In the spring of 1979, my father left my housebound mother in Montreal and came to Vancouver to join my sister and me on a holiday. My mother had planned this trip for us, probably feeling guilty and thinking that my father had become weary of looking after her.
I was tired too. My marriage to a filmmaker had ended years earlier. We’d been together since we were teenagers and had three kids in three and a half years, each one very much wanted by both of us. But we were just kids ourselves.
Though Murray took the children when he could, which meant mainly on the weekends, I was ready for a longer break. Neither my sister nor I was especially close to Abe, but saying “no” would have caused a big commotion in the family. Sandy was also due for time off from her job, and since our parents were treating us, we decided to go for it.
Joey was now eleven years old, Noah nine, Daniel almost eight, and it was a perfect time to be away because they were so focused on my daughter’s cat, Bushka, who’d just had her first litter, all female. Joey named them Pierre, Elliott and Trudeau.
Fortunately, Sandy’s partner offered to stay with the kids, otherwise it would have been impossible. Finding a reliable babysitter, even for an evening, was difficult and expensive. I didn’t want to impose on my childless friends nor on those who had only one child. It didn’t seem right for them to take three of mine, and I didn’t want to take their one child three times in order to make it even. I was determined that the few things I could control would be fair. My kids were very good at keeping me on my toes in that area.
We chose San Francisco because our father, a Montreal taxi driver and tourist guide, had heard the only other place in North America that came even close to Montreal’s beauty was San Francisco and he was curious to compare. Another plus was that city was just a three-hour flight from Vancouver, but American and therefore “foreign.”
Downtown, where our cheap hotel was located, the streets were filled with amputees in wheelchairs or on crutches. Most were disaffected. These vets were the embodiment of war, their young lives had barely begun before they had been so brutally disrupted. Vietnam had never seemed so real to me.
Long before we’d left Vancouver, Sandy and I had made our own plans. Minutes after we dropped our bags I muttered to Abe, “We’re going to an art show. You won’t be interested in it. We’ll meet you later for supper.” We couldn’t wait to see The Dinner Party at the Museum of Modern Art, an exhibition causing a sensation. As it turned out this would be the only time, for decades, that it would be shown in its entirety.
Headed by Judy Chicago, the collective project took four years and four hundred volunteers to complete. At its centre was a series of thirty-nine ceramic plates using floral imagery to depict female genitalia. Each setting was dedicated to a “guest of honour” who had contributed significantly to Western civilization. The work was highly controversial; some thought Chicago was ridiculous to reduce the representation of a woman to a body part, others that she was heroic.
Eager as we were to leave, it didn’t occur to us to ask Abe what he’d be doing while we were away. But as we were racing off he told us anyhow. With a sheepish look he said, “Well, while you’re doing that, I’ll be going to my first porn movie. I’m going to see Deep Throat.”
The Dinner Party was good and gutsy, though my expectations had been unreasonably high because of the hype. And I was distracted. The room was jammed with onlookers and as we inched alongside the long tables to peer at the plates and read the information on each woman, my mind kept returning to my father, wondering what he was seeing.
Later Sandy and I talked far less about the show than we did about Abe. Because he was a voracious newspaper reader, and The Dinner Party was receiving a lot of press, we were sure he knew about it. We were afraid that he was equating what we were seeing with pornography.
And we felt guilty, as if we were complicit, because we knew he knew we’d never squeal on him. Our parents had enough on their own plates to fight about. If Florence found out he’d been to a porn movie, it would either have set her off laughing or thrown her off her rocker. We could never predict with her and we didn’t want to risk finding out.
Going to the film wasn’t the worst of our father’s sins. We begrudgingly accepted that a middle-aged man out on the town for the first time without his wife might want to go to such a “cultural” phenomenon. Rather his great crime was in telling us, his daughters that he was going to see it. Why hadn’t he kept his mouth shut or else lied about it? Sandy and I registered our disapproval but only with each other.
The rest of our trip was spent all together doing the tourist things: Chinatown, Fisherman’s Wharf, the cable cars and the rhododendron gardens. It was a long five days. Abe conceded that San Francisco had its splendid sights and was therefore worthy of comparison, but he was keen to return to his beloved Montreal and get away from his sour daughters.
A while later Judy Chicago came to give a lecture at a packed hall in Vancouver. I was knock-kneed with excitement to be able to see this hot feminist art star. After she gave her spiel about the making of The Dinner Party she fielded questions. Someone asked, “Can a woman be an artist and a mother too?” A deep hush fell over the audience. You could hear hair grow as we waited for her to answer. “No,” Chicago said, “that’s simply impossible.”
There were several loud groans. That was the last thing I heard before my ears went on strike. Then my vision became blurry, and it hurt to breathe. An oddly familiar odour permeated the air: it was the smell of defeat. I fled home to huddle in bed, small and miserable, until anger brought me back to my own size.
Here was a woman who had so much support from so many women to do her art. Why couldn’t she have parlayed that support into helping other women artists? Namely me. She was saying my life as I wanted to lead it was impossible. Since I wasn’t going to give up being a mother, I should give up being a writer.
For months after that I bore a grudge against Chicago, whom I doubt I will ever meet personally. And even if I ever did get a chance to tell her how I felt betrayed by her, would she remember, recant or just tell me to “get a life”? I shouldn’t have placed that much importance on her answer, given her all that power, let myself be reduced by her. But I was very vulnerable to opinion then, hungry for support from other women.
It was in the heady days of the Women’s Movement, the Second Wave of Feminism, which had followed on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement sparked by the courageous actions of Rosa Parks. Great strides towards equality were made in society but not without internal strife over issues of class and race. As well, many mothers felt the movement was only for women without children.
Since for centuries most women had no choice about having children, the current thinking was that motherhood was too traditional. The pill was widely available and abortion was decriminalized. Instead of opting for liberation, women who had become mothers had made the “wrong” choice. We felt marginalized.
Even in the best of circumstances and with a lot of support, parenthood is daunting. Along with the realization that you are the pivot upon which so much depends, comes considerable self-doubt. You have to learn to trust your instincts, discover the authority you never knew you had. Keep yourself solid and fluid for your ever-changing children. Being a low-income single parent held additional challenges for me. Still, by and large, as a mother when I wasn’t terrified, anxious or guilt-ridden, I felt strong, capable and content.
But, if someone asked me what I did, though parenting was my full-time occupation, I never answered right away, “I’m a mother.” Nor did I admit, “I’m a writer,” because if I did and people found out I was also a stay-at-home mother, my writing would be relegated to a “hobby,” and I to “amateur” status.
Like most writers, I couldn’t and still can’t support myself solely by my writing. But no committed writer (or committed anything else) is an “amateur.” All my love relationships were with writers until I realized I didn’t need to live vicariously through them—I was a writer myself although I felt like a fraud to even think that way. To the dreaded question, “What do you do?” I’d hem and haw or say, “I’m a tennis pro.” I’d never played a game, nor wanted to, but it was the most outlandish response I could imagine in light of my life. (I was to play my first game of tennis on my sixtieth birthday).
“Are you a daycare centre?” strangers would ask when they saw me herding my close-in-size kids down the street. Real day-care gave me a badly needed breather from my children and just as importantly, them from me. But I seldom wrote, even after they entered elementary school.
I had part-time jobs and if one child or another wasn’t home with the sniffles, or if I wasn’t getting groceries, cleaning or doing something else to make the house more liveable, I’d relish being alone to replenish myself: to prepare for the scramble of noisy demands that was sure to resume after school.
What I needed in order to write was a blank state of mind, a sense of unlimited time and freedom, and I couldn’t decompress in what little free time I had to achieve that blankness, to focus. Like many new mothers I could barely read a book for a long while after I’d had a baby. Most of my body resumed its former shape eventually and I began to like, be proud of, my stretch marks, but my ability to concentrate was radically different.
In pregnancy the brain shrinks in an unfamiliar stew of hormones and begins to expand a few weeks after a woman has given birth. The hormonal haze lifts, although mothers and fathers continue to be affected by extreme sleep-deprivation. But even after children start to sleep through the night, as parents we remain permanently altered, in a heightened state of intuition and awareness. And always on call.
Sometimes I’d tell the kids, “Pretend I’m not here.” But that inane suggestion never went further than the breath it took to say it. The first word that was imprinted on them was “space.” “Give me some space,” I’d implore when I felt overwhelmed. But what do children know about that concept? They just naturally occupy every part of you, mind, body and soul.
If you haven’t had children it’s hard to imagine how your entire world changes after they’re born, how profoundly your focus shifts. It is an amazing out-of-ego experience. With infinite rewards. My children are my greatest teachers, my greatest blessings.
Once in a blue moon when the kids were very young I did manage to write a poem or a story—something I could work on later—and the satisfaction of that kept my fires stoked. But who knows if my level of creativity would have been any different if I hadn’t had children? It still comes in ways I can’t predict or control. Only now I have the luxury of more free time.
As all-encompassing as motherhood was, I had to learn to own all parts of my identity. To tell others, especially my children, that I was also a writer, because they too liked to make things and could begin to understand. My kids, who have all become parents themselves, have continued to think with imagination. They encourage and expect me to be involved in one creative project or another; they recognize it as my work and value it. The very laptop I’m writing this on is a gift from them.