Letters

I have some letters from my parents. Many emigrants of my vintage could say the same thing, I imagine. Many of these letters got lost along the way and I am sorting through what I have.

My mother would write me newsy letters. She wrote like she talked full of family and neighbour talk. Every week.

After she died, my father carried on. Writing me every week, getting pissed when I didn't respond immediately and reprimanding me mildly when he had to wait impatiently for responses. His writing was tiny, he would cram so much on to 2 pages, exactly 2 pages.

In this one (May 1991) he hits me on the head in the opening sentence:

"I thought you had given up the matter of letter writing".

And

"A pity you were not able to visit us this year."

- Well, Dad, I was broke. Single mum. 2 kids.

He proceeds on page 2 to tell me - without consultation, as always - when he would arrive in Canada for his annual visit - August 17th. Which was 1 day after my birthday. And then guilts me again with:

"you know the old saying if the mountain won't come to....etc..."

Thusly I would give up my measly vacation time to spend it with him.

We didn't have the best of relationships my dad and I. I felt obligated as he was a widower. He loved one of my kids and despised the other which made things awkward in my home. So I would take him away on trips to the states or the maritimes or touring Ontario.

We made half-hearted attempts to cross the distance between us. But I could never quite surmount the fear I had of him as when I was growing up he was a cruel, abusive and emotionally unavailable martinet.

But the last time we went away together, to Nova Scotia, he abused me verbally for the very last time. Post therapy, I stood up to him, declared my boundaries, and from then on he was no longer welcome in my home.

Subsequently, to my surprise, in all our interactions, he treated me with respect and yes, a little fear too.

Not Black and White

The restorative qualities of my sunsets.

Swimming in the sea of old wounds and enragements is not doing me any good. I was planning on getting very much into my own personal sea of RC harm on subsequent posts but it seems like that particular muse has fled and I have no irresistible urge to lay it all down on paper. I wrote a couple of notes and found that the subsequent apoplexy was simply not my colour at all.

Lay the ghosts. Become a kinder gentler me. No, impossible, scratch that last.

Daughter and I had a chat yesterday on old wounds, on how we are all wounded to some degree. How we carry those wounds being all important. Should we keep peeling those scabs off? Thing is, we decided, patterns in families repeat and repeat. Ad nauseum.

Certainly in mine. Much as I'd like it all to stop now, please. Let's be friends. Let's enlighten ourselves as to what is really happening. What truly lies beneath, as some wise old pundit had it. But enlightenment doesn't happen to all at once, does it. I sometimes think I'm some kind of Pollyanna, trying to make it all better. Kiss the boo-boos.

Thing is, again, that there are some who desperately need those boo-boos.

They need to keep tending them and tending them like a really bad abscess. So they don't have
to look at the root causes. Ever.

I'm finished with this particular topic for now.

Bloodied but unbowed, that's me.

Does The Horror Ever End?

News out of Dublin is that a report on further abuses of children by the Catholic Church is going to horrify everyone with the depth and magnitude of it all.

The good news is: that this statement was made by Diarmuid Martin, Archbishop of Dublin and from the pulpit of the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin. Taking ownership, as it were, for destroying the lives of thousands of children.

The bad news (apart from the obvious atrocities) is: that there seems to be an underlying issue of self-service to this admission of guilt:

"We have no time to waste," Martin said yesterday. "There is a dramatic and growing rift between the church and our younger generations, and the blame does not lie principally with young people. Our young people are generous and idealistic but such generosity and idealism does not seem to find a home in the church."

He also illuminated the recruitment crisis in Irish Catholicism, in a country that once used to export its priests and nuns all over the world. "In the [Dublin] diocese there are 10 times more priests over 70 than under 40. In just a few years we will only have a little over 200 diocesan priests to minister to our almost 200 parishes."

Read all about it in The Guardian here

Ah, qu'elle surprise!, the attendance at church by the young Catholics of Ireland is abysmal and the attraction of new vocations just about zero.

I did the math and came up with this:

Low attendance+low number of clergy=empty collection plates.

A few of my family have been severely affected by clergy abuses, but those are their stories and not mine.

All I can recall is this drunken old priest hearing confessions when I was a child, nodding off over my recounting of my 'sins', asking me to repeat how saucy I was to my mother, how I stole the sweetie off the counter at the post office, and then snoring while I tried to wake him - "Father, Father?" to give me my penance so that I could fulfill my obligation before I left the church. Secure in the knowledge that if a bus knocked me down on the way home I didn't have to suffer in the fires of hell. For ALL eternity.

As a dear friend from Ireland always maintains: Ireland: The greatest open air lunatic asylum in the world.

Amen to that, brother, amen to that.

FLASHBACK

In light of a fresh onslaught of gay bashing reported in the media, I bring you the following:

I was having a lovely evening, having dinner with two of my favourite people – a gay couple I love and respect.

We used my car to get to and from the restaurant and I dropped them off on the street opposite their apartment which happened to be plonk in the middle of Church Street – aka ‘Gaytown,' Toronto

As they were crossing the street in front of my car, another car passed with four yahoos hanging from the windows.

“Faggots!” they screamed at my friends.
“Bum-fuckers!” they yelled.

The rest was unprintable.

My friends neither acknowledged them or even let on they had heard but carried on walking, holding hands, heading into their building.

I called them from my cell phone, I was so upset I was crying. These are good people, kind, caring, volunteering, tax-paying citizens. They’d take my previous dog on vacation with them when I went on my annual trip to Ireland. They’d bring photo albums back of her adventures while in the Maritimes. And she always arrived home with a new dog collar, usually loud pink, usually rhinestoned.

“My god!” I said to them, “Are you guys OK? Did you hear that? I’d like to kill those bastards!”

“Oh, relax,” said Jim, “It’s alright. It happens all the time. You get used to it.”

And what Jim said is what resonates with pain for me all these years later.

Added later:
sorry for the mixup on the comments section and thanks to everyone for reading and commenting!