Now that we had found our property, it was time to move along with planning. This amorphous term covered a number of things from the obvious, like packing up our stuff in preparation for our move, to the more delicate, like breaking it to our family and friends that our life was about to take a rather eccentric detour.
And oh yes, procuring another Siamese cat. The local paper had a plea from a nearby shelter begging anyone with experience with Siamese cats to come forward to adopt a large male. As it happened, the cat had the same name as one of the cats we then owned, Pyewacket. It seemed like it was destined.
When we arrived at the shelter, we were taken to a back office with a large sign on the door stipulating in huge letters: “No one but Geri is to open this door or attempt to TOUCH this cat.”
We located Geri, who carefully and silently opened the door, warning us to be careful. But ‘Pyewacket’ obviously knew an easy mark when he saw it. With Machiavellian cunning, he sat quietly as we approached him, then he butted our hands and started purring. We adopted him of course, and renamed him Koko after Gilbert and Sullivan’s Lord High Executioner. After he settled in, he continued the fine Siamese tradition of becoming the scourge of the household. Years later our three year old grandson was asked by his parents whether Grandma or Grandpa was boss when he visited at our house. The answer came instantly: “Koko’s the boss”.
Partly because we didn’t want any of our relations deciding to apply to the court to have us certified insane and committed, we still paid lip service to the theory that we were keeping our options open, but in fact, between ourselves we were talking only about a kennel.
Our initial efforts at figuring out how to go about creating an upscale dog and cat boarding facility were helped by the serendipitous timing of a couple of events.
The internet was just becoming a widely accepted and available tool in 1998. It took forever to load each page of a website, but if you had the patience, you could find a lot of information that hadn’t been easily available before.
Then there was the fact that the Americans, God love ‘em, have a support group or professional association for absolutely everything and dog kennels turned out to be no exception. My painfully slow internet search located the American Boarding Kennel Association (ABKA).
When their page finally loaded, I discovered that the ABKA was hosting a seminar in May in Colorado Springs on “Building, Buying and Operating a Boarding Kennel”. Fate had again, it seemed, provided just what we needed.
As an alternative to attending the seminar, the ABKA offered to sell building plans and books which would encapsulate the topics being presented at the seminar. Simple common sense suggested that we be mindful of the need to conserve as many of our assets as possible. Given the uncertain future we were facing and the serious expenses that would no doubt mount up as we started a new business, it was time to tighten our belts and be fiscally prudent. Of course we contented ourselves with buying the books and plans.
Just kidding. To quote John, “To hell with the expense. Give the cat another canary!” We were Colorado-bound in May.
In Colorado Springs, we were like giddy kids on a school junket. We dutifully attended our seminars and in between passing silly drawings and notes to each other, took copious serious notes and talked endlessly about what we were hearing and how we might modify or adapt it to our vision for an upscale boarding kennel.
As soon as school was over for the day, we hit all the tourist sites. We took a side trip to Denver. We rode the train up Pike’s Peak, we went down into the Cave of the Winds and drove through the Garden of the Gods.
We hit all the chichi tourist shops and bought art work of dogs and cats to hang in the kennel, rubber stamps with cute animal themes to stamp on our bills and generally, whatever took our fancy. The kennel might not have been anything more than a gleam in our eyes at this point, but by golly, we were making sure that when that gleam eventually took on substance, it was going to be well decorated.
At the seminar, we found some of the subjects discussed by the ABKA to be of great interest from a technical point of view, like drains and air exchangers. But other things that the ABKA laid heavy emphasis on, left us bewildered. One person spoke at length about how we needed a commercial class scale to weigh the animals on, both when they arrived and when they went home. In her world, kennels charged on a per pound basis. This made less than no sense to us. You’re going to walk and feed and play with the dog whether it is a 3 pound chihuahua or a 140 pound Great Dane. It’s not a butcher’s shop.
You hope.
Undoubtedly, the most disconcerting thing about the seminar was the overall grim emphasis on the uninspiring business of making money.
The ABKA classified kennels as ‘small’, ‘medium’ or ‘large’, depending on how many dog runs they contained. A small kennel, according to this business model, was anything under 150 dog runs. We were stunned.
The biggest kennel in Ottawa at that time had 100 runs and looked and sounded like a huge, noisy, soulless warehouse for animal storage. We were told that we would find it very difficult, if not impossible, to make a profit on anything less than these numbers. Indeed, if we wanted to do more than scrape by, we would need to seriously consider a ‘large’ kennel. That would be over 500 dog runs. Our collective mind boggled.
Presenter after presenter admonished us that if we thought running a dog kennel meant time spent interacting with the dogs, we should rid our minds of such frivolous notions. We would spend our time hiring, training, and supervising staff as well as doing the endless paperwork and general management involved in this type of large commercial operation.
The sample plans for kennels that were given to us showed row upon row of cages or small cage-like enclosures. Some demonstrated how the wily entrepreneur could stack cages two or three tiers high to allow for even more dogs to be crammed into the available space. Boarders would have to negotiate a ramp to reach their cage on an upper tier. Our ultra nervous rescue Annie would have had heart failure if confronted with such a challenge.
According to the ABKA, because of the increasing complaints from neighbours in urban settings about noise and smells, the wave of the future in kennelling was all-indoor kennels. In these installations, the dogs were taken out of their cages by an attendant to poop and pee in an indoor area, and then returned to their confinement. They didn’t see daylight or touch grass or smell fresh air for the duration of their incarceration. Oops, I mean boarding.
Then too, we were advised to charge for every service we could. Basically, if we touched a dog or cat, we should be getting paid for it. Walks? Charge. Playtime? Charge. Medications? Charge. Hell, we were advised to charge a buck a time just to distribute treats provided by their owners “because of all the extra time and work”.
Ugh. This kind of attitude I could get from the Central Governing Politburo at my law firm. We felt like we had stumbled into one of the darker industrial novels of Charles Dickens.
“Fun? Fun!?!!? Do you see anyone having fun here?? WE DON’T DO THIS FOR FUN MISSY!!!”
No, it was all about the Benjamins, or in our Canadian case, the Loonies, which was peculiarly appropriate I guess, since we were, you know…..
The ABKA was telling us that our dream was a non-starter. If we believed them, going into the kennel business with a tiny facility which was owner operated and took a hands-on, pet friendly approach would be financial suicide.
Who were we to think we knew better than the whole American boarding kennel industry? After all, we were coming to the business as complete neophytes.
But how could we be happy warehousing hundreds of stressed dogs barking their heads off in hundreds of cages? We wanted into this business because we loved animals. At walk time, could we just heartlessly pass by some poor little mutt who hadn’t been out of her cage except for five minutes to pee or poop? Could we ignore her pleas for attention because her owner was too cheap to spend the extra buck or two necessary for us to give her a walk or even pat her?
The whole point of upending our lives was to find a way to live where we could pursue a vocation, not just a job. If the only viable way of doing this business would create misery for the pets we boarded, it was guaranteed to create misery for us as well. It would be insane to continue. This would be a terrific way to go from seriously depressed to suicidal.
On our return from Colorado Springs and the ABKA seminar, it was decision time. Would we try it our way or abandon the whole kennel idea as financially unfeasible? We reminded ourselves that we were rugged individualists who had never followed the conventional wisdom in anything.
Consider both our own histories and my family history to that date.
Labour Day weekend when I was 17, we told my parents that I was pregnant and we were going to get married. I will never forget the look of utter loathing and disgust on my mother’s face. She could not have appeared any more revolted if I had announced that I was pursing a career as a two dollar hooker. She immediately decreed that I would be shipped out to my sister who was at university in Winnipeg, and when the baby arrived, it would be given up for adoption. A suitable cover story would be concocted and when I came home in the spring, no one need ever know of my (her) disgrace.
We declined this kindly offer. We told her our plan was that I would finish my last year of high school in Toronto, where John was going to university. I would follow him to York University the following year. She triumphantly played her ace. I was underage. I needed the consent of a parent to marry. This she would never allow.
My father didn’t even come into her calculations. He stood by, looking sad and disappointed and said nothing. After two days of being browbeaten and shamed, I finally threatened to run away and go live in sin with John until I turned 18, at which point we would marry anyway. The prospect of my bringing this even deeper shame to her, convinced her at last to allow my father to sign the consent for me to marry. I am sure she couldn’t bring herself to put pen to the paper.
John’s parents were more or less indifferent, but offered no support of any kind. His mother’s only comment on my pregnancy was that she hoped I wouldn’t wear white if we got married, since “I don’t approve of pregnant girls wearing white.” Because, sure Ruby, adhering to the proper dress code was the most crucial thing in these circumstances. Well honestly, it pretty much summed up her priorities in life. When John’s rattletrap of a car finally broke down and died on one of his trips to Toronto to find a place for us to live, there was no offer of help with repairs or heaven knows, a loaner. In fact, the only offer made by John’s father was the observation that “Everything with you two is a disaster!”
Awesome pep talk, Norm. You should have taken up a career as a motivational speaker.
Three weeks of hell followed my mother’s concession, since one of my insane mother’s conditions for allowing the marriage was that I start back to school in my home town while the banns of marriage were called. This meant I got to go back and tell my teachers and friends I was leaving in three weeks to get married, instead of starting fresh with my new school in Toronto. The obvious conclusions were drawn and I got to suffer all the humiliation of walking the school hallways, while people whispered about me going from academic and musical success to being the downfallen pregnant girl. I’m sure that deliberate choice by my mother was meant to be a punishment. I didn’t greatly care.
My mother told me repeatedly that I was a fool to think that I would ever finish high school. She was also convinced that she and my father would have to support us financially. She seemed to take pleasure from the prospect of our imminent ruin and inevitable crawling back to her to beg for rescue. On our wedding day, she announced to the small assembly of guests that she didn’t give much for our chances.
The lack of one kind word from any of the adults in our life only induced in us an unshakeable determination to prove them wrong, along with all the other titillated neighbours and ‘friends’ who were indulging in a nice bit of schadenfreude.
Finally the wedding day (which my mother did her best to make into a nightmare), was over and I moved to Toronto to the tiny, grungy apartment in the chilly basement of someone’s house that John had found for our first home. To access the unheated bathroom, we had to leave the apartment and cross the hall. When I sat in the tub that winter, my pregnant belly would emerge like a pale island from the water, covered in goosebumps from the arctic temperature. Some of my voyages to the bathroom were inevitably made in my dressing gown, passing under the prurient eye of the homeowner’s teenage son. He shared the basement and that bathroom with us.
But it had one overwhelming advantage for us. It was cheap.
John got a job at the university music library. With several transfers, it took him more than an hour on the bus to get from our apartment to the university. He wouldn’t get home until after 9:00 p.m. in the evening. After my school day was over, I walked up the street to spend the hours between 3:15 and 8:15 p.m. cold calling people to try to persuade them to buy stainless steel cookware. I got home before John and would have supper waiting when he arrived. After supper was over, we’d both hit the books, falling into bed usually sometime well after midnight.
Between us, we made $50 per week. My parents occasionally sent us cheques. We ripped them up and sent them back. We weren’t prepared to pay the implicit cost of taking help from them, especially my mother. Student loans covered John’s tuition and some of his books. After paying for our rent, telephone, bus fare for John and other small expenses, we had exactly $15 per week for food. Until we learned to add up our purchases as we went through the store, we got caught at the cash a few times with too little money to pay for what was in our grocery cart. Having never been in this position, I was mortified by having to put things back while other customers displayed varying degrees of censure or pity. On one occasion the man behind us seemed to find our poverty hilarious.
It was a good lesson though. A seventeen year old pregnant high school student who does telephone sales for a living, either wilts under the pressure of public opinion or quickly acquires the self-confidence not to care what anyone thinks of her.
In case it’s not clear by now? I was the latter. John had passed that point when he was six. The family fights and punishments for that attitude continued into his adult years. In fact until his mother died at 96, John was always the unsatisfactory son.
My last year in high school, I wrote my Easter exams exactly one week before our son was born. When the baby came, I stopped attending classes for the last six weeks or so of school. It had been a very difficult and prolonged labour. A week after the baby and I came home to the new apartment in the graduate/married student residence at York that we had been lucky enough to find, John left us alone for the first time while he went to a summer job interview. I hemorrhaged, and ended up back in the hospital. John came home to find me being trundled into an ambulance, the apartment looking like an abattoir and a young male student (who was the only person I could find when the crisis hit) gingerly holding our 12 day old son.
If your grades were over a certain level, you were customarily excused from writing final exams in high school. My marks in all my classes were well above what was required for that exemption. I assumed therefore, that I was free of final exams, and would officially be a high school graduate as soon as I received my final report card.
One day shortly after the last term ended, I loaded up the baby and went into school to drop off my text books. I happened to run into Mr. Lovely, my English teacher, who had been very kind and supportive. We chatted for a minute while he admired the baby. When it became clear to him that I thought I had no final exam requirements to fulfill, his face changed.
“Have you spoken to Mr. Prickish?” he asked. Prickish was the geography teacher. He had gone out of his way to make it clear that he thought my presence in the school should never have been permitted; that I was morally aberrant and that the ‘innocent’ girls were in danger of being contaminated by my whorish lasciviousness.
“No,” I answered. “I’m carrying an 85% average in his class and quite frankly I’m looking forward to never having to deal with him again.”
“You know,” said Lovely, “there’s no hard and fast rule against a teacher making a student write the final exam, no matter what their grades are. You need to talk to him.”
Dragging my feet and the by now wailing baby, I tracked down Prickish.
“Mr. Lovely told me that I should see you. Some question about my exemption from the final Geography exam?”
“I don’t know what the question would be. You’ve been absent from my class for the last six weeks. I never heard a word from you. Of course you have to write the exam!”
“I have handed in all of my assignments. I have an 85% average in your subject,” I protested, trying to remain calm. “As to being absent, you of all my teachers were obviously aware that I was pregnant. I advised the administration when the baby was born. I asked them to let all of my teachers know that I would not be back in class.”
“Be that as it may, you never spoke to me personally. You had no permission to absent yourself from my classroom. If you fail to sit the exam, I will not be giving you a passing grade,” he announced with an unmistakable air of triumph.
I turned on my heel and left before I started crying from a mixture of rage, hormones and disappointment. I vowed furiously to myself that I would ace that exam and shove it down his throat. I graduated with First Class Honours in all my subjects, even Geography.
Three years later, John graduated with his Honours B.A. and decided to go on with a Masters. My mother helpfully asked when John was going to get a full time job and start supporting his family. This bit of malice was her response to the news, in the middle of the third year of my own Honours B.A., that I was pregnant again.
By that time, we were living in small town north of Toronto, where the rent was cheaper, even when we factored in the cost of gas to make the one hour trip to school. We had managed to acquire a rust bucket VW Beetle to replace the one that got stolen from the university parking lot. We owed more on that car than the insurance paid out. Yup, that was the way our life went.
Our ‘new’ car was just roadworthy enough to get us back and forth down the highway to the university. The old license plate which had been screwed down to cover the rusted-through floor on the passenger side in front didn’t quite do its job, so you could see the roadway zipping past under your feet. It also let in an invigorating breeze in the depths of winter. (Car safety standards were pretty much non-existent in those days.) John took to unhooking the battery and hauling it inside every night so it would stay warm. That was the only way you had a hope in hell that the car would start in the morning.
We had found a decrepit apartment behind an abandoned Chinese restaurant in an old building. You had to go through the derelict restaurant to get to our door. It looked like a set from The Walking Dead.
Our building was in the centre of a row of storefronts on the main street, so the apartment was blocked on three sides. It was a three bedroom apartment, but there was only one window, and the closet sized room containing that sole source of daylight was not big enough for a bed or even a crib. It was a struggle to wake up, as the stygian darkness gave no hint of whether it was day or night.
When we moved in, there was no linoleum on the kitchen floor; just bare underflooring that was tacky from the adhesive left over from where the previous lino had been pulled up. The landlord did finally drop off a roll of new linoleum and John and I managed to cut it to fit and tack it down.
The oven had no thermostat. When I tried to roast a chicken for our Thanksgiving dinner, I had to keep turning the oven on, letting it heat up, then turn it off when it reached inferno temperatures. After it cooled down, I’d repeat the procedure. The chicken was charred on the outside and bloody on the inside.
John’s parents flatly refused to visit us there. But it was the cheapest place we could find. The addition of a baby had brought the inevitable additional costs.
John fell into a deep depression in the spring of that year. He was barely hanging on, but still managed to finish his Master’s degree with high honours.
I had one more year to go on my own Honours B.A.. John applied to teacher’s college, but finally decided he couldn’t stand to go on with more school. The bohemian struggling student life was getting us both down. We wanted to start earning some real money and pulling our little family out of our subsistence lifestyle.
John had family in Ottawa and the federal Public Service seemed like a good starting point for a job hunt. We literally nailed the door shut on the spectacularly crappy apartment (it had no working lock on the door), and took off.
I reluctantly asked to bring our toddler and stay with my parents while John bunked with his aunt and uncle in Ottawa. While he was searching for a real job, he turned his hand to whatever came along, including uniforming up as a security guard at a drive-in movie and a shopping plaza that was under construction. He worked the night shift all summer. Finally we saved up enough money for the deposit on a basement apartment in Ottawa. I swallowed my pride and asked my parents for help. Could I borrow their car in order to drive back to our apartment near Toronto and start packing up our meagre possessions? There was a solemn conferral before they answered in the negative. I was seven months pregnant. They were of the view that I should not be driving.
From my description of my parents, especially my mother, you could be forgiven for thinking that I had been raised in some sort of fundamentalist religious compound where men wore long beards, it was forbidden for women to be educated beyond the minimum required by law, and females married early and only under the sanctity of the holy church, and then had endless babies in between sewing up sack-like clothes that covered them from neck to ankles.
On the contrary. Although I didn’t really understand it at the time, I grew up in an unusually progressive household that was highly transgressive of the societal norms of the day, at least as far as “a woman’s place” was concerned.
That having been said, it was also true that my mother was a controlling narcissist. Her children were nothing more to her than a reflection to the world of her own magnificent self. The overriding imperative of our lives was that we must always conduct ourselves in a way that brought glory to Mother. If you crossed her (and often you weren’t even sure what you had done to set her off), you would be subjected to days, even weeks of either complete ostracism and silence, or contemptuous rants designed to make you fully understand what a complete failure as a human being you were. We all, including my father, went in fear of her unpredictable rages.
But oddly, there were really only three actual rules. These were that we must never taste alcohol, smoke tobacco, or engage in premarital sex. In retrospect, I think drugs were absent from the list of prohibitions because it would never have occurred to my mother that such things could exist in the world we inhabited. My sister and I were told often and at wearisome length that if we ever got pregnant, we needn’t bother to come home. That made it all the more confusing, when I spectacularly failed at rule number three, that my mother seemed to take great delight in thwarting my efforts to leave home. It was a question of control of course.
Other than the three rules though, free thinking was encouraged. She declared that she didn’t mind what we read, as long as we read. I remember my sister and some girlfriends giggling their heads off over the racier passages in “Peyton Place”. I read Daniel Defoe’s “Moll Flanders” (“Twelve Years a Whore, Five Times a Wife, Whereof once to her own brother….”) before I read “Pride and Prejudice”, probably around the age of 10. At a time when conservatives were promulgating the theory that there was a link between comic books and juvenile delinquency, my mother bought comic books for my brothers before they went off to summer camp.
My mother’s maternal grandfather had been a missionary in Brazil and her own mother had instilled in her that “The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom”. Such a happy and upbeat message for a child. We were all taken religiously (see what I did there?) to church and Sunday School. But my mother did not shut us down if we questioned the inconsistencies in the Bible and the Protestant doctrine that we were immersed in each Sunday.
She never gave a thought to what we did or didn’t eat as long as we ate something, or cared what we wore, even when Sheryl and I adopted miniskirts and hot pants in the never to be sufficiently regretted fashion excesses of the late 1960s. She didn’t care what music we played or who our friends were. In fact, she encouraged friendships with the outsiders and down-and-outs in our little town. She was a social progressive who was delighted when my sister brought home her black fiancé a few years later. When my uncle literally uttered the complete cliché, “I have nothing against the negroes, but do your really want your daughter to marry one?”, she shut him down immediately and with great prejudice.
Any interest or talent that any of us displayed was encouraged to the point of ruthlessness. Within months of me being singled out for praise of my singing at a music festival, I was auditioning to be taken on as a student at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. For years, my mother drove the two hours up and back every Saturday, regardless of the weather. Or for that matter, whether or not I wanted all those lessons. My wishes had nothing to do with it.
In the midst of the depression of the 1930’s, my mother’s father had wanted her to quit school and stay home to help her own mother. The family was eking out a marginal existence on a farm in eastern Ontario. In addition to her farm duties and raising two boys as well as my mother, Granny Ross was solely responsible for the care of her husband’s paralysed aunt. Aunt Cis had suffered a stroke and was bedridden for seven years before her death. She was unable to do anything for herself, even lift an arm to scratch her head. Aunt Cis could speak after a fashion and that was it. My grandmother managed her care with no electricity or indoor plumbing. She did it so well that Aunt Cis never suffered a bedsore.
Granny Ross was an educated woman, and had taught school before marrying a farmer and giving up her profession for the exigencies of being a farm wife. In addition to her missionary father, my grandmother’s uncle and brother were doctors. Her sister Lila was a nurse. My mother’s mother valued education for women and refused to let my mother quit school, desperately though she could have used my mother’s help.
Instead, she insisted that my grandfather drive my mother by horse and wagon (or in the winter, in a horse drawn sled) to the nearest town that had a high school. (My grandfather and his brother bred Clydesdales. It was one of my mother’s jobs to polish their tack and brasses.)
At the age of 12, my mother was dropped off at a boarding house, where she fended for herself from Monday morning to Friday evening, when her father would pick her up and bring her home for the weekend. She finished high school with high honours at age 16 and then went to Teacher’s College. She started teaching when she was 17 years old, in a one room schoolhouse.
After the war, she married my father and they promptly produced four children. When I, the youngest, was five, my mother got a job teaching in another one room school close to where we lived. My father took care of me during the mornings, when he wasn’t busy going out to pump gas and flip burgers for the customers at the lunch counter inside our little store/gas station. After serving me lunch, he would put me in a taxi which delivered me to kindergarten in the school in town.
After school I walked home down the shoulder of the highway with my sister, who had achieved the advanced age of seven. Our older brothers (then 10 and 9) were supposed to walk with us, but typically they took off and left us on our own. After school, once again it was down to Dad to mind us, at least to the extent he thought we needed minding. As often as not he cooked dinner for us all too, because my mother was dedicated to her profession and frequently didn’t arrive home until six p.m. Once my sister and I were old enough (from about age 12 or so), we were responsible for getting dinner on the table.
It was mildly scandalous to the town that my mother had gone out to work. It was even more scandalous that she consigned the before and after school care of her children to their father. And a married man making a meal? Hand me my fan Nellie, I think I’m going to faint.
All of this was pretty much unprecedented in the 1950s. When John’s father died in 1977, one of his mother’s sisters, commiserating with his newly widowed mother said, “Poor Ruby! She always had to work.” (Emphasis mine.)
John’s family was much more conventional than mine. In hindsight, this slavish devotion to the conventions of the day was a tragedy for his mother. She was a lively, sociable woman who loved going out to work. But her husband saw that as a badge of his failure. She had to stay home, where she was bored and frustrated. When the family finances got bad enough, she’d get a job and be happy again. At one point, she was a buyer for the Macy’s store in Ottawa, which combined her love of fashion with her gregarious nature. She had to give it up when her husband’s finances were once again sufficient to make the rent and groceries.
Whether because John saw the misery that this life-in-a-box created, or whether he was just born a rebel, he could never conform to what his parents expected of him. He dropped out of Grade 11 twice. He moved into a boarding house in town and played in a rock band. To supplement the money the band made on weekends, at one point he hitchhiked about 50 kms each way to work in Belleville, a small city with more employment opportunities. At other times he worked bagging groceries or doing grunt work in a car dealership.
He was crazy intelligent, insatiably curious about everything and read voraciously, not just literature, but science, philosophy, art criticism – anything and everything. The philosopher rocker. His school grades always reflected his respect or lack thereof for his teachers. In his last year in High School he had straight As in the classes he liked and barely managed to achieve a pass in the others.
In a sort of cosmic irony, had John not dropped out of school twice, and had I not skipped a grade in school, we would never have known each other.
As for my family, the shocked people of our town were in for an even juicier scandal when my mother decided to get her university degree. She started this process by taking what was then known as ‘extension courses’ from Queen’s University in Kingston; basically, correspondence courses leading to a B.A. She escalated from that to taking courses at night or on weekends. She would make the hour and half drive to Kingston twice per week. On Saturdays, she occasionally took my sister and me along with her, leaving us to wander the streets of the city on our own. By this time, we were probably about 9 and 11.
I remember her jocularly asking us once when she picked us up, whether anyone had raped us. I can’t speak for Sheryl, but I had no idea what that meant. However great the emphasis on education in our house, it didn’t include sex education. My mother had attempted to explain the reproductive process to my sister and me when I was about 6, but I became distracted when she started by saying that the man and woman take off all their clothes. I was left with a confused impression that conception could be prevented by leaving on a glove or a sock.
I don’t want to suggest that my teenage pregnancy was the result of ignorance. I’d learned the basics of human reproduction in a health and hygiene class later at school, but was still left unenlightened as to the wider aspects of sexual behaviour. When we started dating, John once mentioned masturbation. I was too embarrassed to confess I didn’t know what that word meant. I went home and looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary. I was no further ahead. The entire entry read: “Self-abuse”.
I had no conception whatsoever of homosexuality until after I met John and we started having discussions about sex. It was only when a guy who had been a dear friend of mine all through high school, and my accompanist at all those concerts I performed at, died of AIDS in the 1980s that I realized that he had been gay. It just never crossed my mind to wonder about how other people did sex. I still don’t get the obsession of so-called fundamentalists with people’s sex lives. Does the Almighty Creator of the whole universe, assuming there is one, really care how or who people love, or how they express that love? Or, here’s another one equally absurd – what they wear on their heads?
The last requirement my mother had to fulfill to obtain her B.A. was actual personal attendance for three terms at classes on the university campus. She did this in the summers, renting a room, and driving back home on weekends. One glorious summer, she rented a cottage close to Kingston and took the kids with her. We spent the summer swimming and running around totally unsupervised.
In the court of public opinion, all of this was very bad. But the worst crime of all in the view of the ‘normal people’, was that my mother got a rise in salary every time she completed a certain number of university courses. In fairly short order, she was earning more than my father. The horror.
For his part, my father never evinced the slightest objection to anything my mother did. At most, he might shake his head. After we had all grown up and left home, he would occasionally take us aside to tell us what She had done now. But he almost never joined battle with her. The one time I can remember him flaunting one of her dictatorial fiats was when She decreed that my eldest brother would not be allowed to play in a hockey game scheduled for that afternoon. I forget what heinous offense had produced this punishment – if any.
My brother was the team’s one and only goalie. Without him, the game would be forfeited. Hockey was the god before which my father worshipped. He didn’t say anything; just went upstairs, got my brother and his hockey bag, loaded them into the car and took him to the game.
It’s true that my mother’s force of personality was such that he probably wouldn’t have dared oppose her on most things anyway. But in addition to that, he himself had had an unusual upbringing. His mother died when he was twelve. He was smack in the middle of eight children, six of them boys. They too had been raised during the Depression on a subsistence farm in eastern Ontario. The eldest daughter was 19 when her mother died. She promptly left home. The only other girl was the youngest and at age 5, too young to be a help in the house, even by the standards of those days.
Accordingly, the six boys not only were called on to help with the farm chores, they all learned to cook, to sew, to wash and iron and generally become proficient in every aspect of household management. In fact, my father remarked that as a boy in that family, you tried to grab the kitchen chores before your brothers could speak up, as washing dishes and sweeping the floors were a lot easier and more pleasant than mucking manure out the freezing or sweltering cow barns and pig sheds, milking the cows, plowing furrows behind the horses, cutting and baling hay and all the other labour intensive chores that came with the farm.
Accordingly, my father was the only man I knew among all my friends’ families, who could make a pie or hem a pair of pants with as much dexterity as he could fix a leak in the roof of the house or change the oil in the car. He felt no embarrassment about that, or about the fact that his wife made more money than he did.
From as early as I can remember, my mother had hammered into all her children (but especially her girls), the necessity of getting as much education as we could. She cited her own mother, saying, “Education is more important for girls than for boys. Young men will make their way in the world one way or another. But if a girl never marries or loses her husband, she has to be in a position to earn her own living.”
Granny Ross’s sister Lila was held up to Sheryl and me as a cautionary tale as to why we shouldn’t assume that even if we got married, we could sit back and depend on our husbands to feed and house us. Aunt Lila the nurse had married a doctor.
“Married a doctor! Everyone thought she was all set for life,” my mother would exclaim dramatically.
Lila and her husband had three children, including a set of twins. Of course, Lila quit work when she married. Then, when her children were still young, her husband developed an addiction to drugs. He was caught selling drugs to patients to feed his own habit and was stripped of his medical license.
“What do you think would have happened to Aunt Lila and those kids if she had left school?” my mother would demand of us, fixing us with a gimlet stare. “She’d have ended up scrubbing floors, and those kids would have gone in rags, that’s what!”
Yes, my mother was a feminist before the term gained currency. For their birthdays, some of my friends were getting place settings of china for their hope chests. Sheryl and I were being told that marriage, if it happened, was fine. “ But don’t get married just so they’ll carve “Mrs.” on your tombstone!”
Then I turned up pregnant before I had even completed high school. The fact that my mother was convinced that my own life was ruined was by no means the most tragic or important aspect of this news as far as she was concerned. She was full of rage and disgust because I had let her down. I had shamed her in front of the community that she had outfaced for so long. She took out her anger and disappointment on me, and especially on John, at every opportunity for many, many years.
In any event, we managed the move to Ottawa without them. Our second son was born that summer. A few weeks later, I started at Carleton University in Ottawa, to complete my Honours B.A..
John secured a good job with a law firm, as office manager and trademark agent in training. After my own graduation, I started work with the federal government in a management trainee programme. Within six years, I had moved up the ladder until I was just two rungs below the executive level.
I found the civil service work frustrating and boring, so at the age of 29, I decided to quit to go to law school. It was the middle of a recession. High unemployment was exceeded only by record high rates of interest and inflation. John supported my decision. Everyone else we knew thought I was crazy to turn my back on secure, pensioned employment in those economic conditions.
“Even if you get through law school, you’ll never get a job,” they warned.
When I broke my neck in my last year of law school and ended up in halo traction, everyone including the lawyer representing me in my lawsuit against the negligent driver, suggested I should drop out and try again the following year. I refused to follow their advice. I missed every class of my last term, but still graduated third in my class, studying my law books with zealous fervour and relying on sympathetic classmates to copy lecture notes for me. The only thing I didn’t manage was the graduation photoshoot. I’m still pissed about that.
I articled for one of the leading law firms in the city, and got hired back as an associate lawyer. I wanted to do litigation. Lots of people cautioned me that it was not a suitable field of endeavour for a woman. We know how that worked out.
With these struggles behind us, were we now going to bow to the opinion of the ABKA telling us we couldn’t make a success of the kind of pet resort we were dreaming of?
Although this would be far from the first time we had flirted with disaster, the difference was that this time around, we had a lot more to lose. We were very conscious of how hard we had worked and how much we had overcome to leave behind the days of rusted out cars and crap apartments.
In the end, we decided to once again clasp hands and jump off the cliff.
We would build our kennel, and we would do it according to our own weird ideas, incorporating suggestions from the ABKA only on technical matters we knew nothing about, or where they seemed to make sense and be in accord with our own ideas. People would come or they would not, but either way, we would succeed or fail on our own ideas, not on someone else’s.
This attitude would either be our salvation or our doom.
You must be logged in to post a comment.