Just Mom: The Story of a Hidden Past

Growing up, we didn't know any different. To us, she was just mom. She was the best cook ever and the house always had to be immaculate. She worked very hard to keep the family together and the bills paid. Life for her was always such a struggle, and I think to her, she learned to accept that fact long ago. I don't recall ever hearing her complain. But above all, she always made time for her children. We respected her and her lovingly imparted words of wisdom.

In the summer of 1988, she passed away on the operating table during quadruple bypass surgery. The family all rushed to the hospital, an eight hour drive to the neighboring province, but by the time we arrived, she had been gone for about an hour. We were totally devastated. How could we live without this wonderful woman in our lives? She was only 54 years of age.

We instinctively knew that there was a funeral to plan, although we'd really never been through this before. No one that close to us had ever passed away. However, we managed to figure out the proper procedures.

First of all, we would need to find her birth certificate for the funeral home. While going through her papers, we did come across her birth certificate, but in doing so, we were soon to discover the beginnings of a deep, dark hidden past. Her name was not what we had thought throughout our 30 years of growing up as her children. All her friends had called her Mickey, which we knew was short for Michelle. But this was not the name on the birth certificate.

Something else we discovered, is that she was not born where she had told us as children. As children do, out of curiosity, we asked our parents thousands of questions about what it was like when they were children. I suppose it's a way of learning our own roots, especially when we become old enough to realize and understand that our parents weren't always big people. As soon as we learn that they were once children too, we want to know all about their past, what life was like while they were growing up. It's a natural curiosity. Now we were to relearn all that history again, but with a different story attached to it.

While growing up, we believed that she had become an orphaned child around the young age of six. She was then sent from Montreal, being of French Canadian origin, to live with an aunt and uncle on the prairies of Saskatchewan. She was an only child and would now be all alone, living amongst strangers who had several children of their own. She was not received into her new family with fondness or open arms. She would be worked hard and treated badly throughout her childhood, until she was old enough to set out on her own, which she did around the age of seventeen. She worked in a hospital in a nearby town and a few years later, met our father and married. Soon after, she had four children, which she raised with love and compassion. The rest is history, or so we thought?

We would later find out that she was not orphaned, nor was she born in Montreal. She was born right here in Saskatchewan, the middle child of seven. Her parents had been very much alive while my siblings and I were growing up, yet we were to never meet them. We had six aunts and uncles that we never were allowed to see. And if that wasn't enough of a shock, the biggest was yet to come. Our mother was not of French Canadian decent, but of metis origin (metis is part french ancestory with a mix of native or aboriginal decent). This sent our minds reeling. How could we be part aboriginal? None of us looked of aboriginal origin. We were all very much light skinned. We all had either blue or green eyes, not brown. Our mother was light skinned with hazel colored eyes. The biggest question was, how could we not tell that our own mother was part native all these years? However, in retrospect, we weren't looking for the distinguishing signs (the olive complected skin, the high cheekbones). After all, to us, she was just mom!

There would be so many more questions that needed an answer, but sadly, we found out only bits and pieces. It was too late now to ask her. What could have been so bad that she would hide such a thing, concoct a whole new identity for herself? Would we ever find out why she chose to hide her past from us?

After some digging around, we did find some of her siblings after all those years. We wrote letters to her older sisters (even meeting one in person) and became quite attached to them, before they too passed away. We met one of her brothers and an uncle who helped to fill in some of the blank spaces. We did manage to find out a few things from her past, but not all that we had hoped. They too were keeping some secrets of their own.

Times were tough in the years that my mother was growing up in rural Saskatchewan. There were residential schools run by the Catholic church. There were many stories of children being abused, taken from their parents, forced to live the white man's way, forced to give up their culture. There were too many stories of children being molested. As ironic as it sounds, little was done back then. Many people became devoted to the Catholic religion and although these abuses were occurring, they were also defending the religion and those who brought it to the people. My mother was one of those who refused to defend the atrocities. She turned her back on the religion and her own people. She made a new life for herself, and she made up a new past in order to have a better future.

We soon came to accept that we would probably never know more than that. We also came to accept the fact that we were of metis decent. Now, one might wonder why this was so important. It is not always an easy life being of aboriginal or metis decent in the province of Saskatchewan. They are often looked down upon, as much as that might be an atrocity in itself, but this is much what life is like here. There are still hundreds of years of prejudice to be worked through and hopefully it is getting better as each generation comes along.

The thing we learned the most through all this, is that no matter what nationality you derive from, does it really matter? You don't look at the color of your parent's skin or their facial features and love them accordingly, you just see the people that you love, who love you back. We also learned, while asking around and trying to find out more about our mother, that they all knew, just by looking at her, that she was native Canadian. No one ever thought to tell us, but then, why would they? So why, as her own children, her own offspring, could we not see it? Simply put, we weren't looking. To us, she was just mom and we loved her dearly!