Writing about Fathers and Mothers

[When I was working at the University of Calgary Library, Polly Steele decorated the tree in the lounge for Mother's Day, asking people to put things on it that reminded them of their mothers.  As well she arranged a lunch hour, asking a number of people to read something they would write about their mothers.  For some reason, the event was cancelled.  So I didn't read this piece.  Below is the essay I wrote about my mother for that day.  Since Father's Day is coming up, I have been trying to write 15 memories about my dad, one every day  in June until Father's Day occurs.  But now, when I am trying to write about him, my mother gets in the way.  This is out of character -- her, getting in Doral's way.]

Arta Johnson writes about her mother, Wyora Pilling

Mother's Day, 2000

I want to write about my mother and Aunt Erva Parsell keeps getting in the way.  There she is in front of me, her large nose thrown up in the air and her derriere so far back that I could put a teacup on it and have her continue walking across the room without spilling.  She is showing me how she can thrurst her buttocks way back and make people laugh.  Why does she keep appearing when I want to write about my mother’s cinnamon buns?

“What is your favourite food?  What would you like to eat?”  Her words echo from wall to wall.

“Fruit cocktail salad, Aunt Erva.  Fruit cocktail salad,” the nine of us would repeat.

“No, that costs too much,” mother would say.

“Now you keep out of it, Wyora,” Erva would return.

Fruit cocktail.  That was never on mother’s grocery list.  Erva mixed the drained fruit with endless bananas, not the speckled ones Dad brought home for 5 cents a pound, but the golden, yellow-skinned ones.  Not a bruise anywhere.  My portion would include a grape or two, and a maraschino cherry picked from the can and set on top.  And the whipped cream in the salad?  Thick whipped cream folded into the fruit.  I would watch mother’s face as the bowl was passed from one child to another around the table, her words reverberating in my mind.  “That costs too much.”  At Erva’s there was fruit salad, even if it cost too much.

I had never seen her husband, Robert.  I knew he was out on the farm.  What did that mean?  They had divorced over the maid in the farm kitchen and Erva had defiantly thrown herself at a sailor.  Her marriage to the sailor involved leaving her children with her sister and off she went.

How did Robert and Erva get back together?  I would not have dared ask that question, but they married again to each other for the second time.  With no better luck.  Soon she had the house in town, and she and the children made money taking in boarders.  He had the farm.

Then there was Bill.  Quiet Bill.  Much older than Erva.  He ate at her table.  He quietly sat in the living room.  He was her husband.  Her fourth marriage. 

“Do not marry someone older than you,” she said to me just days before I got married.

“I was tricked into marriage with this fourth time.  I had no idea.  One chaste kiss was all he gave me before we were married.  I thought, what a gentleman.  But the night we were married he said, no intercourse.  I can’t.”

Why didn’t she leave him?

Who will answer that question?

Did she think it was just punishment from heaven that had descended on her for the other three failed marriages?

“I don’t want to sleep with Aunt Erva.  She cuddles and warps her arms around me,” one of my younger sisters said.

“She is just keeping you warm”, mother would say.

I sided with my sister, but I was afraid to speak my opinion.

Where does this word come from?  “Oversexed.”  Did my mother say that about Erva?  And what did the phrase oversexed mean coming from my mother.  Such a cryptic phrase when I was wanting to know an encyclopedia of information.

“She needs more sex than a man can give.”  Did I hear those words from my mother?  And how much sex was that, I wondered?

I would like to write about my mother’s cinnamon buns, but Aunt Erva keeps getting in the way.