Experiencing the mother of all reality checks

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/06/2023 (1224 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I remember being in what I felt was the 10th or 11th month of a second pregnancy while living in Fisher River Cree Nation in Manitoba’s southeastern Interlake. We had been living there for eight years. My husband was the school’s principal and I was the mother of an almost four-year-old, travelling back and forth to Winnipeg trying to finish a doctorate.

During this time, I was learning life lessons that have transformed the way I understand Canadian realities.

We were in our early 20s when we came to Fisher River, arriving without any understanding of the culture, language or traditions of the people. Nonetheless, community members were profoundly hospitable. We were welcomed and encouraged, taught by example.

We stayed 10 years, becoming increasingly aware of injustices that define this country’s colonial enterprise, the differences that distinguished our backgrounds, and the common ground of shared humanity.

Conditioned in my own life by colonial, patriarchal approaches to woman’s lives within the academy — the primacy of the male model defining academic advance, the voices in my head that claimed women weren’t tough, smart, ambitious or bold enough to “compete” within the system — I grasped something of my story’s relationship to the people of Fisher River who had made such room for us while struggling against the Canadian mainstream narratives that compromised, contaminated and denied the people’s history, identity, culture and vision. (In suggesting such a relationship, I realize any comparison with merit acknowledges vital differences even as it illuminates correspondences.)

During a hot July, weeks away from my actual due date, I was mentored by the many women whose expert knowledge and experience I received gladly.

I was also trying desperately to finish the third chapter of my dissertation, on Expressionism in verbal and visual art.

I was increasingly oval in shape, stumbling from one sentence to the next, under a cloud of cigarettes I should never have smoked, and struggling with competing claims — the old life of a too-long dissertation that required completion and the developing new life of a little one who required my attention.

This tension has been shared in various ways by mothering women all over the world, working, for example, within academic and corporate systems unwilling or unable to respond effectively to their needs, indifferent perhaps to the delicate and inspired balance a mother or soon-to-be-mother must establish to ensure her well-being and that of her children while pursuing work-related goals.

My water broke in the early morning. There was an hour-long trip ahead of me to the hospital in Arborg. I wrapped myself up in a towel and sat down at the kitchen table and proceeded to complete what I hoped would be the last section of Chapter 3.

I thought this approach logical. My son and husband were sleeping upstairs. Time seemed to be on my side. What kind of time was that, I ask now, almost 40 years later, shaking my head in disbelief whenever I tell this story.

At 33, with a degree to finish within the allotted gestation period allowed by the university for my particular doctoral program, I felt I was lucky to have this morning slate clear. I had so primed myself for the end of Chapter 3 (there were to be four chapters), I could not comprehend the physical emergence of child No. 2.

My husband found me some time later, wrapped in this usual obsession along with the towel, and tried to persuade me into the car. I would not be moved. My friend arrived to look after my eldest. She pried me away from the kitchen table by agreeing to my two conditions: first, I could go upstairs and make up the bed perfectly; second, I could pack up the unfinished parts of Chapter 3 and take them with me in the green bag I had used to transport research and drafts back and forth along the 193-kilometre ride from Fisher River to the University of Manitoba library.

With both conditions honoured, I settled into our Volkswagen Rabbit. I allowed my husband to help me into the hospital, but only after he had shouldered both the Daddy bag that contained playing cards and lotion (we’d attended the early ’80s version of prenatal classes) and the green bag that held what I still considered the most pressing actuality, the unfinished labour of Chapter 3.

There were a number of new mothers, cradling little people who had just entered the world, and there was me, my womb, the green bag and my husband. He explained to the nurse what the green bag meant: she promised that I could get right back to work as soon as I’d delivered. She was very calm and somewhat convincing. She stowed the bag under the bed.

And then, in what seemed like an instant, I woke to the fact that, indeed, I was going to deliver a baby. Which I did. Two mighty contractions — this little boy wasn’t willing to put up with much more.

The green bag? I did not harbour it nearly as carefully on our way home. It taunted me from the back seat beside my baby. I saw it out of the corner of my eye as my son grew on my lap, when the phone rang and my supervisor wondered at the elusiveness of Chapter 3.

My green bag did birth a dissertation — finally — two years later. My son had learned to walk. I was stumbling about, still lit by cigarettes, on edge, as oddly configured by the competing forms of labour that persisted throughout my academic and mothering careers.

It seems to me that while “not good enough” continues to undervalue and misrepresent women’s experiences — even though that framing of women’s worth might be more insistently challenged within some contemporary systems — my green-bag birthing story continues to hold sway as a truth many women live today.

Certainly my experience in Fisher River, a community constrained by government-sanctioned methods of silencing and erasure, opened my mind and heart to circumstances that continue to inform my grasp of the critical commonalities that exist when the intrinsic worth of human beings and their experiences is denied.