Writing Diaries #5

Echoes of the 1960s: The Unspoken Chasm Between My Mother and Me

Lacolle, Quebec, 1969

The two women, my mother and my aunt, sat on lawn chairs shelling a huge bag of peas. They’d just picked them from my aunt’s gigantic vegetable garden at the back of her ramshackle summer house.  The women sat bent forward, silent in their concentration as they released the peas from their pods with the speed and efficiency of long practice.

        The resemblance between the two was striking, no question they were sisters: the  same delicate facial features; big bellies, like their mother, my grandmother, if in a constant state of early pregnancy, and bony knees and ankles.  Paesani, the other Italian immigrants from the same village, considered them handsome women, born two years apart, and now in their early forties.

        I sat a little distance away from them, feeling a bit guilty for not giving them a hand.  “Oh, to Hell with them,” I said to myself. I turned my attention to the book I’d been trying to read, Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence, written at the turn of the twentieth century about the suffocating relationships between a son and his mother and two of his lovers. They didn't need or want my help; they would just think me inept and slow.

        On the other hand, they seemed to enjoy the work and the other household tasks they did day in and day out. It amazed me. Yes, I had to help my mother at home, of course, doing cleaning mostly and cooking sometimes, but it gave me no satisfaction whatsoever.  

        The sun seemed extra bright and hot that July Saturday. Resolutely, I opened my book but I had to squint to make out the words on the page. On top of that, the sun’s touch on my skin burned like crazy.

        I needed the darkness and relative coolness of the cottage. I got up and headed indoors.  

        My mother believed the sun was medicine for the body. She called out to me in her high-pitched, insistent voice, “You came to the country for sun and fresh air and now you’re going seal yourself up indoors like you do at home? Look at you, you’re pale as a ghost!”

        I wanted to answer, “I might as well be a ghost,” but kept silent and found respite indoors. She wouldn’t have understood what I meant: that she didn't see me as I was, that she saw through me. Besides, I’d never enjoyed exposing myself to the sun. It cooked my skin red, and after a few painful days the burnt skin peeled away leaving a fresh layer as pale as the previous one.   

        My mother didn’t understand how different I was from her. She kept trying to teach me to think as she did, to live as she did. My life and hers would have been so much easier had I been born with a character that meshed hers. But I couldn’t turn myself into an olive tree when was born a cypress.