A Cheap Ploy For More Views, or...?

This is a picture of my mom when she was very young, having just graduated from nursing school.

Yes, that's the Cheap Ploy, a Mother's Day post.  I'm not even sure yet whether that's as low as I'll go. You and everyone you ever knew or cared about and everyone you ever talked to will have to read avidly on to find out. I know I will.

When that picture was taken, my mom was finally about to escape what sounds like a pretty tough go in early life in Ontario. Her father was an illiterate farmer with I think a drinking problem, and I know even less about her mother. When the Olive family could not make a go of life, the children of the family were "taken in" by the good people of their parish, which in more concrete terms means the family was separated and the children became more or less indentured servants at various peoples' farms in the area. They were expected to work hard in support of the families they were living with and they were expected to be grateful for the chance to do so. Their educations or futures weren't really something the host families looked to.

My mom's eldest sister managed to get into nursing school, I don't know how, and eventually got a job and then got my mom in, too. Who knows how she managed it.

When she got out of nursing school, she went "overseas" (a kind of vague and romantic-sounding term we don't hear much anymore) to be part of the war effort. She became engaged to a man in the RAF who was shot down over Libya or somewhere in North Africa and didn't survive. It's hard for me to imagine her dealing with stuff like this having come from where she came from. She renewed her acquaintance with my dad in England, and they eventually became engaged and married.

After all that, they came to western Canada and settled down to the business of having a family and all the rest.

I never heard a word about all the stuff above from my mom. She was told to never complain and to always look on the bright side and be grateful, to only say good things about people or nothing at all, that hard work was its own reward...and so that's exactly what she did. Really. We found most of it out after she died, going through medical records put together as the local doctor tried to figure out whether what happened to her was Alzheimer's or some other kind or dementia or severe depression or what.

If you know me or have read a few of these posts you'll recognize that in spite of setting as good an example as anyone ever had, my mom failed to really instil most of those core beliefs too deeply in me. Probably something to do with not having threatened to let me starve to death on the streets in winter if I didn't toe the line...because what she didn't take from that Dickensian early life was a lot of anger or bitterness or entitlement, at least not that anyone noticed.  How does that happen?

Here's a picture of her while she was still partly herself, about 10 years before her good strong body finally got the message that there was no one at the helm and stopped.

So that was it, my Mother's Day post, to a person who made the best of things (even an obnoxious, obtuse, hockey-playing son). I never got to know her as a person, really, and wonder whether that would have ever happened, anyway. I just know she was a good mom, tried her best every day, and that I think of her often.

Happy Mother's Day!