Friends.
I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about language. Words, actually. I am particularly fond of how words sound. Sometimes I find myself lost in listening to others, who are speaking words from languages I could only ever dream of knowing, wondering what it is they are expressing. Words can lift us up and quickly tear us down, share our stories and histories and teach us important lessons for the future.
In my own life, there are a handful of words that have impacted my sense of self, both in quite positive and equally as negative ways. Words like kind, strong, advocate, writer and mother have helped me view myself in positive and empowering ways and evoked a sense purposeful confidence. On the other hand and at different times in my life, descriptors such as poor and/or needy, crazy, fat, hormonal, stubborn and persistent have left their indelible marks on my secretly fragile soul. Of the many, many words that I’ve worked to get past as I move along in my mid-life identity, I think it’s been “poor” and “crazy” that have been the hardest to scrub off.
They are also the two I see through the Village that, perhaps unintendedly, further widen the divides among community members. Perhaps even contributing to the greatest barriers people face in hesitating to reach out for support.
In my own life, I grew up without a healthy maternal role model. This wasn’t for my mother not wanting to be involved in the life of her children, but rather because she wasn’t encouraged, supported or permitted to be present, from about the time I was 18 months old. This was in the early ‘70’s and like many women who stayed home to raise children, my mother was left with little when my father moved along in life, taking us children with him, most notably the financial means to fight for custody or support her kids. As I now understand better, as a mother myself, this devastated the woman who first loved me most, and she soon developed strategies to help with that pain. For decades I ached for her and I wondered why she never came back. I had little girl dreams and saw her as this beautiful woman with long flowing hair. She was rarely ever spoken of to us and when it did somehow slip out, the connotation was that she was “crazy.” For years I tried to understand what crazy meant, but the tone of every adult’s voice told me it wasn’t good. As I grew up, angry and searching for love in those dark and destructive places rocker ballads are written about, I felt afraid, wondering if her “crazy” was my own destiny now, too. Did she struggle with addiction? Would I? Could I reach out for help or would someone know that I was “crazy” too? When I had my own babies, a motherless daughter attempting to do it all “right”, was my post-partum depression the self-fulfilling prophesy that I knew would one day reach fruition?
It was only after some soul searching and beautiful talks with my aunts that I better understood my mother’s journey and that her trauma, her broken heart, was more than a person could navigate. She wasn’t “crazy,” she was coping. And I so badly wish to turn back the clock and have the opportunity, for all those decades, to hear about her in a way that respected my childhood innocence and her love for me.
“Poor” is another word etched into my soul and one that, when I hear it used to describe someone whom another feels needs help, sees me “checking my baggage” so that I am sure to offer a reply not molded by my own predisposition.
Up until I was in my late teens, we lived an upper-middle class life. My father was a self-made man and, although often absent from the dinner table for work, he made sure to provide many wonderful things. Just on the cusp of 20, I was newly married and a mom of one, with another babe soon to arrive. As the gods would have it, that child – our son – was not destined for long on this earth and soon died.
In our journeys of grief, so personal and heavy, our marriage suffered such strain. I packed up some things into a backpack and left for a months-long journey across Canada, running from something that was so deep inside of me. When I returned, our marriage ended and I became a young single mom, in an apartment, attending school and volunteering. My soul had come to a peace about the death of my son and I felt strong. I felt rich in blessings, even though I couldn’t afford gas for our car and we bicycled everywhere. I felt somehow free.
That winter, my child and I stepped outside and there on our porch was a beautiful box of fruit, cookies, a ham, a toy and a few other items. I remember now, as I write, feeling so cared for, in that someone cared for us the way we cared for others too. I dropped my child off at the university daycare and cycled to my adult literacy volunteer position and gushed to a peer about this amazing box! Her nonchalance rivelled my excitement and she casually offered “Yeah, that’s a food hamper.” I was intrigued, having never heard of this before. “What’s a ‘food hamper”?” I asked. “A ‘FOOD HAMPER’,” she repeated, slower and louder, as though my grasp of the English language was now failing me too. “They give them out at Christmas time, to people who are poor.” My knees felt week and I wanted to throw up. We weren’t poor. Or were we?
In those few words, that beautiful act of caring, that left me feeling empowered and cared for was reframed as an exercise of charity for those who are “poor”.
As we head into this season of giving, in the unsurety of a looming pandemic, troubling rent and food costs and the traditionally higher rates of suicide, domestic violence and drug overdoses than other times of the year, language is even more important.
Our people need to feel that we support them because we are all in this together and we celebrate what each is doing to make it through this difficult time. Acts of charity can be reframed as offerings of gratitude for one’s resilience.
Speak encouragement for all of us to cross that finish line. Tell folks you’ve been there too. This is the universal language of humanity, compassion and love.
Take good care of each other.
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Andrea Charest serves as director of It Takes A Village in Listowel.
