Writing Diaries #11—Circumstances made my life a prison: my two terms

Medieval ideas about keeping girls under control meant I spent my teens inside looking out

No, I have never committed a crime, let alone two but I have endured periods when I was treated like a prisoner.    

My parents were my first jailers, imposing strict controls on my life from a young age.

I arrived in Montreal, Canada, from Italy in the fall of 1952 with my mother. We were joining my father who'd traveled ahead to prepare the way. I was three. They had fled their impoverished mountain village at a time when all of Europe was still reeling from the ravages of World War II.

Like hundreds of thousands of post-war Europeans, they left their homelands

hungry for the opportunities available in young, growing countries such as Canada, the U.S. and Australia. These nations wanted and needed their labour.

We ended up in Montreal because my family had close relatives already living there, and they had sponsored us.

Once in Canada, both my parents found jobs. They were determined to buy a house and we did without a lot to achieve that end. The jobs were plenty but the pay packets thin.

Thousands of immigrant women took jobs in the city's garment factories, and the men did backbreaking work in construction. To bump up their earnings they did double shifts or found second jobs.

It was like that in our household for about ten years. I was around thirteen when it became clear Pappa was losing his mind. There had been signs, of course. He'd had worrying, unpredictable moods. He was controlling, and sometimes violently abusive, particularly towards my mother.

Still, until the early 1960s he'd worked steadily. After that he quit job after job until he refused to leave the house at all because people were trying to kill him, he said. For the next few years we subsisted on my mother's wages from her day job in a factory and an evening job cleaning office buildings.

Home was my first prison

I was the child of peasant immigrants with a way of thinking steeped in strictest patriarchy now growing up in a new country. My parents kept me away from its more liberal ideas by keeping me from socializing. These circumstances made my life a prison for the duration of my teens.

My father may have been unemployed and living off my mother but he remained fully in control of our household.

My mother worked all day and in the evenings. We barely saw her. He needed somebody to control and torment so he turned his eyes on me. I was a teenager now and needed watching and restraint, he thought, to keep me from meeting boys. He allowed me to leave the house to go to school, and later to various summer jobs.

Did I defy him? No. Neither did my mother and my little sister. He was unpredictable and terrifying even when he didn't raise his voice. This was our reality at home.

Meanwhile, the English-Canadian schools I attended reflected a different way of life. Girls my age went to parties, to dances, to movies. They had friends stay over and they slept over at their friends' homes. Not I.

I could skip rope, play hopscotch and board games with neighbourhood friends out on our stoops or in the back yard where he could see me.

Why was he so worried about boys? Because his daughter was a possession he didn't want some dirty boy to soil.

He knew too well what boys were capable of. He had been a girl chaser and seducer in his native village and had cheated on my mother many times during their marriage. While unemployed, he'd even had a liaison with our downstairs neighbour while my mother was out at work and we were at school.

His final breakdown came in 1968. It was ugly for all of us, and he moved back to Italy for good. He eventually remarried and had another daughter with his new wife who was only a couple of years older than me.

He never sent a penny to help with the children he'd left behind in Montreal.

I celebrated his departure, believing that the doors of my prison had finally been flung open.

But I was wrong. With my father's departure, an employer took over the prison.

Circumstances of my first job made life a second prison term

An example of the setup similar to the one where I worked, although our telephone directories were ten times the size

I had started a job as an information operator with Bell Canada at the end of university freshman year. I stayed with Bell for four summers and worked part-time on weekends during the school year.

Bell paid well but this big corporate employer had a rule for everything. There were no men employed as operators, which made it permissible to treat us like school children.

The room was set up with parallel rows of tiny cubicles separated on either side by plexiglass panels. We sat in front of a giant telephone directory and wore heavy old-fashioned headsets.

1. We were instructed to keep our eyes facing forward and forbidden to talk to each other.

2. Our breaks were also scheduled. If you couldn't wait until then to take a leak, you had to call the supervisor and ask permission. Only one person at a time could go to the toilet.

3. We were we allowed to work standing even for a few minutes to stretch our legs no matter how many hours between breaks.

4. While we worked, we never knew when a supervisor might be listening in. They graded us on how fast we located phone numbers, whether we inadvertently gave out a wrong number, and how we dealt with unpleasant customers.

5. Once a month an assistant manager sat each of us down to review our report card. Those not meeting expectations went through retraining. Repeated bad report cards got you fired.

The narrow work space and enforced immobility made me claustrophobic, and I soon began having panic attacks. It felt like I was in Hell.

Why did I stay four painful years?

The same reason I hadn’t challenged my father: fear. With my father I wanted to avoid his rage; with Bell I was tethered by the good rate of pay. I had tuition and books to pay for, and I had to help my mother with household expenses. She had my sister and brother to raise, both still in elementary school.  

Although I continued to live at home, my mother and I argued a lot. She had the same ideas as my father about how a good Italian daughter should behave. It meant I should have no life outside the extended family.

I fought hard to distance myself from the claustrophobia of family and their expectations that threatened to strangle me. My mother struggled equally hard to keep me tethered.

In the mid-1970s, when I couldn't stand living at home one more minute, I got my own place. My mother felt betrayed, and it nearly broke her. As for me, I was overwhelmed with guilt but I held firm.

My mother and I were estranged for a long time after that.

The day I left my mother’s house I promised myself I would never again allow anyone to control my life, not a husband, not a boss and not a friend.

And I never did.

My upbringing had wrecked my mental and emotional health. It took years to find a path to recovery, but I got there...eventually. More on that in future blogs.