Little changes in P.E.I. culture

There are things you can and can’t say when you arrive back to your hometown after being gone for 40 years. Things you surely couldn’t say when you were a young sad teenager roaming the streets of Charlottetown.

What you can’t say about your hometown after being gone for 40 years is that your mother lived her adult life in a place where women’s voices were disregarded — even rebuked — with impunity. And that she (unwittingly or otherwise) supported the very people and institutions that deprived women of agency and voice.

Not surprisingly I came to see in 2018 while back in my hometown that salespeople, relatives, information clerks and priests still feel they can either respond to a woman’s voice or they can roll their eyes if posed with a problematic question.

It’s still a choice in Prince Edward Island, you see.

I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been for my mother to live her entire adult life in this way. She welcomed death the way anybody would welcome sleep after a long truck through a tough and thorny patch.

I can only hope the people attending my mother’s funeral mass gave some thought to this: How this one life was connected to something bigger.

I’ll never know because I wasn’t there. I boycotted my mother’s funeral mass and have no concerns whatsoever that anybody in Charlottetown will actually hear that. Carole Trainor,

Halifax, N.S.