain line, my mother said she had looked back upon her life. The line contained an uncharacteristic lament: “I regret that I didn’t have more fun.”
But she tries hard to make sure everyone else has it. When I was a child she invented craft projects for me and my sisters. Later she collected the magic tricks for our children. For the adults, she has gathered jokes—in three shelves of joke books and in her memory. “Did you hear about the man who fell in the upholstery machine?” she quipped, as we packed a donation box of my father’s clothes. “When they pulled him out, he was completely recovered.”
She easily parted with my dad’s things, but her own stuff was more dear. My mother wanted to discuss every item I was sorting, down to a half-pack of toothpicks, to decide whether she or someone she knew might have use for it. Eventually I realized that she clung to her stuff not just because it gave her security, but also because it gave her life meaning. “My husband was always working on his business,” she said. “When I wanted to talk with him, he would say, ‘Not now, dear.’ So I would go shopping.”
She shopped for stuff, thinking of what other people might need. Whenever she visited my home, she brought boxes of stuff. A few years ago, she saw crystal candle holders on sale. She bought 16 pairs. “A gift to give people when you visit them,” she explained during the packing marathon, as she placed the delicate crystal in the bedroom for me.
When she took her afternoon naps this summer, I would creep into that room, remove much of the stuff and put it in the garage for the three-day moving sale we were planning. There was little space left for browsers among the tables, boxes and shelves of stuff in the double garage, but at least 100 people squeezed through. My mother’s artificial flower collection went fast. We managed to sell all of her furniture and enough dishes, small appliances, games and knick-knacks to fill a large pick-up truck.
We sorted what was left along with boxes of non-garage sale items. There were trash piles, donation piles and ship-to-Florida piles, as well as the bedroom take-to-Vancouver assortment. Ultimately, 41 boxes went to Florida. Eighty-four boxes and 29 black plastic bags of stuff were donated. Canned goods went to the food bank. I didn’t count the number of trash bags we discarded.
It took almost a month total to pack, but suddenly, unbelievably, her house was bare.
My mother now lives in the southern part of the continent, and it will take a plane trip rather than a car trip to visit her. As I sat last week sorting though the stuff she gave me, stuff that so fully filled the trunk and back of my car that you couldn’t squeeze another dishcloth in, I found one of those fun items: a game of Jack Straws, a version of pick-up-sticks with tiny shovels, ladders and pitch forks.
I will play the game with my four-year-old grandson and tell him about his great grandmother. I will tell him about the interesting time I had helping her pack and about the very most wonderful thing of all the stuff she gave me. She gave me love.

Onni M - Vancouver

CHANNA VELLER MILNER

My mother died of a heart attack in 1981. She was in her 70s. It wasn't until after her death that I realized she was more than what I had experienced with her.
My mother was exotically beautiful as a young woman She was a couturier in Kovna, Lithuania, and all the finest ladies of the city came to her salon. She was a successful businesswoman with several women working under her.
All that changed when Hitler invaded Lithuania in 1941. During her time in the Stutthof Concentration Camp, she befriended another woman and risked instant death by speaking back to the camp capo, a violent guard who supervised them. She created health for herself by volunteering for night duty to keep the fire burning in the barracks. In this way, she melted snow to keep herself clean and free from the typhus surrounding her. While she was married to my father in Kovna before the invasion, she wrote to him as he had left to look for his brother in the gulag area. She stated she would ask for a divorce if he didn't return. I learned her story when my father and I translated her memoir, I deeply regret I knew only the woman affected by her experiences lacking creativity and independence.
My father survived the Dachau Concentration Camp and ended up in Berlin after the war. When he learned my mother was alive in a Baltic fishing village, he travelled there to find her. They escaped from the village with the aid of a Jewish Russian officer and ended up in the Eschwege Displaced Persons Camp. My twin sister and I were born there in 1946.