Kids Benefit from Independence

By Dorothy Nixon

I have just learned something new about my 78 year old French Canadian and, frankly, I am shocked.

I learned -for the first time, just the other day, that she spent her early years, from six to sixteen, away from her home at boarding school. I've always known that my mother had gone to one of the finest girl's private schools in Montreal, the Sacred Heart Covent; THAT she had told me. She was proud of the fact. What I hadn't fully comprehended, until now, is that this school was a boarding school and that she had resided at her parents' four story greystone on Montreal's Sherbrooke Street only during the summer.

This news has come as a surprise, because my mother has never once, in the 44 years I've known her, complained about her childhood.

In fact, my mother has only spoken in the most illustrious terms of her mother and father. They were the very best parents, she has always said. Her father was a man of stature in the city, the top ranking civil servant; her mother was a dedicated wife and mother- and the best cook in the world, too!

My mother has never spoken ill of her early years - not once! . She feels she led a privileged childhood. Only the brightest daughters from the finest families were sent to learn with the nuns of the Sacred Heart. Besides, her father visited her every weekend. Her mother, it seems, didn't have the time to take the short bus ride from Sherbrooke and St Lawrence at the city's center, to the Sacred Heart Convent on Pine Avenue, during the school year; but that was OK. They "spent wonderful summers together and they could always talk on the phone," my mother says.

My mother did hold something against her mother at one time, she admits; the fact that she hadn't been raised by a governess. All of my mother's little friends at boarding school had been raised by governesses. My mom, back then, had felt deprived. In my mom's eye, this meant her mother was a little 'lower class' than the other moms.

I am writing this because I am going back to work full time next week. I am not going to be able to be there when my kids, ten and thirteen, return from school, and a part of me, a very small part, feels guilty.

That's because I've read so much lately, blaming all the ills of our society on the fact that there are "two working parents in the family." I've always been made to feel guilty when I worked over the years, off and on, outside the home; guilty for not being right there, on top of my two sons, at every blinking moment of the day. This is the Age of Intensive Mothering, after all, the first time in history where we moms are expected to chaperone our small gene pool through nearly every life experience, or suffer the consequences.

Yes, I have felt guilty for not being there -at times- when I should have felt guilty for being so bitchy and tense when I was there, the dutiful stay at home Mom worrying about bills, my husband's unstable work situation, and my possible future career as a bag lady.

What baloney we're being fed today!

Kids benefit from independence.

Polls tell us that most of the tension in families today is caused by financial problems - and by the fact that the job market is uncertain and that the social safety net in the country is falling to pieces. Polls also tell us that most Canadians "think kids lose out when both parents work outside the home." Am I the only one to see the inherent contradiction here?

I, myself, have no Little House on the Prairie illusions about the Good Ole Days; times were not happier. In fact, my aunt, my mother's sister, the one who got to stay home with the family, was adopted, literally plucked from the streets of East End Montreal, a homeless beggar, abandoned at age 6 by her family who couldn't afford to keep her. This aunt feels that she was given the short end of the stick because she was NOT sent away to boarding school.

My grandmother, who was born in the 1880's, used to feed homeless men at her back door. Someone had to. Family lore indicates that she was big on helping out the less privileged in a number of ways; apparently she was an amazing "doctor" to the the poorer families she knew. She also took in troubled teenage girls; yes, they had them back then too. Often these were girls who had 'disgraced' their families by gettting pregnant. Yes, teenage girls did that back then too.

She was busy, my matronly "grande dame" of a grandmother, doing her bit for a pre-social program society. Maybe that's why she didn't have time to visit my mom, her very own and youngest daughter, at boarding school a few blocks away. Luckily no one thought the less of my grandmother for that; she could breath easy. By her society's standards she was a model mother. Anyway, the bar was set a lot lower back then for moms and there were no polls, magazine articles, or Oprah Winfrey talk shows in those days grading moms on the quality of their mothering.

My own mother, as a youth, volunteered, too, in an huge, two building orphanage run by the nuns on the then outskirts of Montreal. She says the place was full of filthy squalling babies and snotty nosed children who barely got any attention at all. These children, like so many children to grace this green Earth since the beginning, were living on survival mode. My mother, in her late teens by then, felt sorry for these pathetic little souls and all the more grateful for what she had been given.

When I asked my mother if she ever feels a twinge of self pity due to her life as an "abandoned" rich girl years back, she says "No." Definitely not. She may not have lived a home during her childhood, but she always knew she was being taken care of. She knew she was from a good family. She felt wanted and happy. She remembers the good times she had at home-- and at school with the nuns. She doesn't dwell on the bad.

So, next time you feel guilty about your latchkey kids, or your kids in daycare, think of my mother, and think of my aunt, and think of all those filthy bawling babies in the orphanages - and please, breathe easier yourself.

1999© Dorothy Nixon, all rights reserved