5
MARRIAGE, MOTHERING & MARIJUANA
"Beneath the surface the separatist forces in the province were growing." "After 1960 Quebec wanted to become like the rest of North America while remaining French speaking." "We accepted American capital and technology and at the same time, we blamed the Americans for everything that was new and unwelcome. During the 1950’s, Canada moved into a state of economic dependence on the United States."
"The women's liberation movement was born and children of the post World War II baby boom came of age. They were the generation that was told to fight a war and refused." "Bob Dylan, the poet and prophet of the counter-culture, poured out all the sneering, pitying contempt the young felt for their elders." "These kids grew up with the Bomb, life in a fallout shelter and the possible ways the world might end." "The hippies, successors to the beatniks, wanted to 'drop out' of the world while the activists wanted to change it." "Blue jeans became the uniform of a generation. A drug culture flourished as did sexual experimentation."
President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps. The Berlin Wall was built, a 28-mile wall to separate communist East Berlin from the city's Western section. As the civil rights and antiwar movements evolved, Indians started to think about changing their situation. They began to approach the U.S. government on the touchy subject of treaties.
During my first year of marriage my job allowed me time off to visit my husband on the road and I began to see more of what he was like. We certainly didn't know one another when we got married. It's never the dinners at French restaurants and chivalrous gestures. There is always the shadow side - when we see through the crack to where a person's reality lies hidden, protected and perched, ready to rise.
I met his customers who placed their trust in his choices for their continued prosperity but watched in shock as he padded his orders to substantiate his quotas. When I expressed my concern for these people barely making a living in the most destitute of Canadian provinces, he banned me from the sample room, like King Henry VIII sending his wives to the Tower of London. There I stayed, afraid to think I might have made a mistake about him and too late to change my mind about my marriage until I met Arthur, one of his clients, a young, eligible bachelor, more concerned with who I was than my husband's business. While my spouse increased our income, my time in that town was never without adventure - sailing in the harbor, dinner when my husband's meetings ran late and an introduction to poetry and prose previously unknown to me.
When my husband was home, I switched gears from leading a single life to assimilating into his schedule, which is what most women did. His friends became our friends and their wives replaced the girlfriends of my college years, most of whom were still single. I sometimes saw them on my own but married life begets hanging out with married couples. Even though these women and I were different, we found common ground on which our relationships could be based - babies. They tried to teach me how to play canasta without success. They were serious about the outcome, I wasn't. Years later a friend remarked, "If you're a failure at canasta, you're a success at life.”
A friend who had a ski shack in a tiny resort town in Vermont invited us for a weekend and it was there that I was introduced to marijuana. A joint was passed around and when asked how I felt, I had to answer - nothing. That didn't stop me from trying again when the chance arose. An obsessive personality like mine, hinged on rootless, dubious underpinnings, burdened with low self-esteem, feelings of helplessness and rejection, was ready for relief. And relief was here at hand. It was easier than drinking hard liquor for which I had never acquired a taste. Marijuana was different and fitted my oral need, which had never been fulfilled. Aside from getting the munchies it made me feel spacier, slightly decadent, and the conservative institution of marriage less conforming, less confining. So a joint here and there suited my dereliction roots that lay carefully concealed, never coming up for questioning. I even felt silly at times (my birth mother's bubbly personality, as one psychic put it, finally surfacing). Drugs tear out the roots and provide a temporary escape from reality. By then I vaguely knew that something was wrong with my life.
I had worked for a year after I got married, traveled the Western U.S. for a month in a cramped car with my new husband and another couple with whom we had nothing in common, and I started feeling the nausea of pregnancy halfway through our ski trip. Upon returning home the news was filled with the monumental dilemma forced on the world by the potential threat of a sleeping giant, Communist Cuba, ninety miles off the coast of Florida, the closest any anti-American country has ever been to the United States.
A CIA-trained force invaded the coast of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. In three days they were overpowered by Castro's army. Kennedy finally admitted that it was an American operation. It instigated Khrushchev to arm Cuba with nuclear-tipped missiles aimed at the United States. For thirteen days in October the world waited tensely until Khrushchev backed down, offering to dismantle the missile bases if Kennedy would promise not to invade Cuba.
Living in Canada and not being in the path of immediate danger, we watched from afar and felt safe. Staining caused me to quit my job and I prepared for motherhood by sewing maternity clothes and dreaming of storks and starry-eyed strategies.
Betty Friedan issued her revolutionary book, The Feminine Mystique, all about equal rights for women. She wrote about women as mothers and wives, giving up their aspirations. The only way for a woman to realize who she is, is by doing some- thing creative of her own.
I was alone when my labor started and after a few hours of discomfort, my father-in-law drove me to the hospital. I guess he felt that if his son couldn't, he should. When the pain got too intense, the idea of natural childbirth was abandoned and I succumbed to an episiotomy. The agony eased and I settled down to pushing while my doctor kept me abreast of the size of the opening. At 4:32 a.m., my baby kicked and twisted her way into the world, leaving me exhausted, chilled and trembling. My body shook for a long time, conscious I am sure, of the turmoil established when my biological mother had given birth to me. All the suppressed trauma of that event emerged through my musculature. I was as alone as she had been. My husband arrived that evening, spent a few days with us and left to continue his life uninterrupted by this momentous event that a couple normally shared. I was carrying on my inheritance of giving birth alone. I couldn't share my experience of childbirth with my adoptive mother.
My daughter Valerie was beautiful, weighed seven pounds four and a half ounces and was twenty inches long. I finally had a blood relative. She might even look like me. Nobody else did. After five days in the hospital we returned home where a nurse I had hired would help for the first month with motherly instincts I had not inherited.
My life wasn't mine anymore. Between making formula - I never had anybody to talk to about breast-feeding - washing, drying and folding diapers, not getting a full night's sleep, and trying to get some artwork done, I was a busy lady. I had to tackle unexpressed feelings which surfaced that I didn't understand and didn't feel free to talk about. There was a life in that other room, a living, breathing being for whom I was totally responsible. My patience was tested more than once when she cried and I didn't know what to do. With nobody to share this experience I was anxious and angry and took it out on her. She was so beautiful and so helpless. Spanking her when she was unable to relieve her discomfort left me feeling guilty, sad and frustrated. It didn't happen often because it didn't make me feel good.
I was raised to be a good Jewish wife and mother. I got married, had a child and continued to do what was expected of me. But I didn't have an adequate sup- port system. I was home alone with the baby and disappointed with myself for not absolutely loving this motherhood experience.
At the time these thoughts never entered my mind but simmered subconsciously and only later became part of my reality when I felt burdened by the total responsibility of family life. I had never been able to do what I wanted, never having lived alone, and now I was in the same predicament. I wasn't alone and couldn't travel at my own speed. But I had wanted children while I was young enough to grow up with them. I didn't want to be "older" like my parents were when I entered their life. I had always been envious of a high school friend who spent