The Pear Tree

Last December I started a mommy-themed column called The Mother Load for a Calgary-based, online publication called Calgary Beacon. It now runs weekly on that site, as well as in the Penticton Herald’s Southern Exposure (hard copy only). While The Pear Tree is not a “Mommy Blog,” I am going to try posting some of these columns here, on Fridays. Let me know what you think…

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It wasn’t until I became a mother, four short years ago, that I really identified with my maternal grandmother.

All my life we were close. Born on her birthday, my mother joked that I was a last minute birthday gift. I think that unique connection glued us together in a way her other grandchildren – who she also loved dearly – didn’t have.

I spent a lot of time with my grandma growing up. We lived just around the corner from her for many years, and almost every summer from the time I was five until I was 15 she took me with her and my step-grandfather to their farm in Saskatchewan.

There, we’d go for morning-long bike rides or fly kites or just work around the house, and she’d tell me stories about what it was like for her growing up.

I don’t actually remember most of them. It didn’t seem vital at the time. I mean, it’s not like I was going to be tested on any of it. So I listened, mostly, and then forgot.

But I do know that she raised four children, alone, up in the orchard hills of East Kelowna, in the 1940s and ‘50s. I know that they lived, the five of them, in pickers cabins, and that in those days people weren’t as accepting of split families. And I know my grandma worked hard, up and down those orchard ladders, alternatively picking fruit and thinning trees depending on the season, doing what she could to support her family.

I knew these things, but I never really took them to heart until I had my own kids. I only have two children, and we live in relative comfort. They have the requisite toys and videos. I have a dishwasher and all the technical gadgetry a modern mom could want. I have an amazing husband who shares the household chores and insists I put my feet up and enjoy some downtime when I’ve had a bad day.

And yet.

My grandma with two of her daughters - my aunt (left) and mum (right)

I can’t seem to muster the strength and grace and dignity that my grandma must have summoned – that she came out of the experience with.

I started to think about this when my son, Oliver, was about 30 months old and my daughter, Amélie, just a baby.
They would tag team throughout the night, waking us for feedings (her) or potty (him) or to be comforted from a bad dream.

During the day, I was a wreck. I could hardly function. And I’d wonder what it would be like to multiply my experience by two. And to worry about where our next meal would be coming from on top of it.

It didn’t really help me to feel better, but it did give me a lot of empathy and admiration for my grandmother.

She died, last month, at the age of 89.

I’m so sorry, now, that I didn’t ask her, during one of our more recent conversations, how she did it all without loosing heart – or sanity. Or how she kept four kids, all of whom inherited her incredible vivacity, in line.

My grandma and my mum

I’d like to ask her where she found the time, not to mention the incentive, to always have her hair done so perfectly in those old pictures, and her dresses pressed so neatly. I know it must not have always been that way, especially working in the orchard. Perhaps that was an advantage of living in the pre-digital camera days – you wouldn’t waste your film on yoga pants and bed head.

Still, even at the end of her life, she always insisted on dressing up to go to town (aka the mall or the bank or the grocery store), and somehow exuded a beautiful dignity and poise that belied the challenges she surmounted in the first half of her life.

I wonder if growing up in the indulgent 1970s and 80s made me soft. Spoiled, even. So that, after managing so many temper tantrums in one day I feel like throwing myself on the floor beside my son and kicking and screaming like a baby, too. I am weak, I know.

So, while I wouldn’t trade the comforts of 2011 for the tough, character-building world of the post-war ‘40s, I could certainly do with some of their morale. I don’t know if I’ll find it within myself any time soon, but I do know I had an awesome example.

- Words by Lori-Anne Poirier

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