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Illustration by Juliana Neufeld
This Mother’s Day I’ll be thinking about three of my father’s younger sisters. Grace, Elizabeth and Frankie were more than just aunts to me. They were substitute mothers. Their irreverent nephews and niece referred to them as “the Ants” and since their mother (our Granny) was a strict grammarian, the misspelling made it seem even funnier.
I was six years old when my real Mom, Shirley, was stolen from our family by brain cancer. Dad had arrived home for lunch one day, to be met at the door by his distraught wife. She thrust my baby sister into his arms, then crumpled to the floor in a coma. The tumour was inoperable, the doctors said.
She lived for another seven years, but Mom never recovered, physically or mentally. My two older brothers and I adapted to the strange new person in our house, but we missed our mother desperately. One by one, the Ants came to the rescue.
At 29, Frankie was the youngest of Dad’s siblings, and had always been the adventurer in the family. She worked and backpacked her way through Europe after university, and was home in Canada doing contract teaching before her next epic journey to Borneo. Frankie was full of fun, with dancing green eyes and pixie-cut red hair. She was my childhood idol.
For six weeks during that tumultuous spring, Frankie – who until then had shunned both child care and the domestic arts – left her teaching job to help my father keep house.
Aged 10, eight and six, her nieces and nephews were a handful by anyone’s definition. (Another amazing aunt, this one by marriage, had volunteered to look after our baby sister.) But Frankie persevered and brought much-needed fun and a sense of normalcy back into our world. Even our horrified reactions to her failed attempts at kiddie cuisine (asparagus spears and poached eggs on toast?) didn’t faze her.
My most vivid memory from that time is of our energetic aunt demonstrating how to jitterbug in the middle of the living room floor, to the delight of all our friends. When her own mother, our no-nonsense Granny, arrived from the farm to replace Frankie, I cried for days.
While Mom gradually emerged from her coma in the hospital, Aunt Grace – a registered nurse – helped spell off the round-the-clock caregivers my father had arranged. Meanwhile, we kids spent our school vacations circulating among kindly relatives, our suitcases stuffed with comic books to share with our cousins.
Since she had a daughter my age, Aunt Grace promptly inserted me into her own family orbit, as if she’d been blessed with non-identical twins. My cousin and I went to camp together, cried through seven viewings of the Gone With the Wind rerelease, fantasized over our favourite Beatles (George for her, Paul for me) and spent long, lazy days at their lakeside cabin in the woods. Best of all, each September Grace organized “back-to-school” shopping trips. Unfailingly kind and considerate, she never forgot a birthday or any other milestone throughout my life.
If Frankie was my “fun Mom” and Grace my “nurturing Mom” – it was Elizabeth who helped me regain a sense of my place in a world that had turned upside down. Recognizing our shared passion for storytelling, folk music and all things Celtic, she involved me in drafting song parodies for family celebrations, or planning the memorable “post-Mariposa hoots” that she held each summer in her Toronto backyard.
Never demonstrative, Elizabeth showed her love by accepting me just as I was. Her positive reinforcement validated my secret ambition to become a writer (of what, I had no idea). With her encouragement my self-confidence grew, along with the belief that I mattered.
When the Ants invited my cousin and me to join their “ladies’ weekend” getaways, we knew we’d crossed a threshold. Along with wining, dining and gossiping, we invariably got lost on back roads while bargain hunting. Because the females in our family lack any sense of direction, we happily accepted our unplanned side trips as part of the adventure. I can remember laughing till the tears flowed, and wishing those weekends would never end.
As they entered their senior years, the Ants seemed to grow even closer. All had left the family farm eons earlier, but throughout their lives they referred to it – and their grandparents’ original plot of land overlooking the Ottawa River – as home. I basked in the communal nostalgia.
Then, in a devastating two-week span one spring, we lost all three of them. First Grace, then Elizabeth, then Frankie. Being so close in life, we wondered if they’d had a pact to make their final journey together. Or, as one of my cousins suggested, “Grace must have called the others home!”
At first, their deaths seemed like a cruel blow and my heart ached. But on reflection I realized that they would be reunited, in spirit, with their husbands and siblings. And then I pictured my Mom – happy and healthy once more, flashing her irrepressible smile – as she thanked them for everything they’d done.
Nancy Dorrance lives in Kingston, Ont.
