ONLY THE NAMES ARE CHANGED

A Child Was Born And All Was Not Healed

Memoirs 4 —What about bonding between parents and child?

Neither my mother nor my father were ready for parenthood. My mother was too wounded and too consumed with her need for psychological survival to be able to shift out of her own needs to comprehend what she needed to do in order to be a mother.

My father was as wounded by the sins of his own father, his grandfather and his ancestors down through the generations preceding his own birth. He was also as narcissistic as my mother, a self-focus that was based on illusory images of grandeur. His focus was a future filled with wealth, privilege, and fame.

Both of my parents were too young, too immature, too wounded, and too wrapped up in themselves to be parents. No matter which way one looks at the situation, the scene wasn’t too promising for a new born who was getting ready to enter into life.

It’s time to begin the story as told using my voice, a voice of an adult long removed from the action of the story itself.

Following the marriage to my mother, my father returned to full-time work with his father in March 1949, just before his eighteenth birthday. Work always slowed down when winter set in. With work, and now a father-to-be, he believed he wasn’t a child dependent on his parents anymore, yet that was exactly the situation he was living.

It was hard to feel like a man when he still needed his father to give him money. Being back at work, full-time, had taken some of the frustration and anger out of his system, but he still was left with the feeling he needed his own job and his own home. After all, he was a married man with a child on the way.

At least working full-time, he was able to celebrate my birth during the summer of 1949. He made a vow to himself to finally do what needed to be done to achieve his dreams of independence, wealth and fame. My mother was encouraged by this determination to finally escape the threadbare existence of poverty and living in the slums of the city where she had found herself.

My father’s plan was to first find himself a job as a ranch-hand somewhere in Alberta, where he could be a cowboy and with luck and time, become a rich rancher in his own right, a rancher with a huge home with everything that would speak of success and power. But first, he had to find a way to get started.

I was born in the morning on July 22nd, 1949 at the Ottawa Civic Hospital. I carried the names of both of my grandfathers and my father as well as the obligatory Joseph that was awarded to all Catholic baby boys at their baptism.

The honour of the first name being that of my English grandfather had been enough to begrudgingly re-open the door to my mother’s home family. She regained some of the lost relationships with her mother and siblings. My English grandfather was still angry and he remained aloof having as little to do as possible with his daughter and her family.

While my father struggled with being dependent upon his father for money and work, and his mother for meals and the foundation of a home environment, my mother slowly began to adapt to the role of being a parent under the guidance of my French grandmother whom I came to know and address as Mémère.

With the initial rush of being a proud parent dissipating, the world returned to new rhythms for my parents. I thrived as my mother breast-fed me and my aunts took over my care and attention in between feedings. According to all reports and stories, I was a happy baby.

Having to deal with the physical and psychological stresses of being a parent, my mother began to panic at what she sensed as a growing distance between my father and her. With my aunts and paternal grandmother focused on me, my mother spent her time trying to entice my father back into her arms.

Her girlish figure soon returned and she used it to recapture his attention. Sex and constant flattery were used successfully to pull him back. At least, that is how she understood it. My mother suffered post-partum depression. It took all of her energy to focus on keeping my father engaged with her, leaving my care to the other women in the house.

The none-too-subtle project of my mother, had served to have my father realise he didn’t have to do any of the work of maintaining their relationship. He had sex on demand, he had the elevated role of being a real man, of being a father.

In the tight family circle he became even more the real man of the house. He also didn’t have to do any of the work of being father with so many in his family making sure I was a happy little baby.

In this environment of having both parents abandoning the work of parenting, these two teenagers lost the opportunity to develop maturity. The seeds of future abandonments of children, both emotional and relational were set in place.

Both were learning by default they didn’t have to be responsible for any child who should appear on the scene, leaving them to focus on themselves.

My father had heard of a job as a ranch-hand in Alberta, not far from the city of Calgary, in the late fall of 1949. The job wanted a man to work with cattle. The pay was better than what he earned as a labourer in Ottawa, especially when there was very little construction work during the winter.

My father shared the news of this job opportunity with my mother, after he had already responded to the job advertisement and had been offered the job. He had accepted the job offer before telling my mother and the family about it.

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Previously

Carrie, Block Wife, Benighted, Britt H., Benjamin Workman, Robert, Au Naturel, James Grigg, Diana Meresc, Chris Floyd, Ridge, Margie Willis, Adrian CDTPPW, Luis Rosa, Dan Carlson | Meandering Naturist, Adrian CDTPPW, Patrick OConnell, Maddy Mirza, Jorden House-Hay, and Adrienne Beaumont