The dermatologist worked for weeks to clear up the not so bad, but embarrassing acne. It would not do, to not put her best face forward at the party.
She arrived in a beautiful blouse with three eye-catching cutouts in the back, a perfect frame for the spectacular fiery pimple.
RL
A short creative writing challenge to write a story in exactly 50 words. This one is a mostly true nightmare that I’d witnessed. Seemed metaphorical for all kinds of teachable moments. 😉
Alright, my mother isn’t, and wasn’t ever, a nun. She grew up wanting to be one, but life has a way of trading dreams on people, and I was the first trade-off.
Her life wasn’t anywhere close to a serene cloistered order. I wrote a little about that in a post called ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’.
Her adult road didn’t include even following the tenets of her early faith. The closest to church involvement was the annual search for one that held summer camps for kids. That was her summer break and our free annual vacation.
What she ended up doing mostly was working 12 hour days in emergency first-aid and security detail. A few years into this industry, she’d re-found her faith, but it could never be used as any kind of vocation. Those 12 hour shifts were an economic necessity and there are few comparable offerings in the faith field.
So, it was long days until retirement at age 71. By then she wanted only to putter, and maybe volunteer a little. She’d already started going to church regularly again, and she helped the Reverend here and there. Their pleasant working relationship became true friendship. She had no idea this would cause her earliest reveries to swell again.
One day the Reverend made her an offer. Would she like to be a lay-reader? She would only have to study some, and practise the rituals in assistance for a while. She was instantly transported to places of long ago innocence. Her sixty something year old dream, a little re-shaped, finally got her to that place that was always meant to be.
Kicked the habit, made good in
vestments
My mother,
Lay-Reader
RL
Blogger and author JT Weaver posted a challenge to write stories in the 270 word range. For some of us, this is like requesting a brush-cut after we’ve been used to only a trim up to the hips. In the end though, it’s made me appreciate the less is more doctrine even more. JT’s challenge idea was inspired by the “Hemingway Challenge” and Abraham Lincoln’s succinct Gettysburg Address of 270 words:
jtweaver.net (2014 – 01 – 11- the-270)
P.S. This exercise also taught me that WordPress includes the captions on photos in their word count. I did not.
Sometimes old memories float up in need of
a little light…
A soul’s whisper to let it go.
I was 14 years old. My mother and I were living in an apartment on the 14th floor of a basic downtown high-rise. We were there because that’s where she was when I ran away from the last foster home I’d intended to live in.
I threatened to run away and never be found again if they made me go back to that home. The Department of Social Services, and my unprepared mother, gave in.
My mother had been struggling with escape from an abusive marriage, alcoholism, and no way to fully support her daughters. Those were the consequences of the sins created by and for the Government. That’s how we ended up in foster care just after Christmas that year.
We were six girls, ages two to twelve years. I was twelve. They were my sisters and because I was the oldest, they were also my beloved babies. There was no doubt that we were a fiercely bonded ‘band of sisters’ having already traversed a very rocky start together.
I was quite used to taking care of them and the house as required, which it seemed was almost always. So, the demand to relinquish responsibility to the social workers who came to take us away or to the people who were to foster and/or adopt us was incomprehensible. It was shocking and infuriating and frustrating.
Many nights I’d lie awake planning our escape from that foster home and formulating the many ways I’d find our mom. I usually ended up crying myself to sleep immersed in the despondency of realizing how powerless I really was.
We were all together in that initial home, except the youngest who was instead taken to live with our father – another story for another time. I was eventually to move to two other homes within a year and a half. Only one sister was allowed to go with me; they gave me one day to choose between the four faces that pleaded to be taken. Despite everything that we’d already lived through to that point, it was then that I learned that a soul could feel fractured.
In short time and with little choice, we adapted and carried on as kids are so able. Then two years later, suddenly we were all being taken to visit with our mom at her own new home. The visit went by as quickly as I’d dreaded. When it was time to say goodbye to her, it felt like the beginning of all the bad goodbyes again. I could not return to that pain; the next weekend I bolted for home, for her, for good.
So there I was, on the 14th floor in a small, sparse apartment, a temporary only child, but finally with my own mom. Life definitely took another turn in my day-to-day. I spent less time with my friends and more with my mother’s.
She had a friend on the 7th floor. Phyllis was one of those larger than life characters; a hard-drinking party girl, a queen bee who had great pride in being a full-time ‘player’. She seemed to take my mother under her wing. She was a louder than life distraction for a young woman bogged down with desperate problems.
Phyllis held court to an allotment of very proud and loud butch lesbians. They called themselves the girbols (girl boys, hard g). One of them was Margaret. She was pretty, a large woman and very quiet. Though she liked to hang out with the crowd and indulged in the same drink and smoke, she alone remained quiet.
I came home from school one day at the start of spring break and went down to the gang. There was a brand new baby girl cuddled up in Margaret’s arms. I hadn’t even realized that she had been pregnant. The baby was so tiny and delicate, and wrapped in a pink blanket.
Spring Break began on a weekend and as on all weekends, it was time to get the girbol party started. I was immediately designated the girl baby’s guardian. I took baby and all of her required possessions up to my apartment.
The ‘weekend’ turned into nearly two weeks during which I had full custody of baby night and day. It’s awesome, as in really awe-inspiring, how easily you fall in love with a child, even as a young girl and you immediately wish to be everything it takes to nurture them to perfection.
She needed me for everything and I reveled in that. At night, I would wrap her next to me and listen to her breath and smell the top of her head until I drifted off in true peace. Every minute with her was another moment of reclaimed love. I was once again protector, friend, sister, mother. For awhile I was me again.
Spring break was over and I’d already missed two days of school, I had to go back. That morning, I reluctantly took her down to the 7th floor, gave her back to Margaret and left for school. When I came home, I dropped off my school things and grabbed one of her blankets to collect her. I sniffed her baby smell all the way to Phyllis’s apartment.
When I walked in, I saw Margaret sitting by the window staring out with the curtains blowing around her. The girbol group was strangely quiet. I asked for the baby and no one said anything. I went to Margaret and asked. “Where’s the baby”? She wouldn’t answer and then I saw her tears. I was instantly alarmed.
“Where’s the baby Margaret”? I was ready to cry, but not sure why.
“They took her”, she said softly.
“Who took her”?
“Social Services. I phoned them today and they came to take her away”.
I know I asked her why, maybe a few times, but I don’t recall an answer. I doubt she gave one.
I turned from Margaret and I looked at everyone else. No one would look back at me; they kept their eyes on the floor or each other. I turned to Margaret again and watched her silently cry for a while. I walked to the door and quietly closed it behind me.
It was the last day I saw Margaret or our baby. I went to sleep that night holding that baby blanket. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. Somehow, I knew in my heart then, that no matter how much I dreamed, I was never going to get my family, my ‘band of sisters’, back in the same way again.
And, we didn’t, not ever in the same way again.
RL
Andrea Hotomanie, Principal, Glenda Speight, Constable Erin McAvoy
As Remembrance Day approaches, I am reminded of how profoundly I was moved by the Remembrance Day assembly at my son’s school last year. I found it particularly poignant for two reasons.
What I found initially striking was that the ceremony was presided over by all women, something I’d never seen before. They were school Principal, Glenda Speight, RCMP Constable Erin McAvoy, impressive in her Red Serge, and Andrea Hotomanie, the district Aboriginal Support Worker.
Andrea Hotomanie was the second reason of note. She stood up in recognition of the First Nations who serve and have served in the Canadian Military. She wore a magnificent button blanket around her shoulders. It was the first time I had seen this kind of inclusion at any school remembrance assembly. It brought me to tears.
It moved me so deeply because it was the first time I felt my grandfather and uncles included in these remembrances in a way that they hadn’t before. It brought them, Cree warriors from Northern Alberta, faded from history for so many decades, up to the front too. I felt they were being honored for the first time as servicemen and not as guests in the back of my mind, while all the other heroes were noted up on the screens and in the speeches. Between Andrea’s presence and my son nearby, this acknowledgement brought it all fully home to my heart.
All those many years ago, there was never any doubt that at least three of my uncles would join the military from the time that, as young boys, they stared admiringly at the one photo of my grandfather in his uniform until they were all signed up and fitted into their own.
Along with pride of nation and reverence for the uniform, there was another underlying and stirring reason to join up. Uncle Philip finally expressed it after I asked him why he always declared that his favorite job was being in the Canadian forces. He said, “Respect”. While he wore that uniform, it was the first time in his life that he was treated with honest to God respect, and it didn’t matter where he was in the world. It was his greatest time of honor and pride. I can’t say so for my grandfather or the other uncles, but I suspect they felt much the same.
Their presence at the Remembrance Day assembly that day was palpable to me, and I have no doubt that they were all there in full uniform.
There is a lot of history about Indigenous participation in the military and the details are available more than ever. I would encourage anyone to look up that history sometime for some very interesting and enlightening reading.
For now, I would just like to say thank you to my family for their courage. We will always be proud. We will always remember.
In remembrance of:
Private John Joseph Baptiste Gray – WW1
Private Frank Joseph Gray – WW2
Private Philip Sanford Gray – Korea
Private Larry Alexander Gray – Canadian post, Quebec
To an old friend serving in Afghanistan, Deputy Chief of Staff, John Valtonen, as always, thank you, and stay safe.
RL
Our Home and Native Braves was published October 30, 2013 on the Reader’s Digest community website: http://www.readersdigest.ca/our-canada/community-blog/our-home-and-native-braves
Recommended link for Native military history:
A Commemorative History of Aboriginal People in the Canadian Military:
http://www.cmp-cpm.forces.gc.ca/dhh-dhp/pub/boo-bro/abo-aut/index-eng.asp
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