Lived lives

In my childhood, I roamed through rough-and-tumble capers in a kind of free fall. Leaving us to our own devices, my parents intervened only if one of us came home bruised or bloodied, if the school called them because of our delinquency, if a report card disgraced. Their interventions rarely coincided with our interpretation of events.

We did not have play dates. After-school lessons were few. Parenting guides did not clearly assess whether or not children were at risk if left unsupervised, whether a child needed added support, whether a teacher’s punishment was fair-minded.

It seems so much more is known about at-risk circumstances, behaviours and practices nowadays. Parents, for example, are encouraged to implement and monitor boundaries that promote safe environments, understand more fully the range and complexity of childhood experiences, and collaborate proactively within educational systems.

In the “freedom” (mayhem) of my childhood, pivotal and sometimes harrowing events distinguished our unsupervised play. At four, running full steam ahead on the dock in front of the family cottage, I slammed my foot into a fairly substantial, rusted boat mooring. My three brothers were running after me. I don’t remember if we were playing a game or if they were out for blood.

There are so many times when children say or do things that inadvertently or intentionally help adults navigate challenging terrain.

I recall two such pivotal instances of my own.

In the first, I am desperate to finish Chapter 2 of my dissertation. I realize I need further research materials, but any visit to the University of Manitoba library will involve a seven-hour round trip by car from Fisher River Cree Nation, where we live.

I bargain with my three-year-old. He will go to a YMCA drop-in daycare near the university. They have a pool. He likes water. I will go to the library. I promise my swift return to the daycare, a happy ride home, even an ice cream.

I have just turned into a 75-year-old. In reviewing the landscape from this (ad)vantage, I discover surprises that will sustain for however many years I might have left in the galaxy.

My first surprise: I am adaptable. Ten years ago, my late husband and I went shopping to replace the cars we owned that were well past due. For the first time ever, I got a “brand new car,” a small car, spiffy and fire-engine red.

A standard, it made me feel like I was really driving, though family and friends noted with varying measures of chagrin that I was not only a jumpy, bumpy gear shifter, but also given to enthusiastic responses to side shows en route — an impressive rock formation, fetching storefront exhibit, a summer biker dressed as Dracula.

This past month, coincident with the marking of my 75th year, I let the small car go and took over the Subaru I had given to my youngest son after the death of his father. It is much bigger, an automatic, with all the bells and whistles my children feel make me safer on the road, both in terms of other drivers and their own children, whom I transport as befits my expanding role of Baba as up they grow.

I continue my calling, as it were, reaching out to various organizations that conceive U.S. President Donald Trump has been anointed by God, coincident, of course, with his own sense of being divinely appointed.

When I call evangelical circles that support Trump’s “ministry,” and note, as so many have done publicly, the destruction of democratic freedoms that distinguishes Trump’s American Dream, I provoke nothing more from believers than “we are praying for the president.” No engagement with the Trumpification of America, no grasp of how women’s lives — along with many other lives — are being diminished, supervised by obscene patriarchal visions that would maintain or return them to servitude.

To reverse the declining American birth rate, for example, Trump announced that women are to be rewarded with $5,000 for producing babies, contingent on a live birth after delivery. In this Trump has named himself the “fertilization president.” Another recent proposal would gift $1,000 to American babies born as part of a “Trump account.”

Such campaigns are shockingly similar to the Mother’s Cross of Honour program in Nazi Germany initiated to reverse the sinking German birth rate by rewarding suitable Aryan women for producing “Hitler’s children” and thus ensuring the proliferation of the “master race” and its dream of world domination.

As a human being, an old one at that, I am required to advocate for present and future generations and their right to care for and live within a world that honours the miracle of life itself, its diversity and its sanctity.

Since my husband’s death in March 2017, I have been marking my life’s passage. I have my rituals. A candle and incense, an urn, family photos — an altar of sorts, immersed in memory.

I hold this space dear.

I do not light the candle or incense at the same time every day. Rather, the moment announces itself variously: twilight, a grandchild’s visit, preparation for an event I am hosting; an early morning snowfall.

The light and the incense gentle the air, and animate my appreciation for the presentness of the past.

As a fat child, I was a disgrace.

In school, shame and isolation might prevail in any setting, on any given day. In my kindergarten class, I was a freak, twice the height and girth of my peers.

In Grade 1, my desk fell over when I tried to rise to sing God Save the Queen — a too-tight fit in the desk warranted a ruler on the back of my hand for disruptiveness. My nickname in middle school was “Hippo.” In gym class, trussed in a clown-like, dark green jumper, I was the obstacle in tumbling: students somersaulted over my crouched form.

Yet, it is transformative to remember that even in my disgrace for being neither “normal” nor “pleasing,” for having exceeded the limits ordained by acceptability standards, I seem to have had a sense of myself that existed apart from the stigma assigned.

Lived livesWinnipeg writer Deborah Schnitzer explores life lessons from women in their Third Act.

In this new year, as holiday hoopla subsides, I welcome the time for further reflection, particularly because in 2024 Hanukkah and Christmas fell on the same day.

I found myself rehearsing the “same-day” story of my childhood I habitually performed for friends and family. I called that version “Tuesday Night,” relishing it as an expression of my mother’s generosity in the face of what I believed to be my father’s frugality. Today, I understand it differently.

My childhood story went like this:

Lived livesWinnipeg writer Deborah Schnitzer explores life lessons from women in their Third Act.

The recovery of a lost document can be revelatory. Mine has been so.

In preparation for our second-born son’s wedding, my husband Mendel and I composed speeches full of wonder at our good fortune in being present, in becoming mishpocha (Yiddish for family by marriage) and in seeing younger love resonant. As Mendel so often spoke without filters — a predisposition received by some with good humour, by others with alarm — I strongly advised he let me look at his first draft as part of my campaign to preserve the “dignity” of the occasion, convinced my sense of dignity would not coincide with his.

Twelve years later, a lost document in hand, I recover meanings my initial misgivings obscured.

‘No one gets out alive.”

That’s what my Aunt Helen would tell me as she faced the end of her own life. You might have had an Aunt Helen of your very own. Wise, full of mirth, though well acquainted with loss, for her eldest son had died of cancer in the prime of his life.

She was an adept juggler of competing claims, independent of mind, enraged by discrimination in any form, and, at any moment, willing to challenge its barbarity.

Magnificently ahead of the time in which she was born, opposed to domestic servitude, my Aunt Helen discovered her own strength and meaning, and, naturally and without apology, transgressed stifling convention wherever it stood in her way or in the way of others.