The cold winds blew down from the Cape Breton Highlands, causing everyone to comment on the chill outside. The little town of Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia, had just had a small dusting of snow and the wind caused the snow to swirl around the parking lot of the small hospital where my first child, a little boy, had just been born. It was April 28, 1971, I was twenty-two years old. My husband and I had held him, examined him, found all eight pounds of healthy baby, and nothing else mattered, not the cold wind, the news or any other happening on our planet. John David was here and we were thrilled.
With all that had happened in our country in the past year and was still ongoing, I had grave concerns of what lay ahead for my baby. A primitive protective instinct had settled itself in me and I knew now how mothers’ felt, what they tried so hard to describe. This was a mysterious feeling of change, of being very vulnerable and always on watch, on guard for your child. That primitive feeling that tells you to make a phone call, even well after they leave home, just in case all was not well. Yes, I had become a mother.
Our son is thirty-eight years old now, six feet four inches tall, a kind and caring person, an experienced electrician, single, owns a Harley-Davidson, with another updated model ordered, loves to pitch softball games, is loyal and kind to his only sibling, his sister Heather, and is infatuated with his little two year old niece. He is, as the saying goes, a gentle giant, with many good friends. Over time he has learned to control his bad temper of childhood years, and has become a man who can stand on his own two feet. He is too far away, in British Columbia, but that is unavoidable in our world today. He still comes home, does his great impersonations of his parents which are hilarious, strums his guitar when he is stressed, but he is too far away to give those wonderful bear hugs everyday. He has been living out west for ten years now, a good citizen, son, grandson, brother and uncle.
Our country experienced so many awful happenings in the nine months before he was born. My husband, a policeman, was away with his work from time to time, Prime Minister Trudeau was having problems with the FLQ crisis, the War Measures Act had been imposed, demonstrations were being held everywhere opposing the action, and it seemed our comfortable Canadian world was becoming strangely uncertain.
Somewhere in all of this the Prime Minister married Margaret Sinclair, I recall my husband coming home in the early morning hours, waking me to tell me, knowing my love for the news. Then Cape Breton had a major oil spill in Chedabucto Bay causing tremendous threats to sea life and environment, and it seemed the news was never good. I have a vivid recollection of being ready for a Halloween party and my husband being called away to do Security Detail on a Cabinet Minister who was visiting our area, and he was gone for days and days. In the midst of all of this a murder took place in Wentworth Park in Sydney, NS, that eventually led to the arrest of Donald Marshall, who was sentenced to jail and served eleven years before the case was reopened and he was pronounced innocent. This was followed by The Marshall Inquiry, and I go back to that night as soon as the name Marshall is mentioned. I wondered if bringing a baby into this world was sensible, then my doctor reminded me that I was born just as the world was emerging from a devastating World War, in 1948, so think about it!!And I did, and John was born in spite of the state of world affairs, politics and so on, and he thrived and grew, giving us great joy.
We knew very few people in the little town, being recently posted there, but we had made some friends, and they have actually become lifelong friends. Alyson and Sheldon Jenkins remain close to our hearts to this very day. I was so very fortunate to have them because the road was rough after the babies’ birth. I was constantly tired, had no interest outside my apartment, anemia had zapped my body, and besides that I seemed to be adrift, having trouble adjusting ,but trying desperately to stay afloat, struggling to stay the course.
To this day I sincerely believe, other than time, that two things salvaged me from this foggy world I had fallen into. They may seem insignificant but they turned me around. For those that saw the real ‘me’ return, laughing, telling stories, jokes, reading book after book, wanting to go back to work, just watching the downhill trend reverse itself they tell me was ‘a miracle’!
I’ll tell you the two things of which I speak, and I knew I would remember all the rest of my life and write about some day.
First of all, leaving my husband to care for John, I managed to go shopping, a short lived excursion because I had no energy or interest, and I returned home. On the coffee table, with a shaft of sunlight shining behind it was a magnificent shiny Heinz pickle jar filled to overflowing with huge lilac blossoms. My husband knew how much I loved the lilacs and had prepared a bouquet, and that bouquet stuck a chord, a twinge of wanting to be better, to live fully again. To this day, every time a lilac blooms, I put a huge bouquet in a pickle jar and just have it for the memory, the warm memory of a special bouquet in Nova Scotia in 1971.
But the hills were still there to be climbed, some days they were steeper than others, but always a climb. When June came Sheldon and Alyson suggested we have a good ‘Cape Breton feed of lobster’-and I was game for that, lobster being one of my favorite foods. The men fetched the lobster, we made the salads, and we got together with cold beer, newspaper tablecloths, and we ate our fill. Then we divided the remaining lobster, my friend gave me a loaf of her moms’ home made bread and we called it a night. It was wonderful!
The next morning, with the church bells ringing in the background, I bathed and fed my baby, and went outside to sit in the sun with him. My husband said he would prepare lunch, and I stayed with the baby. Soon he arrived with the biggest lobster sandwich I had ever seen. Huge healthy chunks of lobster between slices of fluffy home made bread! A tiny pickle topped it off, and it was indeed a work of art! He brought his lunch out and we ate in the sun, with the baby settled in his stroller.
And that, my friends, was thing number two. One bite of that sandwich and a feeling washed over me as if to say "You will be OK," and we sat and enjoyed our lunch, and I hoped and prayed that the worst of the fog was gone, and it was!
So, just little things, but done with such care and devotion, that the love shone through and touched my heart and healed it. A strange story maybe, but on that early summer day I discovered out that I was truly cared for, a young father had done his best, and had given the best gift of all-LOVE! I was home, the two of us with our baby, church bells, sunshine, lilacs, lobster and love.
Bonnie Lowe
"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails." William Arthur Ward
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