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Family Day
It’s February, Family Day is just around the corner and even if we haven’t got family, we’ve got family. We’re more generous about our definition of family, thank goodness. When I was a kid, attending a Catholic School in Toronto, there was never any doubt about what a family was. According to our teachers, a family was always one Mom, one Dad and their offspring. Once each day, in reading class, we’d haul out our Faith and Freedom Readers, which graphically depicted what the perfect family should look like. Every page was filled with colour pictures of a smiling woman, Mom, who almost always wore an apron. Mom was paired up with a ruggedly handsome male, Dad, in who wore factory work clothes. Father and Mother fawned over one son, one daughter and one dog. That was a family. It wasn’t my family, but it was, apparently, the perfect family. Chapterby- chapter, the adventures were hardly anymore exciting than Mom cooking, cleaning, mending, doing laundry and caring for the children. Dad went to work, five days a week, right after a hearty breakfast with the family. The children, one boy and one girl, went to school. After school they played in the garden. The boy played with a baseball and a bat and the girl fawned over her baby dolls or helped Mother bake a perfect batch of cookies. Every Sunday they cleaned-up, put on their Sundaygo- to-meeting clothes and went to church. Occasionally, they all did good deeds for the less fortunate in the community. Somewhere, around page twenty-five, the Grandparents got a mention. Grandma was good for the perfect apple pie and a pair of hand-knitted mittens. Grandpa, bless his pipe-smokin’ heart, could put the wheels back on the the grandson’s wagon in no time flat and built a tiny crib for his granddaughter’s baby doll. The Faith and Freedom Reader’s definition of family was a dream to me. As one of seven kids living in a house my dad built (with the help of his brothers, mom’s brothers, both of our grandfathers and a family who had hidden my mom’s brother during WWII) on a VLA lot from plans created in some VLA office in Ottawa, I could do the math. We didn’t measure up. The VLA homes in neighbourhoods all across the country looked the same. Inside and out with three bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room and a kitchen. You could walk into a VLA house and know where every room was located. Our VLA’er was home to nine people (on a good day). We had a septic tank, pumped water from an artesian well, and out in the dirt driveway sat an arthritic 1934 Chevrolet (which was replaced by a ’52 Chev, in 1954) with lovely long fenders to slide on. The Faith and Freedom family’s children never played in the dirt on the septic tank and they never got excited about a hot summer day when the tar on the road bubbled and a kid could get a big glop of it on a stick. The perfect family had a flower garden, something my mom referred to as “a waste of time, you can’t eat flowers”. We had a vegetable garden, as did most of our neighbours. Obviously we weren’t textbook family. But we did have some of the basics down pat.
Family. It took me a really, really long time to get over the brainwashing I endured from the vignettes on the pages of those Readers. By the time I was about ten, I had stopped asking my mom if our grandma was ever going to put out her cigarette and bake me some pie, or knit a pair of socks or something. As far as Grandpa was concerned well, let’s just say we didn’t ask him to fix our wagons or our bikes, and we sure didn’t expect him to build a bed for the dollies. My grandparents, like my parents, were real people.They worked hard. I didn’t hate them because they’d missed the point about my needing only one brother and, instead of having three sisters, I’d be the only girl-child in the house. The thing is, there just wasn’t anything in my school Readers about my kind of family home.
And, so it was. Recently, I stopped looking back at my family with such a critical eye and I think of the good times we had as a big family, living in a fairly rural, somewhat remote, community. Today, I wondered if there had been “Family Day” when I was a kid, how would my family have celebrated? I’m going to go with a big ole bonfire in the backyard, hotdogs with sliced bread for buns, hot cocoa, marble cake, popcorn and lots of cousins, aunties and uncles around for snicks!
Enjoy your family day. Create some new memories. Eat popcorn for breakfast—it’s a grain. Be safe.
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