Kay S - Winnipeg folklore writer and dreamer

My mother was born in 1911 in a tiny rural town settled on the border of North Carolina and South Carolina. When she was eight her parents and their four children moved to Windsor, Ontario, and later to Detroit across the river, where two more children were born. She met my father at a Halloween party at her church, and they were married a year later – she was seventeen. Her first child was born the next year, and nine years later I appeared in the world, the first girl. Five years later we moved to south Florida – my parents, my oldest brother Allen, me, Janet, and Jolene, all bundled into our 1944 Packard. My mother, who never learned to drive, sat in the backseat with the girls while fourteen-year-old Allen sat up with my father.

To read more of Kay's story of her mother, including a short story she wrote inspired by her mother's garden, go to Ultimate Challenge.

Mother's Story Workshop

As requested by Scarbie I have changed the font of these Mother entries. Instead of Arial small this is Georgia normal and I hope it's readable on Mac. Please let me know if there are still problems.

Last Wednesday I started the first Mother's Story Workshop at Unity of Vancouver. It will go for four weeks, every Wednesday night from 7 - 9, and it's exciting and scary for me to deal with "pedestrians". As you may know this project was started amongst my friends - women actors in Vancouver. I just threw out a challenge - tell me where your mother was born, to who and what happened next, in 2000 words - and some of the women who responded knew how to write, some just wanted to talk about their moms, some wanted to "play" with their friends, but all of us had the experience of telling stories on stage. We basically knew what we wanted to say and how to say it. Or we didn't get involved. At this workshop, I'm working with people (men and women) who have maybe not written anything beyond a grocery list or business report since they left school. They have sketchy memories of their moms, and feel bad about that, but they also want the experience of learning how to talk about her. So that's what we're doing.

I've told them we're writing instead of just talking because it's important to keep the focus on mom and not get sidetracked into our relationship with mom; this is, after all, not therapy. It's important that we systematically organize our memories by date so we can see the potential relationship of different events. Yes, 1942 means there was a war going on somewhere, could this have been a factor in her story? Yes, when she was five years old there were 4 older siblings, 2 babies and 6 more on the way - what was growing up in that household like? I've given them assignments to write about the major events in their mothers' lives and I have no idea what will come back next week.

A woman stopped me on the way out, confessing she didn't remember much of her mother and I told her of the women in our actors group who lost their mothers when they were very young and how by writing down what they remembered, it allowed more memories to surface. She said she didn't remember much of her own life either. She seemed pleasant enough, no sign of obvious trauma but who was I to know? Maybe this was a common thing amongst regular folk - no past, no memory. What was I supposed to do now?

Then I remembered having to sit down in my 20's to consciously link up what year I had done a play with when I had moved to that apartment to when I was going out with that guy. My whole grid system for memories had disappeared once I'd left school and I needed to create a new one that was tied to something beyond what grade I was in. Without a regular job, regular house, regular boyfriend, there were no constants by which to gather events in my memory - everything was strewn around like the clothes in my bedroom.

Perhaps this woman just hadn't established a grid for herself yet; I could solve that (maybe). But it made me realize that maybe this gathering and telling memories of mom was going to take longer than 4 weeks. I knew "talking about mom" involved breaking a big taboo and caused people all kinds of anxiety, but what other fundamental things would I have to teach them? What other unknowns were going to arise?

I had written another story here of another woman stopping me on the way out and her story of "the dark things" but upon reflection I've decided that as much as it shows that we need to write these stories if only to release ourselves from the thrall of history, I must respect the privacy of the people talking to me, if only until their stories have settled within themselves and they are truly released. Suffice to say, wondrous things are happening.