I LOVE MY MOTHER, AND I LIKE HER, TOO

A SON REFLECTS ON A PARENT’S LIFE WELL-LED

The other week my mother, B everley Anne Peterson, turned 80. She was born on Feb. 6, 1939, in Naicam, Saskatchewan, a small, attractive, thriving prairie town, back when prairie towns were communities with a certain future. She was the third of four children, each separated by five years, preceded by her older brother, Earl, handsome and reliable, Joan, perfectionistic, nervous and talented, and followed by Margaret, an attractive combination of conscientiousness, caring, fun-loving and full of tricks. Her father, Frank Ponath, operated a successful car dealership and garage. This made the Ponaths one of the more well-off families by Naicam standards, with all the advantages and jealousies attendant upon that. She grew up on the right side of the tracks, and my grandmother was none too pleased when her third daughter was pursued my father, Walter, smart, tough and goodlooking, but not exactly of the right class. None of that mattered to Beverley, who pursued her own heart.

If my mother was a child in any manner similar to her adult self, then she was friendly, honest, hard working and prone to instant fits of guilt if forced even temporarily into leisurely inaction. She had a very good sense of humour, and loved to laugh and tease. She worried my grandmother a bit, being more independent and less immediately obedient than that easily worried lady would have liked, but I think that was a testament to her character.

I remember my early childhood, insofar as I can remember it, as a happy time, not least because my mother loved me and was funny and easy to get along with and playful and hospitable. And she stayed my firm friend through adolescence, which I can’t imagine was particularly easy.

We moved from Hines Creek, the small and isolated northern Albertan town where my parents bravely moved when they were first married, in the mid-60s, and went back to Saskatchewan, and then back to Alberta, where we settled in Fairview, another northerly community, about 15 miles away from where we were originally. Mom stayed at home until my brother Joel enrolled in school. Then she went to work. She had trained as a nurse, but worked, instead, at the library at our local college, and over a 20-year period ended up as the head librarian. She found the transition into the competitive and masculine hierarchy of the college difficult. She was not taken as seriously as might have been, given her competence, by her more disagreeable male colleagues, some of whom had a lot to learn about being civilized human beings. She had to insist on her ambition, too, in the face of some opposition from my father, who felt that having a wife who worked indicated that he wasn’t fully capable of taking care of his family. Old-fashioned as that might be, and however likely to be pilloried as sexist now, it did reflect his firm and admirable belief that it was his responsibil- ity to ensure the economic viability of his family. There are worse flaws.

I come back to Saskatchewan every summer, where my parents and my siblings have a cabin at a remote northern lake. Mom and Dad both got to know my kids very well because of that, and I firmly believe that such intergenerational connection is vital. How else do you learn to travel through life when you’re young? I see my parents at least one other time or more a year, and talk to them at least weekly by phone or FaceTime (when I remember that it exists).

Last year, I took Mom and her sister Margaret to Iceland for two of the lectures I have been delivering on my last book, 12 Rules for Life. It was a good adventure. They shared in the excitement of the large lectures and the odd celebrity that accompanied the tour. A few years back, my son sang at Carnegie Hall with a choir from Toronto. Mom and Margaret attended that, too and my wife, Tammy, and my sister, Bonnie, got up to some mischief and invited them both to a drag club at a Chinese restaurant (a combination only likely in New York). It was pretty risqué, by 1950s women’s standards. The drag queen, a very large black guy, zeroed in on my mom. He told her she was the whitest woman that he had ever seen (probably true, as she has snow white hair and the pale skin of someone English who lives in northern Alberta.) He accused her of making apple pies. He raked her over the coals a bit, in a good-natured manner. She laughed, and joked, and took it in good form, and admitted rather shamefacedly that she did make a mean apple pie, and it went over fine.

That’ s my mom. No trouble. Lots of fun. She doesn’t complain, except sometimes, and then she has her reasons — and always feels guilty about it. She seriously loves her children. She likes to have a glass of wine, and to play practical jokes, and is hospitable to a fault. There are always three meals prepared for guests at my mother’s house, or her cabin, or even when she’s visiting. It’s easy to feel welcome when visiting her. This is a remarkable and underappreciated attribute. It’s much less common than it once was, now that so much resentment appears to have built up in the kitchen and the domestic sphere, where the increasingly common warfare between men and women and their respective duties means that the basic tasks of hospitality have been abandoned, where mealtimes are no longer collective acts of celebration, and where people are chronically preoccupied with their individual electronic addictive social hells. I can’t help but think that something crucial has been lost in the hunger for career and social accomplishment. But maybe that’s just sentimentality, as I consider this birthday and its significance.

For now my mother, Beverley Anne Peterson, is 80. That’s just not young, no matter how you slice it. Her older sister, Joan, passed away a couple of weeks ago, after a dreadful bout with Alzheimer’s ( the same disease that took her mother, with equal horror.) Her older brother, Earl, is showing some signs of cognitive decline and even Margaret, five years younger, has had some heart trouble. Many of her friends have died, and a larger number of them are in nursing homes, where they are starting to be truly old. Some no longer recognize her. It’s no picnic to get old. The world defies your hard- earned expectations. Your culture disappears. Your friends vanish. You lose your hearing (she’s a bit deaf now), and sometimes your sight ( she’s fortunate there) and your mobility (no problems there, either, perhaps because of her habit of daily walking) and maybe a lot more than that. But she manages it all with amazing grace, volunteering at the old folk’s home in her home town, maintaining an active social life with the friends she has left, as well as new ones she has cultivated, and travelling, a lot. She’s no damn victim, my mother, and does what she can, with conscious intent, to make the best of what is sometimes a difficult lot.

My Mom is a very good person. She’s nonplussed by her age; surprised that it arrived so soon. She still feels like she did when she was, say, 30 or 40, and can’t believe that the time has been so evanescent and vanished so rapidly. I love her a lot; I like her, too. She’s been a very good friend to me. So, here’s to you, Mom. Happy Birthday. I hope that God shines His grace on you for the next years of your life. I hope that I get to see you for some more good summers. May your spirit stay young and untrammelled. May you have as many more birthdays as you want; that they are mercifully delivered.

JORDAN B. PETERSON Clockwise, from top left: Walter Peterson, Joel Peterson, Beverley Peterson, Jordan Peterson and Bonnie Peterson. Jordan writes that he remembers his early childhood as “a happy time.”