Helloooo my mayflies! How was your Mother’s Day? Brimming with love and joy? Dysfunctional and unpleasant? Completely irrelevant? No worries. Everyone has a mother, but it isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. My day was super fantastic, thank you, because I never really expect anything, so I’m almost always thrilled and touched. We had Fake Mother’s Day on Friday with Aidan and Jamie, where we physically distanced, but managed to get physically hammered. This is the result of having adult children who love to party. I dimly recall doing tequila shots while Jamie played LMFAO’s “Shots”. Then came Mother’s Day Doughnut, the hole between Fake and Real Mother’s Day, where everyone recovered, while I went to the hospital and had an MRI (routine, and not because I sustained brain damage from the night before),  and then Real Mother’s Day, where I gave myself a yoga and spa day (at home, obvi) while the rest of the household cleaned and cooked. Lovely.

 

Here are four women who probably never did tequila shots in their entire lives, which is not to say they didn’t party. I thought I’d skip back a couple of generations and present to you my children’s great-grandmothers. Let’s start with the eldest: my father’s mother, Marion Crowe, born in Tipperary, Ireland, in 1886.

Marion had 11 children, 9 boys and 2 girls. Three of them, including the daughters, died on one weekend during the diphtheria epidemic of the early 1920’s. Another died later of crib death. 7 sons made it to adulthood. Marion and her husband were affluent members of Dublin society, but I doubt that eased the pain. I do like her white mink coat, don’t you? They say she was a saint, but I suspect most Irishmen say that about their mothers. She passed away in 1964. I never met her, but on a visit to Ireland when I was 18, I found baby pictures of me in her photo album.

 

Next comes Helen Mathewson, John’s grandmother, born in Montreal in 1888.

 

 

Helen really was a saint: she ran a hospice in France for gassed soldiers during the first World War. She met John’s grandfather, a Canadian cavalry officer,  in London, where they married. I have her engagement ring. She was a highly accomplished woman in many ways, but distant, apparently, and a heavy smoker. She died of emphysema in 1966.

 

This is Maria Havelka, John’s grandmother. She was born in Prague, Czeckoslovakia, in 1899.

 

Maria was also highly accomplished, as a pianist, tennis player and patron of the arts. She married an older man and had one child, John’s father. Her husband was apparently a difficult man, but he conveniently died early, leaving her in relative comfort until the Communists rolled in. She moved to Canada in her 60’s to join her son and his family, but was fiercely independent, living on her own and teaching piano until she died in 1992. I adored her, and I’ve been assured it was mutual.

 

Finally, my mother’s mother, Flore Beaulieu, born 1904 in Sainte-Flore, Quebec:

 

 

Flore was one of 13 children. Catholics, am I right? Although it was never really mentioned, she was, according to my sister the genealogist, part Mi’kmaq, which you might detect from this picture. She grew up poor, married my grandfather, neither of them speaking each other’s language, and had 5 children. She was a shy woman, but a brilliant bridge player, a gifted gardener, and a champion curler. I lived with her and my grandfather for 3 years on weekends while I was in boarding school in Montreal. She died in 1998.

 

There they are, four women born less than 20 years apart in 4 different places in different cultural and socio-economic circumstances. They never met, not even at their children’s weddings, as travel was not as easy in the 1950’s, and if they had, they might have been hard put to find anything in common, but they make up half of my children’s DNA, and thus they live on, and for that I am forever grateful.

 

Read more Mo to Go HERE!

Have a comment? A suggestion? Just want to chat? You can email Mo here.

Listen to Darren & Mo weekday mornings from 5 to 9 on CHFI.