Family in war
This morning I have been thinking about the war in Ukraine. I am confronted with those feelings I had in adolescence, of having to constantly reorient to the present moment. This moment, now, I am ok. My goal is to not become overwhelmed by the panic I feel. I wake up already high-minded “How dare the war-machine, how dare it actually unleash war”? Aggression ITSELF forces the cracks and margins of society out of hiding, and the vulnerable are revealed. The poor become soldiers, defenders of their mothers, wives, and children. But they are also canon fodder, numbers, bodies in mass.
And the compassionate are left to heal, and to heal who is left. How to heal …
Old battles in Scotland, as far as I can trace and according to my Granny, “we” came from Scotland and North England during the Highland clearances, after the last big battle. Landing first in Nova Scotia, then coming to New Carlisle (Baie des Chaleurs), and then to Montreal/Verdun. My great grandmother Martha Helena (Crozier) Wilkie spoke a Scotts-Irish dialect of Gaelic.
The French revolution, according to my mother, our French family can trace records in one village as far back as the French revolution. This means we were/are as close to indigenous French (Gaulois) as is possible in such a historically multi-cultural region. She has a large poster of our family tree.
World war 1, In Canada, my great-grandfather Fred Elmar Wilkie is too young (adolescent) to fight, but he loses a brother in the fighting (later on, Fred will pass on his brother name). He left the farm when his parents separated (he was ten years old), with the intention of working on Montreal’s docks, but he was too small and was apprenticed (and lived with) a plumber and his family.
In France, my great-grandfather fought for his home, and was forever radically patriotic. This motivated him to become a French resistance participant in the next war.
World war 2, In Canada, my great-grandfather is too old to fight, but his son Milton (Uncle Mel) signs up to the Black Watch fresh out of high school, barely 17 years old. Martha (his mother), also joins and serves as a nurse, along with Vera (Martha’s eldest daughter, Mel’s big sister). Mel is wounded seriously and is sent home with metal in his body, a plate of steel for collar bones.
In France, my grandfather is barely thirteen years old, the oldest of four, when the Nazi’s occupied their village. He wrote a whole book about it. My grandfather survives many brushes with death while living with his father in the woods and participating in French resistance activities. My great-grandmother is also active in the resistance and often entertained/distracted the occupying officers, by singing and serving lavish meals in the little village inn she owned and operated with her husband. The kitchen garden in France (that fed everyone) was maintained until the day he died and was passed on to my mother (through her father) when he died.
Baby Boom! In Canada, the circumstances of his beginning are unclear, but my grandmother carried the burden of guilt, and lay all her expectations for a good life on Derek. When his ‘father’ Fred Elmar Wilkie died suddenly, on New Year’s day, my father would have been turning ten years old in three-week’s time, the obituary read “…survived by his wife Martha Helena, and his children Vera, Lorna, Irene, Milton, and Derek”. This proves the story true, that my father was protected from knowing he was actually Lorna’s illegitimate child. She would hold him up to the best of her ability all her life, while he blamed her for his lack of focus and direction. He blamed her for not having a father to teach him how to live.
In the U.S.A, my grandfather Bernard had left France to build a new life and business in America! The migration was done in sensible stages. My mother and her sister were left with their two grandmother’s and associated gaggles of female relatives while Bernard and Anne-Marie set up shop in Washington D.C., and a year later the girls were collected and brought to America! They were sent to a catholic school right away in order to learn English, though my mother was only just 4 years old and not actually ready for kindergarten with the nuns.
Vietnam, In Canada, my father is a hippie. Before he was a hippie, he was a juvenile delinquent, and before then he was a rising star athlete and the apple of his father’s eye! As Vietnam raged on and the peace movement grew in the country next door, my Father wandered, played music, did whatever he wanted and met my mother.
In the U.S.A., my mother is in her first semester of university, she joins student groups and becomes politically active. The experience backlashes consequences at her, and she drops out to travel with her friends. Spontaneously visiting Montreal, she is riding a wave of karma that brings her to meet my father. Like two sparks flung off of a larger fire, momentum pummelled them together and energized their pulling apart. Neither of them really wanted to get tangled up in the first place, and the window of time making my birth possible was brief.
The cold war, In Canada, I lead a double life. I am My mother’s daughter, I am my father’s favorite son (but not-a-boy). I am ten years old, I am scared of nuclear war. I think about it all the time. I know I am powerless because I am a kid. I know adults cannot be trusted, they do not feel properly. I know the adults in my life are preoccupied and selfish, I know most people are, and I know the intensity of my empathy and compassion. I am already tenderized by pain, already resigned, already stuck on hope.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Now I am a mother, I know that love and dedication are normal and widespread human feelings. I can’t understand how no one sees how war is not a good solution for anything! Can’t stand the thought of my children growing up with the fears I had…I am becoming angry.
Syria, Ukraine, I can no longer think straight. I see clearly all the things political, I still know I am personally powerless. How do I live between the intrusions of war and the things I am trying to create? The people there are just the same as myself, we live and feel and strive for all the same basic things. How can I live when they suffer? What should I be doing? Writing my dissertation doesn’t feel like peace-making, but it is exactly that. I pour a cup of chamomile tea, I open the curtains to let in the light, I tell my dog to be quiet. I write. I hope we don’t die tonight.
I am stupefied. There is more war, this time in the middle east. This is the place that has had no peace since forever. How many thousands of years will it take to teach the futility of vengeance?
