Growing up in Newfoundland, long before the ubiquity of flu shots and antibacterial hand gel, my siblings and I went through more than our share of winter sickness. My mother took care of us. Mild colds and regular flus to more serious illnesses like chicken pox or measles—all were indulged in the same manner: a steady regimen of lying on the living room couch, cozy under a blanket, with the TV on and a glass of flat ginger ale and stack of saltines on the coffee table.

But before the couch was made up and ginger ale brought from the kitchen, my mother would kiss our foreheads to check for fever. We didn’t own a thermometer; if you were sick enough to have your temperature taken with a thermometer, you were sick enough to visit Outpatients. Besides, that gentle forehead kiss told my mother everything she needed to know.

The whole routine, from kiss to crackers, was comforting—so comforting that now that I’m a mother myself, I sometimes find myself wishing for a slight cold or flu, a strange rush of nostalgia brought on by the taste of Canada Dry and the sight of a blanket-covered couch. But my mother doesn’t look after me anymore. She just dispenses advice when my children are sick, despite the fact that I, too, believe in the power of the glass of ginger ale with a bendy straw.

“Can’t the doctor give him something to keep him healthy?” my mother asks, worried about both of my kids but particularly about our little boy, who seems to be more vulnerable.

“He’s already had his flu shot,” I tell her.

She worries about every possible head cold and ear infection, though underneath I suspect a dark fear that something else might go wrong. Maybe it’s the memory of her older sister, Bessie, who died at eighteen months old. My mother never knew her sister, but her father told the story many times: the doctor taking little Bessie away while she waved bye-bye over his shoulder. So Mom always took our childhood illnesses seriously and remembers the tubes in my ears and my brothers’ measles, strep throat and tonsillitis vividly. With her grandchildren, she’s doubled down on maternal concern.

Penobscot by Arlene “Dozay” Christmas. This piece honors Penobscot women who are resilient healers and teachers of their People.

“I’ve asked the doctor,” I reassure her. “She said it’s just part of life. Germs go around, especially in school. Kids get sick.”

“She must have something to give him. A tonic maybe?”

“A tonic?”

“Yes, a tonic. When you were small, the doctor would give you a tonic all winter long.”

I don’t remember this at all. I checked with my brothers and sister and they don’t remember either. Whatever those tonics were, they couldn’t have been all that frequent or vile-tasting; my father still talks about the horrible taste of the cod-liver oil they were forced to swallow every morning at school. Bad tastes stick in the memory as well as in the throat.

When was the last time the doctors gave out “tonics”? I did some digging. In Newfoundland, the practice of giving healthful tonics continued into the ’60s and ’70s, bolstered by belief in the benefits of cod liver oil and preparations like Infantol, guaranteed to help your baby grow. The tonics, with a few exceptions, were mainly vitamin water with other ingredients ranging from minerals to caffeine, wine, and yeast. While most were probably harmless, and some may have done some good (particularly in the days when rickets was common), they couldn’t have helped us much, given our regular bouts of illness.

Besides, compared to the promise of a flu shot, updated every year for new viruses, a tonic sounds outdated, like arsenic to effect a “healthy paleness.” So instead, I teach the kids to wash their hands before they eat. I encourage them to get fresh air and exercise and stick to their bedtimes. I try to keep them as healthy as their picky appetites allow.

No doubt these things will also seem outdated if and when I’m fortunate enough to have grandchildren. Maybe by then, studies will show we’ve been washing our hands all wrong, spreading germs around for maximum coverage. Maybe super-effective and modernized flu shots will be delivered to our front door by drones that inject the whole family via needled appendages, slapping an identical “I Was A Good Patient” sticker on both adults and children. And maybe I’ll say to my son or daughter, “Can’t you get a real nurse to check over the kids?” or “Can’t they soap their fingers more?”

For now, I’ll keep my faith in hand washing and flu shots, even though nothing will completely prevent the yearly incursion of colds and flu. Viruses and bacteria will piggyback into the house on any one of us; it really is just a part of life. And when the inevitable happens and the children get sick, it won’t be any modern idea or product that gets them well again. Instead, I’ll do the same things my mother did: the efficient tucking-in of blankets on the couch, the TV, bendy straws and ginger ale, and the comfort of a gentle kiss to check for fever in the middle of the night. As remedies go, these things have been one hundred percent effective. In fact, I think my mother and I have used the best kind of tonic all along.

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Understorey Magazine is a project of the Second Story Women’s Centre and a registered charity. If you like what you see here, please share with friends and consider making a donation. Thank you.

The first time I write about my mother, she hates it. What I write is this:

“In the morning my mom tells us to go back to bed because it’s too erly [sic].”

It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t sitting on top of a line about my dad buying me candy. In retrospect, it’s him she should have had the problem with. She reads the incriminating sentence in my notebook on parent-teacher night and the next day, my dad speaks to me about it.

“Your mom was pretty upset about what you wrote,” he says.

“Oh,” I say.

In The Argonauts, her memoir about motherhood and identity, Maggie Nelson muses, “Most of my writing usually feels to me like a bad idea” (123).

I haven’t yet learned that feeling. I am seven. I didn’t write it to hurt her.

*

Looking back, I’m not surprised that, when faced with the Herculean task of writing a sentence on each of my family members, I struggled with what to say about my mom. So completely absorbed in her familial roles, eager to experiment in her own obliteration (Nelson, 37), she seemed barely more substantial than whatever I felt toward her in the moment. I clung to scraps of her. In first grade, when it was my turn to say what I wanted to be, I said, “A physiotherapist,” except I couldn’t get the word out right. I didn’t know what it was or how to pronounce it—just that it started with a p and was what my mom used to do. Before me, back when she was a real person.

*

Cut from the Same Cloth as the Elephant in the Room by Robin Smith Peck

The next thing I write about my mom is even shorter, but she hates that too. It’s her birthday and I want to help make it special, just like she does for us: I make her a birthday banner. I don’t know who her favourite cartoon characters are, so instead I just write, “Happy Birthday Mom!” and decorate the rest of the Bristol board with colourful exclamations of her age: 35. I’m proud of my work and I think she will be happy, but she cries instead. I ask my dad, “Why?” and he tells me that she is sensitive, she doesn’t like seeing her age up on display. But my age is always on the birthday banners. Once again, I feel confused.

*

I grow older and the mother in my head grows ever wispier, evanescent. I learn what a physiotherapist is and know immediately that I don’t want to be one. One day at supper, my dad asks who my role models are and I say Whoopi Goldberg when really I mean Guinan from Star Trek, and Mariah Carey because I’ve just been given my first radio and she is my favourite.

“Don’t you think your mom would be a good role model for you?” he prods.

And I say, “No, not really,” awkwardly, without looking up, the same as when mom comes back from the hairdresser. It feels like a test and I know that I’m failing, but I don’t know why they keep asking me questions they won’t like the answers to.

*

My mother says I am a wonderful writer. She tells Nanny and Grampy how talented I am, while I read the new Post-It note on Nanny’s fridge. It says, “There shall be no criticism in this house.” I show my parents the bits of my schoolwork that I think they might like: reports on books that I love, projects on topics that interest me. I keep my feelings in simple sentences. For my birthday, I request a diary with a lock.

*

Christmas Day, 1996, I sit at the kitchen table, alone, writing in my diary and crying. I am crying because five days before my little brother was hit by a car while crossing the street. What I write is exactly what you think:

“It was the worst Christmas ever. My brother is dead.”

My mom comes up behind me, screaming, “Don’t write that! Don’t write that!” She snatches both the diary and pencil from my hands and begins erasing furiously. As if I won’t remember if it isn’t written down. As if it won’t exist if it isn’t on the paper. But I don’t want to cry in a vacuum.

“Mom, stop it! That’s mine! Give it back!”

She is in pain, I know—the kind of black hole pain that can’t ever be fixed. Eventually, she’ll learn to step around the hurt, to tread lightly across that valley in her memories where Luke lives. Fresher griefs will come to steal the spotlight; future joys will distract her. But not tonight, not when she has only begun to fall.

I know all this, but still I scream and snatch my book away; I am in pain too and I’m not in a comforting mood. She flees the room in tears and I sit at the table, alone again, retracing all my words from the leftover pencil indentations. Tears drip over the paper, even though they know it’s cliché.

*

Fifteen years old, I compose a short speech for church. It takes less than a minute to thank our departing youth leaders and give them a blanket as a wedding present. My words are a blip, half-improvised, tossed in the bin before I sit back down.

But my mom loves this speech like nothing I have ever done before. She tells me I would make a wonderful pastor’s wife and immediately I shatter. Each fragment of my self seems a frightened, wounded casualty, crying out, “Help me, save me, I’m still here!” I scramble to find some noble aspect that I can hold up to her eye and say, “See, this is who I am, and I am worth more than that!” But I can’t find any heroes and she doesn’t understand why I’m upset.

*

I stop writing. Then I feel lonely, so I start again. My dad leaves, returns, leaves again; the rest of us wonder where that yo-yo will land. She sits alone in the dark. She doesn’t want to celebrate her birthday. She refuses to be in photos with her grandkids.

We fight, it uproots all our shallow graves. Her apology email opens, “I wish I had your writing skills at a time like this.” I told her, I’m not mad, because how could I be? How could I function, constantly burning? Eula Biss writes, “The mother of an adult child sees her work completed and undone” (in Nelson, 140). I’m not mad, I’m just Me. I can’t erase our history. She says to my sister, “I could go my whole life without knowing what Amy thinks of me.” Once again, I see my shadow and run.

I am scared to write. I am scared of saying things I’m not supposed to say and feeling things I’m not supposed to feel. I’m scared of you getting hurt because not everything in our family was apple pie and hugs, even though enough of it was. Maggie Nelson expands on Barthes: “I am a writer; I must play with the body of my mother” (106). Am I a writer? I know by now the stories I want to tell, they’re formed from all the thoughts I shouldn’t say—ideas so enthralling they need to be followed around for a while. There is nothing beautiful or complicated that will just sit still and let you capture it. That’s why the pen moves. I didn’t learn to be quiet; I didn’t learn to be polite. I couldn’t learn to bury my most hurtful truths; I’d have to fall in after them.

Please forgive me.

*

Nelson, M. (2015). The Argonauts. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.

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Understorey Magazine is a project of the Second Story Women’s Centre and a registered charity. If you like what you see here, please share with friends and consider making a donation. Thank you.

I felt the car sink up to its axles in the soft ground. Damn! The winds whipped heavy snow about my face. Large wet flakes settled and clung to my eyelashes, making it harder to assess my predicament, but the plummeting temperature meant I had to extract my little red Datsun before I rested or she’d be frozen in by morning. As my two little boys slept blissfully under a blanket on the back seat of the car, I stood alone in the storm feeling panic grow by the second.

Some months before, the three of us had been abandoned by the boys’ father. I was now farmer, farmer’s wife, mother and father on a farm that demanded the efforts of two grown adults. I was doing okay, for the most part. Young and strong, I’d plunged into my responsibilities with a fervour. Dave was eight and Pete only six; I could not let them suffer the scars of divorce. But Dave had come to me one evening as I gazed out the kitchen window at the ten cord of wood that was yet to be cut and split. I had no money to hire somebody; winter was hard on my heels. I considered all the ominous tasks that I had to complete alone: clearing snow, barn chores, hauling water for the cows across ice and snow, bringing two-foot logs into the house, cleaning the furnace pipes—all on top of my normal chores and a full time job. “Don’t worry Mum,” Dave said. “Pete and me stacked up together, we’ll make a man.”

“I know you will,” I replied. But did I?

The Sugar Camp by Joanna Close; photo by Eliot Wright

Between chores, we filled blank spots in our time with concerts, movies, plays—anything that provided the maximum entertainment for the least amount of our precious money. We even managed one afternoon in Halifax with the Harlem Globetrotters. On that particular stormy night in late November, we had just returned from a puppet show, Aladdin, performed at the Bridgewater High School. The skies were overcast with a nip in the air when we’d left in the late afternoon. We emerged from the school into a raging storm—heavy, wet snow that accumulated fast. I struck out for home with my fingers crossed, hoping I could keep my car on the roads, most of which were narrow and rutted. Snow spiralled towards the windscreen as I fought the hypnosis it intended. Standard shift, front wheel drive and a homing instinct got us back to our empty farmhouse. I drove as close as I could to the house and woke the boys. But as they stirred from their blanket, the car settled into the earth.

“Boys! Wake up! Get into the house and straight to bed. I’ll be in soon to light the furnace.”

Or so I hoped. We had been gone for hours. The fires would be out and our poorly insulated house cold. My little boys ploughed their way to the front door as I made for the barn to collect boards and hay. The milk cow softly lowed a greeting which soothed the rough edges of my nerves. My “fancy” boots and nicer slacks were not designed to keep out the chill but I didn’t notice as I scraped away ice and dirt from behind the tires. The snow fell as fast as I could clear it. Such futility merely increased my frantic efforts. Before I dared face how I might push and drive the car at the same time, the front porch light went on. There was Pete, dressed sensibly in his overalls and big rubber boots, plodding through the drifts towards me.

“Pete, you should be warm in your bed,” I said, relieved to see someone, anyone. The countryside was asleep, as we should have been.

“I can’t leave you out here all alone, Mum,” he said.

“Okay,” I managed to get past the lump in my throat. “Can you drive while I push?”

“Yep,” he answered. I gave him a quick lesson on how to use the clutch. It was close to midnight and we could barely see two feet in front of our faces. The snowflakes were smaller but thicker, indicating a drop in temperature and an intensifying storm.

“I call forward or reverse, okay? The trick is to avoid running me over.”

“Yep,” he said again and hopped in behind the wheel.

“Reverse!” I screamed against the wind. My feet, searching for traction, found a rut that stopped them slipping. I pushed. She moved—not much, but she moved. I looked up to signal to my son. He had disappeared from view! On closer inspection, I found him stretched out under the steering wheel with his rubber boots firmly on the clutch and the brake, awaiting instructions.

“We’ll try reverse again,” I called, unable to decide if I should laugh or cry. Backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards, while I pushed with all I had. Pete got it right every time and suddenly the struggling car popped out of the muck. I ran to jump in. Pete scooted over and I moved the Datsun onto more solid ground. We had done it! We had done it!

I hugged my little man, for man he was. We put away the tools and headed for the house. Warmth welcomed us in. Somebody had lit the fires. I looked at Pete, who answered with a wry grin and wee shrug. What could I say? Stacked up together? I had my answer that stormy night.