Time To Speak

It was time to speak to him again. Nearly twenty years had
passed since his death and it had been perhaps fifteen years
since she'd last spoken to him. But now the time was ripe.

I never did accept what you said to me in that dream the time you
came to me a few months after your death. You were going to find
someone for me! How dare you? I loved someone then, deeply,
passionately. But of course, you and Mom couln't accept him.
You never said a word about how you felt about him while you were
still alive, but then in death, you nonchalantly let me know
"you're going to find me someone. Don't worry about it"

Worry about it? I wasn't worried for a minute. I wasn't in the
least looking for a man. Nineteen years old, with hardly a
relationship under my belt, still a virgin, I wanted adventure,
affairs, passion.

Another couple of months down the line, and I meet a man with
whom I'm totally incompatible. I mean, I'm a Libra/Goat, and
he's a Cparicorn/Ox. But for some reason, some incredible karmic
reason, I embark in a relationship. A month later, this man
wants to marry me. I love you! he tells me constantly. I am
very uncomfortable because I don't feel I love him yet something
tells me to stay.

Now I've grown to wondering if you weren't the cause of that
entire situation. You were left an orphan as a young child, and
you spent your summers with an elderly uncle, also a priest, in a
little godforsaken place in the hills of this province. You met
a woman with whom you were totally incompatible, and after years
of courting, you finally married. No children. Finally, you
decided to adopt. I came along as number three. It wasn't meant
to be. You had both just decided that I was too old, too set in
my ways, and it just wouldn't owrk with the young baby boy you
had just obtained three months prior. But the social workers
begged and begged and finally you agreed to have a look at me,
but there definitely would be no adoption at this point as it
would require a winter wardrobe which for two months would be a
wasteful expense.

They sat me on the kidney shaped orange couch, and I tore your
heart away. You knew it wasn't the right place for me. You knew
your wife didn't want me. You should have said no, but I know
what it's like. I was conned into bringing home the sweetest
looking Husky pup one day. I knew it was wrong; he was too big
for the yard; I wouldn't have the energy or stamina to properly
take care of him, but I held him in my arms, looked into his
langourous eyes, and drove away with a new dog.

O.K. So I wasn't a dog. I might as well have been. They
checked my pedigree and because "it was better than most",
decided there must not be too much of a delay before I was
adopted. You weren't able to take care of me. I was battered,
verbally assaulted every day of my childhood, emotionally abused
and there wasn't a thing you did about it. I do remember that
one day, you told your wife that if she continued, you would call
Children's Aid. But it continued and you looked the other way.
It gnawed at you. Eventually, you developped cancer of the
stomach, of the intestines, cancer everywhere and you finally
died, to come back to me in my dreams a few weeks later and tell
me you "had found someone for me". I was fuming! Especially
since this person came from the same town as the one where you'd
spent part of your childhood as an orphan. Now here I was, by
some unlikely coincidence, orphaned, living with my grandmother,
working in the same little town where my natural mother had come
to work and hide until I was born. Uncanny!

Well I married that man. Are you happy? I knew I shouldn't but
some unexplainable force made me do it. And I've been unhappy,
unfulfilled for nineteen years. But I have decided that I will
not waste away and die of cancer the way you did. I think you
played a cruel trick on me. Sure. I married a good man, an
honest man. An excellent father. What more could the woman want
they all said. I don't know any woman who wouldn't give her
eyeteeth to have the kind of man she's got, they all said. Well
I was embarassed not to be more grateful. But there's been
something missing all these years. I didn't know what it was. I
wanted to do something. Something on my own, sparkling, exotic
but I was all tripped up. I just couldn't get it together. I
had children and hated the thought of them being abandonned by a
mother who "had to go find herself". I knew that in fifteen,
twenty years, the fact that I had found myself would be of no
consolation to a bunch of little children I'd left behind. So I
stayed and tried to make the house nice, tried to bake and garden
and knit and sew but I was so miserable I would cry myself sick
on my staircase every evening once the children slept. I didn't
know what I wanted. Such talent everyone wouldd say. She could
be anything she wants. But I didn't know if I wanted to be a
baker or a teacher or a doctor or a graphic artist, so I counted
pills all day in a hospital pharmacy. Of course, I knew what I
really wanted to be. I wanted to be a foreign and war
correspondant and had been saying it for years but it always drew
such mirth that eventually, I sort of said it as a joke myself.
Two children, three children later, I would still be saying:
"when I grow up, I'm going to be a foreign and war
correspondant." Then, another child, another static career as a
translator, because this was acceptable for a mother. At one
point, I knew I had grown up because I started saying: "I used to
think I would be a foreign and war correspondant when I grew up."
Nostalgia. To be truthful, I never wanted to be anything else.
A freelance photojournalist, foreign and war correspondant. I
would see the world and report it in a way people weren't used to
seeing. A woman's perspective. But that's history now. Now, I
still do odd jobs, but people call me stubborn. They say I have
a problem with authority, that I'm too much of a perfectionnist.
It's all true. So now I work on my own, never really doing
anything very meaningful. I no longer cry in the staircase. I
rarely cry at all. When I do, it's when I go for long walks in
the rain. No one else is out and if perchance, I do cross
someone, my tears don't show because, one, it's raining, and two,
it's dark. Depression is a strange thing. So is wanting to
commit suicide. I don't like myself. I'm too self-centered.
There are all kinds of reasons people find and I'm only too
willing to believe them. I try to shake myself out of it. I
give myself a good talking to. Live one day at a time, one hour
at a time if need be. They all tell me and I believe them and I
take their advice and you know? It works. One hour at a time, I
can throw my depression out the window and live for all those
around me and ooze out love and good feelings. Because that's
what's really important in life. Bullshit! If I am created in
the image of God and if all those around me are created in the
image of God, then, we are all created equal. And if I am going
around, refusing to live my life beyond the hour for fear of
having suicidal thoughts and instead, I am joyfully performing
banal activities so my loved ones can live a stable life,
something is wrong. I am not being honest and neither are the
people around me. If they knew how much it meant to me to do
what I really want to do, they would have let me go a long time
ago. They would have encouraged me. They would have seen
through my lies. A new floor, new household appliances, we'll
keep your children, you need a holiday. I didn't need a holiday.
They all knew it. It was a pretext to keep me home, with my
husband and with my children. A foreign and war correspondant;
it does sound exotic doesn't it? People don't want me to do it
not because they are so worried for my welfare, but because women
with young children don't plunge into an uncertain career, where
possibly, your life could be put in danger. It makes other women
feel bad. My mother-in-law sneered at a woman who went to "find
herself" in India. The woman was a certain age. Her children at
least most of them were adults. People who go "find themselves"
are trying to get away from people who stifle them in order to
make the right decisions.


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