Читать книгу On the Goose - Josie Penny - Страница 13

Trying to Adapt

So much had happened in little over a week that I couldn’t think straight: getting married, living with Keith’s parents, moving into a new house, a baby shower, and being rushed off to a strange place alone to have my baby! My mind was in turmoil. I was happy to be married, happy to have my own place. I was delighted with wee Gregory, and took great joy in bathing him each morning. I loved the smell of baby powder as I stuck my face into his tiny body now dressed in his new rompers. He was a good baby and hardly cried at all.

Three weeks into my marriage, after returning from the hospital in North West River, I was able to take stock of my situation and what I had to work with. I didn’t have a bathroom. I didn’t have a kitchen sink because there wasn’t a sewer system on our street yet. I didn’t have a washing machine, so I had to go next door and borrow Aunt Winnie’s huge galvanized tub and scrub everything on the washboard as my mother had done. Oh, how I had hated that job, and I still hated it. Wanting to be a perfect wife and mother and having been taught to be responsible, I struggled to keep up. I’d just turned eighteen in January.

Back then there were two sizes of cloth diapers, long ones and square ones. I took pride in getting my baby’s diapers as white a possible by bleaching them and adding “blueing” to make sure that when I hung them on the clothesline they would be perfectly white and without stains. Every garment had to be straight. All the long ones, then the square ones together, his sleepers and night gowns, tiny shirts, facecloths, and socks all had to be in order. When I brought everything in from the clothesline, I ironed everything. Even the hems of my bed sheets and flannel pyjamas. I could hear my mother and all the women I’d worked for in Cartwright echoing in my brain: “If you’re gonna do a job, do it right.”

Aside from caring for my newborn, I took pride in keeping my house clean. After scrubbing my floors on my hands and knees, I then added paste wax and polished the linoleum until it shone. We didn’t have much furniture, only what came with the house. I was grateful for that, because we certainly couldn’t afford to buy any. I grew up very poor, literally living from the American military dump, so that didn’t bother me too much.

The only source of heat we had was a stove that burned wood and/or oil. When the temperature during winter dipped way below zero we had to bundle up. I tried my best to keep the baby warm. However, when it got below minus twenty-five and minus thirty I worried about him freezing to death. It got so cold during the night that when I got up to check on him and pulled the covers down, his warm, wet body would meet with the cold air and the steam would billow up into my face.

Mrs. Penny would drop by every day to see how I was doing and to give me advice. She tried to show me how to care for my house and my baby. She didn’t know that I grew up caring for my many siblings. I didn’t want to be disrespectful to her; after all, she was my mother-in-law. I had to bite my tongue many times to stop from saying something I might later regret.

What had just happened to me? Where did my hopes and dreams of marrying a tall, dark, and handsome man go? Where did my freedom from responsibility go? Thankfully I was too busy to give it much thought. I never had a friend in the place and had to rely on my sisters-in-law for a lot of my needs. Sal went back home to Cartwright shortly after my wedding. My Aunt Winnie was a great help. I adored her. She had soft brown eyes that seemed to reach into her very soul.

Though I’m not sure to what degree, Aunt Winnie was living with a drinking man who occasionally abused her. I’d become too busy trying to adapt to my own situation, trying to cope with so many new things at once, to give it much thought. Now I was discovering the indifference of my husband. It was very unsettling.