In the 1950’s.
Average life expectancy for women was 71 and men 65.6.
Average Canadian salary $2,992.00
Bread cost 14 cents.
Bomb shelter plans widely available
On tv-- Ed Sullivan show, Ozzie and Harriet, Lassie, Father Knows Best, I love Lucie, and Murrow’s “Hear It Now” on radio.
Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on public bus.
I don’t know how this thought popped into my head. It was a hot, sticky July day and I was leaning over the kitchen sink idly prying dried Pablum out of the china bowl rimmed with little bunnies. The thought wouldn’t go away.
I didn't have a life plan. I don’t think I’d ever had a life plan; what I did have was a day-to-day survival plan and a house full of children.
That thought and the usual household sounds pushed me back to my real world; how to stretch a tablespoon of ground round for one more meal and whether the damned fuel bill would get paid on time. Then it finally hit me; I was responsible for all those innocent little children in my house and these lines between my eyes did not come from piping, "Birds in their little nests agree."
Well, sure I knew I had kids. I was dead certain that I had been practicing childcare twenty-four hours a day, and I'd had a crush on the obstetrician several times, so sure they were my kids. It seemed sort of sloppy to finally recognize that I didn't have a life plan. Just a houseful of kids. I could not recall just exactly how I had ended up in this mortgaged kitchen with every moment of my time spoken for, when a blink of an eye ago I was single, carefree and untouched by overdue bills and overheating car radiators.
I dried my hands and hurried to the phone to alert my husband at the office.
"I'm sorry to bother you, but have you looked around our house lately? It's full of children and they're all ours. How did this happen?"
Yes, he had noticed we had a lot of children and might he remind me that he had been willing to settle for fewer of those.
"Listen," I continued, "Wasn't it only yesterday that we were scrounging quarters for the movies and popcorn, and now we have a house and a mortgage and bank loans and all those children. Who decided we were old enough and sensible enough to borrow money? What was the bank manager thinking of? And all those children; are we ready for all this responsibility?"
He said there there, you're just having a trying day so why don't you call a sitter and meet me down town and we'll have dinner and discuss this. Well, I did just that and before you could turn around we talked ourselves into a newer car and another baby.
I cannot believe my good timing, marrying and having babies when nothing else was expected of me except to keep the house and kids in order. And that was enough; all that was missing from my life was a built-in treadmill. There was that vague unspoken rule that everything should be perfect when husband returned home from his important work, but I’m sure that rule was meant for women with the 2.2 kids and a cleaning staff.
I certainly never considered having a career outside the home and in fact, I thought I had a full time career in my home.
I always wanted to be a mother. A mom. Nurturer of children. I know, you're saying, "And?" This is the embarrassing part because that's it. It never occurred to me there was an "and."
I wouldn't have traded my life with anyone, although my thoughts sometimes fixed on the seductive notion of getting a solid eight hours sleep or having an uninterrupted adult conversation.
When I was a kid, I was very clear about my future. I'd earn my living as an artist, marry a newspaperman and have lots of children. All those things happened although the artwork quickly sidelined to paperhanging and scraping layers of paint off second-hand furniture, and re-arranging everything. The furniture re-distribution was a good habit; a few years on when it mattered, I could tell who came home after curfew when a foot crashed into a newly moved table.
My formative years were lived on the exit edge of several passing eras. I was too young to know what the depression was, but it certainly overshadowed my childhood. My father always had a job and we never went hungry but the anxiety of those times turned me into what you might call the ultimate oxymoron-- optimistic worrier. That’s a person who feels it's a near certainty that the world may crumble tomorrow, in fact it probably will, but today looks good.
World War Two replaced the depression in my worries. There were new things to be terrified of; I mean what if Canadian children, like the children in Britain were forced to wear those hideous gas masks with the mutant eyes? Every night I went to bed fearful that we'd be bombed right out of our house, but I did have enough sense to be grateful that I was a female and didn't have to join the armed forces.
I saw all the Andy Hardy movies and was ready to put my heart into adolescence but that coincided with the war, and teen-age outbursts were probably considered subversive. The wildest thing I did in those days was to turn into a permanent string and foil saver.
I lived at home until the day I married. My father went off to the office from Monday to Friday and half days on Saturday. My two brothers were expected to fill the furnace sawdust hopper three times a day and cut the lawn and I was expected to peel potatoes and dust and know how to pour tea, and you can bet that didn’t mean dangling a tea bag from a string into a cup of hot water.
Sunday was roast day and on Monday was leftovers day. I dreaded the leftover- lamb Mondays because it was always curried in a yellow- green sauce on a bed of rice and it looked and tasted deadly. By the time I was an adult I discovered that it tastes wonderful with careful mixing of spices. I think my mother got hers from a sadist.
Excepting the lamb, my mother was an excellent cook who wasn't particularly interested in kitchen appliances or gadgets and we didn't have a refrigerator in our house until I was twelve years old. Until then the iceman delivered fifty-pound blocks to the icebox on our back porch every few days.
All of us post depression kids knew our roles. We kept our elbows off the table, didn't talk back and we were expected to regularly attend various levels of school until we got some kind of diploma. That generally marked the signal for boys to shave regularly, wear three- piece suits with skinny ties and work in an office. At the same time the girls got their first polyester silk dresses and shoes with three- inch heels, and married the boys who had found their offices. The girls were expected to have a couple of children and perform charitable deeds, so the good clothes were saved for christenings and family parties.
While I was still young enough to dream romantically about the future I knew I would have children and I knew that they would be absolutely perfect. God knows, I'd spent enough time analyzing every mistake my parents had made; you wouldn't catch me raising children in a household where there were conflicts. Yes, I said that.
I would be the modern day Marmy March. I know, there's a large possibility some of you have never never read "Little Women" and you don't have a clue who Marmy March was. Well, she was poor and decent and while her husband was off fighting some unidentified war, she stayed home and raised four spunky daughters who hardly ever complained and were perfect bricks.
Marmy still managed to have a hard-working, faithful maid and that freed her up to commit good deeds to people poorer and needier than she was.
Somewhere in the process of growing up, opening the first bank account, dating, marrying, having children, and starting to care about the cleaning power of detergents, any priority plan I might have had lost its momentum. The larger things in my life were planned more or less on the spot. Getting married. Buying a house. Having babies. Buying sick second hand cars.
I loved my life.
