I spent the weekend reading a memoir of a friend's mother. It was a well written, honest recollection of her life. She wrote from her understanding of living from her more than ninety years. I know her from the periphery of her life, through a friendship of over fifty years with her daughter.
Friendships wax, wane and wax again over the years. It seems that friendships with roots in youth have a special hold. A friend's family are part of the friendship. My friend's mother's story is not impersonal.
My mother was about ten years older. She lived to be over one hundred. Both mothers were children of the British Empire in Canada, a world that disappeared in our lifetime. One lived in English Montreal the other in Toronto, when it was a city of churches. They lived in a world of bone china and wilderness campfires. My friend and I were swept into new realities.
Much of what was central to their lives was not relevant to ours, much was. Our mothers offered us a way of living, that we who came of age in the sixties molded into new shapes, as we see our daughters and grandaughters live in new ways.
I hope Womens Study Programs recognize the importance of the strength of such women.
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