Tag: grandmothers

Homemaking

I am “homemaking.” That amuses me. I am homemaking now in the way I “normally” should have been doing in my twenties. But in my twenties, I didn’t have any semblance of a home to make.

I wonder why “homemaking” was and is so important to me. To actually “make” a home, I mean. A place on the planet that reflects my taste, my loves, my values, my accomplishments, me. For a childhood trauma survivor like me, both the dream and the leap to get here was huge.

What needed to change first in my adult thinking was the notion that I deserved a home. That may sound odd. Surely, everyone believes they need and deserve a home. But no.

When home was as unstable as mine was growing up, the biggest association I made with the concept of “home” was pain and instability. I honestly felt all I had to bring to the table as an adult was more pain and instability.

In my father’s world, a home was something a man bought for his wife and family. It was not common for women to have the financial or social wherewithal to own a home on her own in his generation. I learned the mandatory tasks of keeping a home well enough. Dad made sure of that.

While he worked at his day job, I went to school and then came home and worked some more. Normal household activities. Setting the table. Putting out the cutlery and napkins and glassware. On spaghetti dinner nights, Dad instructed us on the proper way to eat the long pasta twisted up into a ball with a fork and a spoon. It felt so sophisticated.

After supper, I’d clear away the dishes and wash and place them in the dish drain beside the sink. That way, they would be ready to use in the morning.

I remember one night being so carried away by TV sitcoms that I was too tired to do the dishes. The next morning, Dad was clattering about in the kitchen making breakfast and muttering about missing things he needed. He was decidedly unamused when he found the dirty dishes from last night’s supper “soaking” (my excuse) in a dishpan under the sink.

To say, Dad was uninvested in my life and any career ambitions I might have had would be an understatement. His parenting “style” reminded me of how my sister once described her own parenting: “If the kids are still alive by five, I’ve done my job.”

In Dad’s mind, the career and life ahead of me was wife and mother and housewife. My journalism and academic career aspirations were about as realistic to him as manufacturing fairy dust. It was the subtle undercurrent of these expectations that affected my day-to-day life.

I believe that undercurrent affected my view of “housewifery” but it never tamped down my desire for “a home of one’s own.” Never mind a simple, single room. I felt a strong and consistent call to interior decoration principles but it was never so strong that it became an occupation.

And now, I am turning my hand with more industry to homemaking. Once might even say “at last.” I fought through the souring of the homemaking experience due to the constant expectation of my father. My own mother’s deplorable housekeeping skills were her emblem and matter of pride for not caving into a life of domestic servitude.

She looked down her nose at the “house proud.” It became obvious that her disdain was a co ver for her own ineptitude in managing a household. It would appear I am a member of the “skip” generation. My grandmother kept a lovely home. Many of my fondest childhood memories were made there.

Nan’s house was immaculate. It always smelled of something freshly baked, like bread or cookies. She grew African violets that had fuzzy leaves which we were cautioned not to touch for fear of killing them. To combat the dry winter air, she placed empty soup cans full of water on radiators around the house. Nan knew stuff. I always felt safe and protected in her presence.

Maybe that is what I am going for in this “homemaking” journey. Safety and protection. I am finally building a physical and psychological fort of my own creation.

One day, this home, too, may be filled with the smell of baked goods and African violets and little people who gain a level of comfort from my presence as I once did from my own grandmother. That is incentive.

Meandering Around the Mall

I was 18 years old when I got my first writing job at a newspaper. Full disclosure, my mother was one of the co-owners. And she was the newsroom equivalent of chief cook and bottle washer.

Mom and a similarly disgruntled journalist friend who met at the Telgraph-Journal in Saint John, NB were sick of the bland and myopic editorial point of view espoused by The Northern Light in Bathurst, New Brunswick, Canada. To read its competitor and dominant local news source The Northern Light was to be assaulted with consistently positive stories about the city’s overseers with zero political or social analysis and scant actual news content.

The rest of the provincial newspapers were owned or influenced by the powerful and famous/infamous K.C. Irving and his family.

The complaint was the Irving corporation’s interference in its’ newsrooms and its’ journalism. Offensive or unseemly stories about Irving’s business practices or government entities or friends of the Irvings were largely ignored and swept under the rug. Bumpy rug.

My mother and Sharon Miller cooked up a plan and were determined to put a stop to it. The paper was published weekly and included a section in French. The paper was composed on old typesetters in those days long before computers became widespread, printed, trimmed, and attached with wax to the broadsheet page template.

My first assignment was to produce copy for the Meandering Around the Mall column in its regular weekly slot. I hied myself to the Bathurst Mall to meet and chat with people. If I knew them, the more the better. But often the interviews were along the lines of, “What brings you to the mall today?” “And is that your granddaughter with you?” “And oh, it’s her birthday?” “Which one?” “And is she having a party?”

From this meaty exchange, I would dutifully jot down both grandma and granddaughter’s names, record her age (the granddaughter’s, of course, not the grandma’s), and weave this information into flowing and supple prose. Of course, I had to talk to a few people or the column would have been very thin indeed.

Three to four people were usually enough to give me adequate column inches. Interspersed this with upcoming deals or events or special guests coming to the Mall. It must have been paid advertising but I never saw it as that.

But looking back, it was pure New Brunswick. People are curious about other people. Most people back then loved to see their names and the names of their loved ones in print. In any section but the obituaries. Depending on the relative.

A fond memory I had was the frantic activity around “putting the paper” to bed. We had a deadline at the printer in another city three hours away. And sometimes the typesetter would pile into the company van and head down the road with our precious cargo. The formatted newspaper original laid in a broadsheet-size box.

The printing press worked us into the schedule among the dailies it produced. We’d wait at the printer all night. I still remember sleeping on a pile of mailbags in the press room. The next morning, the published paper was loaded into the van. We trundled back to Bathurst, turned the van over to the distributor, and the newspapers were dropped at their appointed destinations all over the New Brunswick North Shore.

Meandering Around the Mall was an extremely modest forerunner to Facebook, which has taken the model to unimaginable heights. But it does hearken back to much simpler days when – essentially – stalking and chatting people up looking for personal information wasn’t a slightly sketchy or maybe even a criminal act.

I had some wonderful adventures at The Bathurst Tribune but my newsroom tenure didn’t last long. I started there in the spring and by early August, I had been admitted to university. My life was about to change dramatically.

The Bathurst Tribune didn’t last long either. It survived until finances and local hostility from the powers that were in charge at the time killed it off. Just under two years in all.

In retrospect, the Quixotic journalism effort seems faintly quaint and very twentieth-century. But there was a sense of being involved in a meaningful upstart project designed to disperse “hard” news that the population might otherwise never hear about.

Meandering Around the Mall was clearly not that. But it was a charming “slice of life” that elevated locals to mild levels of recognition when that sort of thing mattered.

I wrote “hard news” stories, too about politicians speaking in town or union meetings or car accidents and their outcomes. But for some reason, it was that odd little weekly column that sticks in my memory.

To this day, I can still have a lively, if fleeting, conversation by engaging a proud grandma with her granddaughter at a shopping venue. Some things never change.