What She Wrote

My mother married my dad when she was twenty-three. Instead of a white dress, she wore a smart skirt and jacket, corsage, white gloves, warm smile, her wavy hair carefully set. The wedding photo, shot at a long-gone studio, hangs on my bedroom wall. In it, my father is twenty-one. Handsome in a suit, with shiny shoes and skinny tie. The wedding was small because they didn’t have any money. It was 1952 in Miramichi, New Brunswick. That year, Princess Elizabeth acceded to the throne to become Queen of the Commonwealth realms. People watched I Love Lucy on black and white TVs. Everybody smoked and worried about nukes. Women made casseroles in Pyrex dishes and unforgivable jellied salads with shaved carrots and green olives. Fabric was stiff, bras were pointy under sweaters, hair was rigid with spray. Soon they would “rock around the clock” and get “all shook up.”

I turned twenty-three in 1989 and started the final year of my bachelor’s at the University of New Brunswick, in Fredericton. I was transforming and so was the world. The Eastern bloc shed Communism, and the Berlin Wall crumbled. So did South Africa’s apartheid. A Chinese man stopped a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square and became our hero. We never learned his name. Brian Mulroney was prime minister. I didn’t like him because I was a lefty. The Exxon Valdez ran aground off the Alaska coast and poured an unprecedented spill of at least 240,000 barrels of oil into the ocean. Seinfeld and The Simpsons hit prime time. I listened to U2, the B‑52s, INXS, R.E.M., and other bands that weren’t just letters and numbers.

We like to name generations. It helps to generalize and extrapolate. In November 1951, Time published an essay called “The Younger Generation,” an assembly of dispatches from across the United States, which contained reflections from and about those born between 1923 and 1933. The piece meandered through the Korean War, the re-emergence of religion, McCarthyism, promiscuity, television, feminism, marriage, family, and work. It introduced what Mom and Dad’s cohort would henceforth be called: the Silent Generation. Silent as compared with their parents and grandparents, who had jazz and general strikes; who fought wars, endured scarcity, marched for women’s suffrage. “The most startling fact about the younger generation is its silence,” the piece scoffed. “With some rare exceptions, youth is nowhere near the rostrum. By comparison with the Flaming Youth of their fathers & mothers, today’s younger generation is a still, small flame. It does not issue manifestoes, make speeches or carry posters.” Looking back seventy-five years later, is it any wonder they turned to suburban bungalows and electric ovens for comfort and stability? It sounds like a trauma response to the fear, rationing, and political upheaval of their early years — impacts of the Great Depression and the Second World War.

I was born between 1965 and 1980, so I am a slacker, latchkey, Generation X kid, our name pulled from a Douglas Coupland novel. My generation turned outward. “Unfettered, unsunscreened and unsupervised, we children of the 1970s and 1980s roamed the alleys of North America like wild dogs, casually exposing ourselves to danger, equipped with nothing more sophisticated than a dime if we wanted to let our parents know where we were, which of course we had no intention of doing,” Jeff Gordinier wrote last year in the Globe and Mail. “Xers are the generation of the record store, VHS rentals, faded concert T‑shirts, used books, used shoes — we like to have a hard copy. We’re used to that. What’s old is gold.” This couldn’t be more me.

Despite our thirty-seven-year difference, there were similarities between our generations. Mom was a kid without TV, and I was a kid without computers. Mom listened to the radio and records. I listened to radio, cassette tapes, and compact discs. We both used phones attached to walls. Mom’s generation grew up after the Second World War, mine after Vietnam. The Silent Generation lived in the shadow of its predecessor, the Greatest Generation, lauded for resilience and for beating the Nazis. Gen X was overshadowed by baby boomers, who were brash, anti-establishment, and legion.

But despite these broad equivalencies, Mom and I as young women were worlds apart. She had church, and I had feminism. She got married; I went to university. She had her last of six children — me — at age thirty-seven. That’s when I had my first and only twins. I couldn’t get pregnant, and she couldn’t stop. My IVF daughters were conceived in a lab. My mom could be casually racist, antisemitic, and homophobic, and although I gently challenged her beliefs, I tried not to judge. As a small-town New Brunswick girl and later a military wife, she lived in a Christian, Caucasian, and hetero world. My mom never studied philosophy, psychology, or history, as I did. She was denied the bigger picture. I don’t think she ever had a Black or brown friend or travelled farther than Florida. I loved her, but when I was young, I couldn’t wait to become her opposite. Back then, that goal felt like a destination, but becoming something happens over and over in a lifetime, if you let it.

A friend once told me that when you’re old enough to appreciate your mother, she’s too old to feel appreciated. That was especially true for me, since mine disappeared into an Alzheimer’s void when I was in my forties. In the years following her death in 2014, I would sometimes imagine conversations: both of us the same middle age, drinking coffee, playing cards, me asking about her early life, gathering recipes. Wouldn’t that be something, I thought. And then it kind of happened.

My dad gave me a box of my mother’s journals after the funeral. “You’re the writer,” he said. “You should have these.” I ignored the box for ten years because I was grieving, and, to be honest, I wasn’t much interested in the minutiae of her life, as I understood it. My twins were ten, and I had a full-time newspaper job, so the box collected dust under my desk at home, where it served as a footrest — something my mother might have appreciated, considering that she, like me, was too small for most chairs. Or — let’s face it — she might have resented it.

One day, looking for a distraction, I finally cut through my father’s fastidious tape job and opened the box. Inside were sixteen journals of varying shapes and sizes spanning twenty-three years. I recognized some of them and was appalled that for long stretches, I’d forgotten they even existed. The first begins with a substantial backstory, from marriage in 1952 through the birth of her six children, to children becoming adults: “My name is Betty (Keoughan) Gregoire. I had some bad times and very good times during my life. I only wished I’d written them down — so I thought why not go back to at least the day I got married and try to take it from there.”

She eventually arrived at the present, July 4, 1987, at which point she started a daily diary. I did the math a couple times, disbelieving. She would have been a few months shy of her fifty-eighth birthday, which meant she was exactly the same age then as I was now. But not only that. In 1987, I was twenty-one and in university; when I opened the first journal, my daughters were twenty and in university. I let this magical alignment sink in as I ran my fingers down the page, feeling the texture of her looping and unmistakable script. I swear I could smell her Ruffles perfume.

We did not stay fifty-eight together for long. She aged in fast-forward as pages turned. My younger self aged alongside her, from strutting academic (“Lisa phoned last evening said she got another A+, the only one in 18 students”) to a woman in love (“Lisa’s boyfriend arrived today. . . . He’s lovely, also Jewish”), from pregnancy (“Lisa shocked us with news that she is pregnant and not only that but twins. We still can’t believe it”) to motherhood (“Lisa is training the girls, they both peed in the pottie. Great”). I read her journals furtively at first, delighting in little secrets and forgotten memories; then I slowed down to savour her sweet voice. Then — well, I got kind of bored as weekly, monthly, and seasonal routines repeated over and washing-out-the-kitchen-cupboards over and Paul’s-painting-the-fence over and went-to-mass-today over and a-cold-start-to-May over.

Perhaps, in the absence of medals or diplomas, she was tallying chores as proof of her worth. For whatever reason, journalling, like styling her hair, became part of her daily routine. I pushed through. I yawned and put coffee on. I made notes to stay alert. I journalled about her experiences and then got totally meta as I journalled about journalling, until I realized I was getting self-absorbed, as usual. It’s a habit my mother knew well. “I wish Lisa would call,” she wrote in 1989, when I was away at university. “I call her but there’s never any answer. I guess she doesn’t think of us old people.”

When I journal, I usually write about how I feel. The above lament notwithstanding, Mom mostly wrote about what she did: ironing curtains, washing floors and walls, sewing clothes, cooking and baking, crocheting, dusting, gardening, church duties. It sounded mundane because it was. Service to home and family is mundane and, back then at least, thankless and undervalued as “women’s work.” One might pity women like my mother for having dreams too small or none at all, but that’s because they dreamed for us. She worked so little assholes like me could live comfortably, dress scantily, speak freely, and aspire broadly. I painfully recall a dinner during a visit home from school when, a few glasses of wine in, I casually dismantled a lifetime of faith by lecturing about the Catholic patriarchy. Realizing I was the only one talking, I returned to the tender roast beef and potatoes my mother had prepared as she cleared dishes and retreated to her sewing room to hem my new jeans. Children are incapable of understanding the indignity and sacrifice of parenting until they parent. It’s just a fact. My mother forgot that sometimes. When I became a mother, I did too.

When patterns repeat, deviations stand out. Periodically, my mother would stray from the unending list of things to do and things done and say something personal. “I decided today I can’t please everyone,” she wrote in 1992, when she was sixty-three, the tone so familiar to me. “I can spread myself only so far — sometimes I feel I have so much on my shoulders like gifts for the grandchildren, letters to my children and keep a house, plus company. I felt burnt out the past couple days. Too much on my mind.” In those rare, whispered asides about us kids, my dad, her siblings and friends, illness, crime, politics, love, and loss, I saw the depths of her. And, to my surprise, I started to see myself: An aging woman with adult children who are opinionated, sometimes self-righteous, and unapologetically themselves. A woman who tries to do everything and burns out. I just got orthotics for fallen arches, as Mom did when she was my age. Despite my vowing to become the opposite, we are now in the same shoes.

I settled in to experience twenty-three years of Being Betty Gregoire, and my brain exploded with learnings: Our shared grief over wrinkles, weight gain, age spots, and the rest of our body’s mortifying betrayals; our views on the peevishness and sustenance of marriage; our intolerance of dirty fridges and toilets; our likenesses and differences. About my kids, and myself as a kid; about mothers and daughters; and about parenting, which demands so much attention and rewards you with control and influence until, suddenly, your children stop living for you and start living for themselves. Which is exactly what they are supposed to do.

It makes sense that my mother began her diary about a year after I left for university. I think she was lonely. She was missing me — the last of six to leave the nest — and her children in general. She mentions me frequently in the first few journals with a mix of pride (“We finally did get to see Lisa perform and she was fantastic. She is what you call an entertainer”) and disappointment (“Lisa hadn’t called for some time so I called her — I woke her from a nap 7:00 PM. Wasn’t in a good mood. How selfish children can be”). In fact, for almost the entire month of January 1990, she wrote repeatedly about my not calling. I remember that time well. I was studying journalism at Western, going through a miserable breakup, living on bar stools, and avoiding people. “She might get all A’s at Univ. but I certainly wouldn’t give her an A for being thoughtful towards her parents,” she wrote then. I laughed when I read it, but she was right. I hadn’t noticed her unhappy transition from all-knowing central character in my childhood story to a woman on the periphery, someone I turned to only when I needed something — toaster, beer money, moving van.

“Children don’t realize how much you do for them and how very dear they are to us,” she observed in 1990. “Once they are on their own, they tend to forget.” She made my favourite foods whenever I came home and always had a little gift for me: lavender talcum powder, a homemade nightie. Before a visit, she would write about her anticipation, how she looked forward to card games and conversation, but much of my time at home was spent with friends. Those parts were painful to read.

Women in the 1950s and ’60s were increasingly getting jobs and going to university, but in my mind, the babies were the biggest influence on Silent Generation women. My mother came from a family of eleven. Her neighbours, the Cooks and the Reynoldses, each had eleven children. That’s thirty-three kids in a single 200-yard radius in a Maritime small town. In 1955, the year my mother had her first of six children, Canada’s baby boom fertility rate — births per woman of child-bearing age (fifteen to forty-nine) — was 3.8. By the time I had my twins in 2004, the rate had fallen to 1.56, less than half. My family’s baby story had three acts in the past century: eleven, six, two. The biggest plot twist in that story, of course, was the availability of birth control in the ’60s, which sent birth rates plummeting. Contraception was a sin to my mother, but she eventually relented and quietly went on the pill during menopause after a warning from her doctor that she could get pregnant again. Sorry, Jesus: six was enough.

The availability of birth control, while revolutionary, was not the only thing going on in the ’60s. “Women entered the workforce in increasingly larger numbers, in concert with profound social changes,” says a Statistics Canada fertility report, “including the feminist movement, technological developments and labour market shortages.” My mother was raising six kids as feminism flourished, and she didn’t work outside the home after marriage. It would be years before we owned a decent washing machine. If she felt those social changes, it was minimally. The ’50s and ’60s for her must have been a blur of child rearing and decamping as my father got transferred from place to place by the military, including to Whitehorse in 1959. My mother, who hated the cold, went to the Yukon first with three kids, and Dad joined a few months later. “I was stuck inside with the three ones & decided to go for a walk & put Joe in a cardboard box, tied a string to it and the girls did the same with their dolls,” she wrote in that first 1987 entry. “Away we went.” I have a bleak photo of her and my siblings in Whitehorse. They’re standing sullenly in front of a filthy car, Mom’s face the definition of stoic forbearance.

But the “buck up” attitude has side effects. I recall my mother’s reaction to my difficult experiences when I was young: a mean exclusion among friends, failing to net that easy, game-winning layup. Her loving embrace was swift but conditional: she did not abide self-pity. I’d be told to wipe my tears and move on, learning not only to minimize my own sorrow but to dismiss others’ suffering as self-indulgence. Mothering for me forced a reckoning between coddling and tough loving. I still never know which one to do when. Parenting is usually impossible to get right in the moment. We fail. We yell ourselves hoarse in cars. We tell lies to move things along. We drink too much. We forget that we are fallible humans and that, hopefully, our children will survive despite us.

The differences between my mom and me were mostly generational: we came of age with different rules and norms. It’s the same for me and my daughters. We share most values and cultural references, and we even like some of the same music, but technology, politics, and society are dramatically different now than when I was their age. When I argue with them, it’s usually about screens or consumption. I think they waste time scrolling and shopping. They drive when they should walk or take transit. They need to get outside more. When I see them staring at social media, I feel sad — for how it has replaced genuine experiences, for how they fail to be more like so‑and‑so’s child whom I’ve unfairly idealized. But mostly sad for myself in what I deem another blameworthy parenting failure. Where did I go wrong? As a mother, you often neglect your needs and desires to satisfy the family, then you blame yourself when expectations aren’t met — or blame others when gratitude falls short. The cycle of expectation and disappointment is endless and dumb.

I remember a particular argument with my daughters after a recent dinner out. One was working at a shoe store and offered a discount to her sister, who’d lost a pair of runners at a party and piped up about “deserving a new pair of shoes.” I lectured about the suffering millions who actually do deserve new shoes and how it’s fine to want shoes but privilege doesn’t deserve anything, except perhaps an uncomfortable reset. They shot back, lawyer-like, citing piety and hypocrisy. They accused me of gaslighting (a term I looked up in the bathroom). We continued quarrelling on the walk to the car, each of us now intent only on winning, while my husband side-eyed me to let it go. I finally yielded, setting the car radio to classic rock and staring out the window in self-pitying silence, as is my wont.

I’ve thought about that night a lot — how awfully judgy I was. My mom sometimes judged me against her own high standards too: I was wild, thoughtless, and unladylike. My spiked hair was ridiculous. My ripped jeans, appalling! It’s deflating to watch your child become an adult who is not enough like you, but supporting your child in the life she chooses, no matter how it contravenes your own hopes, is one thing we should try to get right. Give your hopes back to yourself. Let her hope differently. She will likely become you in the end anyway.

In Modern Motherhood: An American History, from 2014, Jodi Vandenberg-Daves quotes a Gallup poll from the early ’60s, in which 60 percent of wives said their marriages were happier than the marriages of their parents. Yet 90 percent said they wanted their daughters to live different lives than they had lived: they wanted them to marry later and achieve more education. Which is exactly what my mother said to me as I entered university, and on this we agreed. I got married eleven years later than she did — after five years of university and launching a career.

My three years of pre-kid marriage in Alberta were blissful. We had money and friends. We threw late-night, Alice in Wonderland croquet parties and travelled widely. Far away in New Brunswick, my parents faded to once-a-year visits home and periodic phone calls. By then, they had a computer, and I could email whenever I wanted, which finally relieved me of the guilt-trip calls. But in the same way that she was receding from me, I was also fading in prominence for her. Her journals from that time centre on the grandchildren.

My twin pregnancy plucked me off a party train and dropped me into the mysterious mom train, speeding in the opposite direction. My mother was thrilled, but the high-risk pregnancy frightened her. “Had a long talk with Lisa. She’s well but the dubs seem to kick a lot and it tires her out. God love her,” she wrote, using our nickname for the double babies. The Dubs arrived unexpectedly at twenty-eight weeks on the morning after my birthday in 2004 — which I resented for years since it meant my birthday would be spent planning theirs. They were tiny and frail at birth. We were witless and scared. Our neonatal doctors and nurses were aces, and after eight weeks, Daisy and Maggie were released from the hospital. Within months they were round as beach balls.

My mom and I were both evolving then. In her seventies, she was relaxed and content, more reflective. I was humbled and raw. She was the expert and I the student. Relieved of her mom duties, she turned to sewing clothes for herself, beautifying her home and garden, enjoying meals and wine with Dad, hosting the grandchildren or travelling to see them. “I’m thankful for Paul, all my children,” she wrote on Thanksgiving 2004. “We had a special supper which we’re thankful for and now I’ll be getting into a cozy bed. Thank you God, nite.”

Dad told me recently that because she grew up poor, Mom often felt inferior and undeserving. But after the children were gone, she found joy and self-esteem. She volunteered for Meals on Wheels and several Catholic charities. Along with descriptions of her burgeoning aches and pains, her journals then contained proof of continued growth. “I had such a great day,” she wrote in March 2002. “I was out all day starting with the fabric shop in Newcastle. They had some people demonstrating tech, how to use a serger, twin needles etc, so enjoyable. I even took the old bridge back. I was so proud of myself.”

For me, that time was smeary. Parenting twin babies devours you. One time I found the car keys in the fridge and the milk in the cupboard. For the first time ever, I had big boobs, which was sensational and awkward because they took up space and put me off balance. I pumped so much breast milk that the nurses gave me frozen product back when the girls were discharged from the hospital. My life revolved around blending homemade baby food, playgrounds, diapering, bathing, strollering, and saving videos onto CDs to mail to the grandparents. It was absurdly tiring and funny, brimming with chores and bereft of sleep. After so many years of drifting away from my mother — surprise! — I needed her again. I was the prodigal daughter, hastening back to her, craving her warmth and soothing reassurances. I wanted to tell her every new thing the girls did. I wanted to cry and rage, to confide in her and hear her say, “You’re doing your best, dear. God love ya.” I wanted to know how she had coped and what she had cooked. I wanted to get home. I wanted her to visit. I wanted a lot, sure, but that was okay because I thought I had so much time.

Alzheimer’s digs a moat around you that starts with a slim trench and widens over months and years so that even the sturdy bridges of family and friendship snap, leaving you frightened and alone. In the beginning, it’s excruciating, both for afflicted persons and for the family, but eventually the individual slips into a childlike state, delivered from agitation and perceptions of malevolence. Then it’s just the weakening and the dying, which, compared with its precursor, is calm and feels strangely like relief.

My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s shortly after she turned eighty. It was especially cruel because she’d watched her older sister Connie die from it — watched her cry, fidget, rage, recoil, wander around and around. Mom wrote in her journal almost daily in the early ’90s as Connie’s contented life unravelled, thread by thread. She and her sister Rose were helpers and witnesses. Mom would relieve my uncle George some days — bathing and dressing Connie or doing her hair and makeup. She was so shocked when her sister forgot how to apply lipstick after having done so daily for fifty years. “Connie phoned me tonight said her head felt funny. For a minute she didn’t know where she was,” Mom wrote in February 1992. Later, in July: “I was with Connie and she was trying to tell me something and couldn’t put a sentence together. I feel so sorry for her and what she must be thinking of herself. I made 2 apple pies tonight.”

My mom’s younger sister Helen was also showing signs of dementia but died early with cancer. Connie died three years after that. “I know one thing, if I ever have Alzheimer’s disease, I want to know about it,” Mom wrote in 1994. My dad says he did tell her, several times. She didn’t believe him. Maybe she was too frightened to face what she knew was coming.

My mom had meticulously recorded her daily life for twenty-three years and then promptly forgot all of it. None of us kids lived in New Brunswick when she started to get sick, so when we visited, the changes were stark and alarming. Dad saw it evolve daily. Although he’d witnessed Connie’s decline, he was ill-prepared. He eventually learned some tricks, like taking Mom for a drive when she insisted he take her home, instead of arguing that she already was home. During visits, I’d put music on, hold her hand, stroke her arm. Familiar songs and gentle touch could be soothing. She liked turning pages in magazines, finding matching buttons in a bowl, and folding face cloths. I’d take the folded ones and add them back to the pile when she wasn’t looking. This could go on. I didn’t mind. My dad showed me a pencilled note a few years ago. He said it was one of the last things Mom ever wrote. It reads, “Paul I need a.” I wonder what she needed. Probably everything.

When my mom died at eighty-five, she had $30,000 in her bank account, which she’d saved from her old-age pension. My aunt Rose died of Alzheimer’s two years later. Of the six Keoughan sisters, three had Alzheimer’s and one had a different dementia. This scares the shit out of me, my sisters, and some female cousins; we worry this will be our fate. I’ve looked for answers, but Alzheimer’s is complicated and not fully understood. Most cases are considered “sporadic,” which means they occur due to a combination of genes, environment, and lifestyle. Women get it more often, but the biggest factor is age: the longer you live, the greater the chances of getting Alzheimer’s. And here’s the kicker: if there are a lot of occurrences in your family, you have an even higher risk. Every time a word eludes my grasp, I panic. I tell myself it’s fatigue or brain fog. Then I pull out my journal and write a few things down. We want to remember and be remembered. I remember my mother through her daily observations and reflections but, more than that, I hear the voice of a Silent Generation woman. I’m ashamed to think that for ten years, that voice was trapped in a box underfoot instead of teaching me things. I was not the first writer in the family: she was.

In my mom’s last journal, which spans 2008 to 2010, she wrote often of being tired. She’d skip days, her handwriting was messy, and dates were sometimes unclear. In 2010, she was eighty-one and starting to get confused. Her second-to-last journal entry that I know of was on June 9, 2010, my dad’s birthday. “Paul’s 79 yrs old today. He’s showering we’re getting ready for supper at Welcome Back can’t wait Roger is treating us,” she said. “I don’t write now except when there’s a special occasion.” Then she signed off “Betty,” which was odd because she always ended with “nite,” since she usually wrote before bed. Her final entry is dated “Jan 11,” but maybe she meant June 11: “Well, I couldn’t get to sleep I took a gravol — usually helps. I just can’t settle down — sitting on the side of my bed. Paul’s asleep. I have a Dr. appt. tomorrow not worried just a check up — nite. I cooked too much today plus washing. nite. See you in the morning.” The rest of the pages — half the book — are blank.

That she ended her memoir scolding herself for overdoing housework is classic Mom. But did she decide to stop writing, or did she accidentally misplace the book and forget about it when troubling questions overtook her mind: Where am I? Who are these people? The journals’ ending was quiet and came too soon. Now I’ve lost her twice. I want to pull my daughters in so tight they can’t breathe and then push them out to slay the world. I want my mother to know that I became like her, a good mother. This is classic me: always wanting more and looking for approval.

I bought an old rotary phone recently at a flea market. It doesn’t work. It’s just an artifact. After hemming my daughter’s pants one evening, home alone, I picked up the receiver — and the simple act of reaching for the dial marvellously dislodged an old number from Montreal, which I dialled. “Mom,” I whispered, “I’m sorry for not calling you when I went away to school. You were right. I didn’t get an A in thoughtfulness.” Feeling silly, I went to hang up but not before adding, “You’d be proud of me. I’m sewing.”