Lived lives
Winnipeg writer Deborah Schnitzer explores life lessons from women in their Third Act.
As a new widow, I did not think I would ever laugh again — not from that deep spring of well-being where all seems right with the world, where senses of humour are perfectly allied, funny bones synched by often harebrained experiences, stories oft told at family gatherings.
With my husband Mendel gone, I found myself bereft of those legendary and life-giving funny-boned memories. Time and again, I confronted profound disruption: there was only one person on earth with whom I lived such madcap moments, those revelatory and side-splitting adventures. The time when … the time after that…
For example: Lake Louise, our honeymoon, running in circles in a rented canoe, arguing over who was to steer; a rescue boat appearing alongside, fearful the lake’s freezing temperature would do us in if/when we capsized.
Without the co-creator of such stories, the world was dim, the air slight.
I could praise the arrival of a second grandchild; the tender ministrations of family and friends; appreciate in some measure the return of spring. But estranged from the known as manifest in even the smallest moments of the everyday with my life’s partner, I could not find that unbounded glad and giddy laughter that can come from a casual remark rooted in a shared life.
Then, one summer day edging toward twilight, driving back from a lake weekend six years after Mendel’s death, my family is singing its heart out, listening to Shania Twain singing her heart out — my eight-year-old granddaughter’s voice, wild and unassailable, rises between my daughter-in-law and my two-year-old grandson seemingly enamoured of our antics, my son driving, me in the front seat beside. Raucous. Carefree.
I begin to laugh, not from any surface, but from that deepest cavern where love’s light and contentment reside.
I am startled by the sound of my own voice, its resonance fuelled by a sense of self exerting renewed promise. This different but recognizable identity reconnects to continuities — car rides with my children when they were young during summer holidays in an non-air-conditioned brown Volkswagen Rabbit, me turned round to the back seat, holding the garbage presented by sticky hands, teaching the boys Harry Chapin’s All My Life’s a Circle, resolving altercations.
In truth, the boys’ altercations were few, for I was by far the worst traveller. I did not like “motoring” holidays, found myself carsick through the Rockies, grim at the prospect of another camping ground because, even in the pouring rain, my husband felt we ought to honour our (make that his) proposed ambition to tent straight through from Winnipeg to Vancouver.
He felt it built something — character? Solidarity? Backbone? Mostly it built in me a re-evaluation of my marriage vows.
Though during our Jewish ceremony, all I had to say was, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine,” that seemed an extravagance while I stood in the mornings, drenched, without sleep, the boys damp, sick of raw-ish hotdogs and slimy tinned beans. I did not share my husband’s triumph as he proclaimed us one with nature.
During a particularly impressive deluge, I demanded we stop at a motel. The boys clamoured, their sticky hands waving, their feet kicking the seats in front of them — well, the eldest could do that on the driver’s side and of course Mendel was always the driver, convinced he was far more adept.
In truth, he didn’t want to spend the trip on his knees, his backside to the windshield, taking care of little people. The women’s liberation movement was in early enough stages that I did not recognize my so-called “tantrums” (a.k.a. rebellion) as the legitimate measures required by a woman who understood patriarchy and the related power imbalances that plagued her own evolution.
Now, travelling from the lake — afforded the front seat as matriarch, swinging under the wings of Shania, hosting the memories of long-ago travels, my grown second-born son at the wheel — I marvel at the various identities created and integrated through road trips in my life.
Is marvel the right word? I think so. I may not have laughed in the pouring rain with damp children while Mendel enthused about “our” stick-to-it-ness, but stories of our trans-Canada camping trip returned as the dark comedies we never tired of telling.
Even if Mendel is no longer here to co-direct them, he remains a rollicking presence.
It is so quick, the life we get to live — lasting love perhaps, children perhaps, holidays. In the car with Shania and my kin, enlivened by a sing-along, my full-bellied laughter reacquaints me with the more vibrant aspects of the funny bones I have been missing. I thank Mendel for giving them such depth and dimension and my children for the rides renewing them.
