All eyes turned to my father who, like many fathers of the day, had the social authority to mediate reality for the rest of us. “What do we think of this, daddy?” was the question that came to my mind. “Does this make sense to us or does it not?” My father decided it made no sense.

His face turned a pale pink before he jumped to his feet and shouted, “Get the hell out of here with this craziness! What in the name of God are you trying to do to your poor little children?!”

A few of us cried before piling into my father’s car to go for a soft-swirl ice cream at the local Peter Pan. In spite of the upset, we were, in some ways, the luckiest of all little lambs. My father was the warmest spot on earth. In his warmth and sensitivity, we took solace from the harsher elements of the world. To his shoulder was where I always took my tears and my tired, heavy heart.

His strong emotional reaction to my mother’s resignation would have a lasting effect on my tender, sympathetic heart. How deeply I loved my father and how well I knew him from the inside out. I hated to have to witness him feel confused, upset or powerless. I wanted to protect all that was soft, rare and vulnerable in him because, like I said, I knew him from the inside out. At the same time, there was my mother to consider, and then, of course, us. How would we survive? Had she really left us adrift? Would we starve from that day forward? Were we resigned to wear dirty socks forever?

Not surprisingly, we all did fine (in time) taking up our own chores. We didn’t die of the repercussions and neither did my father, although it would be less than truthful to say he ever resigned himself, happily, to the situation. He never did.

Still, my mother never recanted. She was a person of her very definite word. If she told you to be back in the house at five minutes to eleven, that’s exactly what she meant. As a child, I spent more days than I care to recall suffering in solitary confinement before learning this about her.

Like many men of his day, my father believed that a mother’s love was best conveyed through a lifetime of self-sacrifice and service to those she loved. But as the years went on and I would visit my parents’ home, I would see that my father was growing in self-pride and confidence as a result of caring for himself and his own person in this way. I came, in time, to understand, forgive and tolerate his relentless, passive opposition to the situation. His opposition was evident every time he’d shake his head as though my mother’s actions were something for which we all should feel terribly ashamed.

Today, as I go forward in my life and realize how much each of my parents gave me, I can honestly say that one of the best things my mother ever did for me (besides being someone who kept to her word) was to walk into our living room that day and give her notice to quit. She taught me so much through this single, solitary act. She taught me that she had a self that was worth respecting, and that my dirty socks were my business, not hers.

And my father, tender hearted soul who never missed a chance to pile us into the car and take us for an ice cream whenever the world felt too hard, will always be remembered for having the warmest heart on earth for almost any child whom he believed had been left out in the cold. And oh yes, he will always be remembered for his impeccable attire. I even had somebody say to me once they thought that my father had the pressed pants in all of Prince Edward Island.

I can only assume then, that in the face of all this, you really do believe it is your job to do something more extraordinary for me than to use your mind to find your way into the mind of the female subject that is me. Well, then. Very well, then.

Yes, you are my professor and my graduate advisor and that’s the role you signed-up for. That’s the role you intend to keep and memorize ’til death tears us apart. And yes, I suppose, I too will come in time to accept this as just another banal, un-negotiable detail in my everyday academic existence.

Still, I thought you should know that your stony silence brought a measure of sadness and suffering. For three days, I worked to make meaning of your unapologetic response. I worked at understanding only this much of it, that perhaps it was meant to emphasize something that needed emphasizing. In this regard then, I am glad we were able to come to some kind of mutual understanding about the role each of us is to play inside this academic arena.

Already, I understand this much Dr. Livingstone. You are a serious academic with a job to do, and I am an individual in training. It is not your job to know me. And it is not my job to know anything of the person that is inside you. Well, then, so it is. In time, I too, perhaps, shall write of the material world in long drawn out, endlessly exhausting phrases that make little to no sense to most of the world’s women (never mind the poorest of the poor). And you shall be among those who stand to applaud me when I no longer make sense to them or myself.

But enough of them. What of me, Dr. Livingstone?” In the meantime, what of me? In what small, dark corner are they bound to find me before I fossilize, flesh and bones shrivelled up from this petty, bourgeois treatment you deem my necessary education?

Will it be you to assign me a grade, any grade at all? For having the scruples to take my thesis proposal to the floor before I forget there are others who can’t even spell the word “thesis”? Or would you prefer that I perform such illicit acts in the privacy of my own home? Look at me, Dr. Livingstone. I am a fugitive on fire confined to the walls of this concrete tomb, hoping, in time, to fill my plate with my share of red meat in the name of education. Well, do you concede or do you not? Eat or be eaten. Is this not the nature of the beast of education today? Eat or be eaten?

If you knew anything about my female kind, you would know at least this: they will gossip of my drop-dead dramatics for the next ten years the minute that I succeed in making my escape from the confines of their boring, academic notions of what constitutes women’s motivations. Even as I lay shrivelled to the size of a small pathetic lizard in the corners of their academic rooms, they will hate that I was able to find my way out and through.

There’ll be a few tears of empathy. Even less heartfelt compassion expressed. They’ll come to my dead flesh with the eyes of their judgment. Only now, it will be hidden under the guise of their scientific inquiry! See them scorch my skin with the fire of their fierce scrutiny. “Why did she die in this manner? What kind of radical statement was she trying to make? Was she in need of therapeutic intervention? A self-proclaimed introvert? Let us get to the root of her now! Why in God’s name would she wear those pants and running shoes that colour to die in?”

Do you hear what they’ll be saying behind my back? Yet, they will be so wrong about me, Dr. Livingstone. I know that you have great patience for polite people who eat wholesome grains and savour the texture of milk pudding. I, on the other hand, don’t. I only have patience for those whose minds are on fire with the flame of an idea so wild and strong that even the winds of March must bow to the force of it. This is what I have patience for. Please don’t let the fugitive in me die, Dr. Livingstone. I beg this of you.

(For my father, Hugh Patrick Trainor of Passmore Street)

My father is an old man and sometimes the nurses that work to feed him and bathe him now will sit him up in a chair and wrestle with the dead weight of him so they can dress him in a shirt and tie.

It was the day after Christmas. I walked into his room and saw a shirt and tie of his thrown over the chair as though he himself had just taken them off. My father’s hands and legs are heavy as gravity now. They don’t move by themselves. I ask him, “Why do you wear a shirt and tie in here daddy?” His mind is near full of dementia. He doesn’t know the answer to this.

He can’t say “yes,” on this day, so, of course, he can’t say “no.” He told me only 6 months ago that he needed a change of scenery. Looking at the wall is hard on him. After I heard him say this, I turned inward (in on myself with the pain). I stay away for months. The next time I visit he is in another room.

He can’t say “yes, I see how the leaves are falling from the trees now,” or “no, I don’t want your godawful beef stew for supper again.” He is fed his meals here in much the same way young children are fed pablum. His food is mashed. Everything is tasteless and textureless as pablum. Patient, able-bodied people stand on the other side of his supper fork waiting for him to swallow. Nobody questions why his hands don’t work, suddenly. The attendants smile. They smile while they wait. I look toward the shirt and tie lying over the chair.

His teeth have been removed. I found them by mistake one day. I was searching for a phone book. They were in the drawer second to the bottom. I picked them up and tried to imagine them back in his mouth. I couldn’t. His face is caved in now, hollowed. It is not the face of the man I know.

I tell him a lie. I tell him that soon I am going to buy us a piece of land. I tell him that soon I am going to build a house for all of us–for all of his children, and him. I tell him that soon I am coming to get him from this place. Soon he will be looking out onto the pink skies of autumn and the ocean that he loves. Soon he will be able to smell the wind and the grass with me. He tells me that yes, this is what he wants.

There are clouds inside his eyes now. They are full of mist. I call him, “Daddy!…Daddy…can you hear me?…It’s me, Daddy.” His mind is so full of dementia. I want him to remember the brown sugar fudge he’d make us on Sunday nights. I call him, “Daddy!”

I hold his hand now, heavy as gravity. The skin is cool. The veins beneath the skin are blue and shrunken. I tell him, “I’m going home now Daddy, but I’ll be back tomorrow.” He looks around him, wondering where I’ve gone even as I stand directly in front of him. He shouts out to the frame of the door, “I love you, too, dear.” The shirt and tie hang over the chair like yesterday is still now. The tie is knotted perfectly for tomorrow.

We would sit down and wait for the evening’s tragic events to begin, but it seemed they never really did. We were needed, mostly, for the purpose of sitting. The church was small and even the pews were covered in the same powdery blue paint (I seem to recall) that covered the walls. Josephine was laid out no more than fifteen to twenty feet away from where we were seated. Her face and body was on intimate display, even for those of us in mandatory attendance.

There were no real instructions as to what we, the white teachers were expected to do. So mostly, we just sat there, kept our knees together, folded our hands on our laps, and tried not to stare too much at Josephine.

Seventeen years of living, maybe, or perhaps it was only sixteen. Nobody but her own people seemed to know for sure, and, of course, none among us (from the outside) dared to ask. Girls the same age as Josephine sometimes died in these isolated Aboriginal communities. Sometimes it was without apparent reason or cause. That’s as much as I’m willing to say on the matter.

We were all plenty sorry for the death of Josephine, and certainly, some of us believed we ought to have done more to convey our shock or sympathy or something. This was a young girl’s life, after all (no small matter). But not much would come of it. We were, after all, a rather strange, transient kind of presence (however necessary) here in the land of the Indian. So, in time, we all went back to teaching for our pay and minding the necessary silences.

The day I was to leave the land where Josephine was laid to rest, I remember thinking to myself how odd a thing it is that children should appear, even in death, beautiful. How stubbornly their muscle clings to the bone so as to give the effect that one has but laid her precious head to a pillow for a moment’s rest, and that soon, perhaps, the very minute the springtime geese arrive back to these skies, the child will jump onto her feet, and with the rest of them, come running.

I was a good behaving child, and I still am the same colour of white but probably not one of the poor because now I go to school so I have learned. Nobody’s gonna laugh out loud at me. I still don’t wanna save no one except myself and then my sisters. Maybe my mother too–god damn mind scrambled up like runny eggs with the stress of not knowing where’s the food coming from?… Trusting god to keep his end of the bargain concerning her babies and all that, but he never did. She stayed on her knees for him, anyway, ’cause she loves men more than anybody. She didn’t know Jesus was a Jew. She thought he was just the son of another white man and I think that’s mainly why she trusted him.

Were’t no faviours being done me or my sisters on the welfare so I turned my back on these things and I got up from my dirty knees knowing, for sure, that you just can’t eat the marble staircase in the pope’s mansion cause he’s gonna order you straight to jail before he’s ever gonna take you into his fine kitchen and feed you warm gingerbread.

You think the poor’s prayers matter? Keeping our eyes on the heavens beyond while our stomachs ache and our minds go scrambled with the ugliness and hatred of this world? Social Services people putting their clean, organized little fingers in to rearrange our world while they trample us good because they need us to be us so they can be them. Ha! They don’t fool me. “Stand here,” I wanna say to them.” Stand, here, at the end of this food line letting all them ‘others’ who are hungry, tired and sick of the world’s shame go before you… you know what I’m saying to you? Serve something besides yourself.”

It was my father who sat on the foot of my bed right beside my window with the thick plastic taped around it the day they took his car away because he used his money all up to feed us. God damn, it was an arrow to my child’s heart, and when he said it, he just said it straight as a line to me like I was gonna understand it exactly like he meant it without bursting into crying, myself: He told me, ” I’m really gonna miss the old car, Carole” – his eyes burnng with hidden shame I wasn’t supposed to see; his skin all parched and pale like he’d done something wrong and that was why it all turned out so bad.

Right then and there I told myself that i was gonna stand up to that god awful pope and to every clean little girl who ever thought she could rule the world, and to every foul mouthed lying social service worker who ever came our way because you don’t do that to the poor long as I’m livin’ among your dead. If it was the last bloody thing I ever got to do on this earth I told myself I was gonna do it cause you don’t do that to the poor long as I’m living among your dead.

Of course we tidy them up before we send them (little sparrows from the nest). We need to tidy the mess of our initial wordy outcry because that’s what you do with jargon (that’s what you can do). It was a little overblown in the beginning, perhaps — a little emotional — a head full of burdocks. What you really wanted to say comes only after hours of stringent editing. That’s what you really wanted to say.

You hope I read it and that I concur — the point got made. You have much to say, you say. Well, then, so do I! Let us demand to be heard! We have been silenced long enough! “This is an outcry!” We want to be respected (and for good reason). In order to be respected, we need to carefully word our words in such a way that the message, which is the entire point (we hope) of most of our wordy words, will not be mistaken for something it is not. We need to carefully word words in such a way that we will not be mistaken for something we are not. This is all so daunting; so mundane, but how crucial and necessary to the outcome of our literary labours? We see nothing political in this.

We choose our jargon with care. We must it if it is not to choose us! We choose the most valued; the most esteemed of jargon. We will be heard! Over the masses, our one or two or eight thousand righteous, solitary voices will be heard! We see nothing political in this. We wonder, at times, why those with other ways of thinking and talking never seem to learn how to get themselves heard. We feel so sorry (this is an apology). We mean it. We see nothing political in this.

We use appropriate words. We double check meanings. We choose carefully (there are a lot of things at stake). We choose potent words, strong words. Words that drop like bombs. Words that do the job. We want to be taken with great seriousness (please let our words have weight and height – depth and breadth… Let the crowds go “ah…”).

We talk like we’ve already eaten (We have just left the table [all of us]). We talk like, of course, we will have enough protein for supper tonight. We talk like, of course, there is enough energy left over to think and talk and drop a few bombs. We talk like we have the freedom to do as we choose, except when it comes to bombs (most of us don’t enjoy bombs). We do things because we can in a democratic world (it is our right and our view). Our jargon is the proof that we canso… (See? We’ve forgotten already that too many people won’t get enough protein at supper tonight — that jargon is not protein – or freedom. Not necessarily).

We want to be heard. We hate bombs. We hate violence. We hate hegemonic masculinity. We hate that wealthy white men still dominate, and that small girls and boys of every colour continue to get raped and killed. We hate that racism and classism still run rampant here in the civilized world. We will write about it. We will use proper jargon. Damn good jargon. Jargon that delivers. We like it when our jargon delivers. It packs a punch. We like our jargon punchy; we like it to be delivered on time, and we like our pizza with pepperoni and our red meat rare (We would much prefer it if we were the ones doing the punching; if we were the ones doing the paying, doing the eating etc, but whatever… we are open).

We read newspapers. Cardboard soldiers getting set up and shot down with jargon. It’s tantalizing. It’s exciting. It’s civilized warfare. An informed cock fight (I hope we win. I hope we win.). Our jargon is commodity. It’s the rich man’s silver and gold (Live and lust for language, and you’ll swim in a sea of coins [an octupus’s garden] Let the crowd go “ah…”).

Often, we don’t know how to say it ourselves, but we swear that we will know it when we hear it. We know it when our jargon rings true. It makes us weak at the knees if it rings really true, deeply true. I heard once that the jargon some poor people talk is terrible and direct (I say this hoping to speak deeply and truly). “Too quickly to the point,” was what I heard said about this, once… A dirty blade, perhaps. Dull, but very blunt (to the point). I once heard a poor person, herself, say that people who can’t read or write, rarely do (for years, my sole focus was on the contradiction in logic in this poor person’s crazy assertion – the faultiness of her grammar).

This is an unapologetic love song to that which is still not considered to be important enough, or newsworthy enough. This is an unapologetic love song written of that which is still not considered to be lucrative enough or profitable enough.

This is an unapologetic tribute to my mother’s hands – to the years of excessive work that left them raw and chaffed.

This is an unapologetic tribute to all that is rightfully hers – to all that we continue to insist cannot, and should not, be claimed on a serious professional or academic resume.

This is an unapologetic love song to the artist who is, and was, my mother – to the strength and design by which she held to her life; to the courage and conviction that was at the root of her brilliant artistry. This is an unapologetic tribute to all that was belittled, ignored, and patronized in her by my father, my church, and by the educational curriculum that dictated the nature and content of my schooling.

This is an unapologetic love song to my mother – masterful teacher – one who was never educated or trained in the area of Family Studies, Child and Youth Studies or Women’s Studies (- who is still not considered to be an expert in any of these fields).

This is an unapologetic love song to her who knew no financial bottom line – to her who received not a nickel – not a dime – of financial compensation for the years of artful mothering; for the years of back breaking labour, love and devotion.

This is an unapologetic tribute to my mother who knew that a “self” given over in sacrificial love, bears a hearty kind of fruit. This is a tribute to that kind of beauty.

This is an unapologetic tribute to one forced to live without mention, without accreditation, without authorization – without ever being the subject of passionate, intelligent-enough academic analysis.

This is an unapologetic love song to my mother, who held fast to her faith on the days the food ran out; who sat us in a circle the day our furniture was being repossessed and sang us songs of gratitude to God. This is a tribute to my mother who taught us how to stay faithful to ourselves; to our word, and to our god.

Two

This is an unapologetic love song written for one who was forced to endure without resources, understanding, affirmation or compassion.

This is an unapologetic tribute to her who, for years, stood to face the harsh elements of the world. With a fistful of wooden pins and a mind intent on reorganizing the world, she stood up to the wind and the rain on the worst of our days -and not for the sake of enslavement or female servitude, but for the sake of that which burned inside her – for the sake of her love – the artistry at the centre of her mothering practice.

This is an unapologetic tribute to one who lived for a different kind of bottom line.

Don’t hide your passions or your swear words under your breath. Don’t keep your discoloured pajamas hidden in the bottom drawer on this day, or the fact that you don’t give a damn about your cholestorol, hidden from my view. Don’t feign perfection for me, my love. I won’t believe it anyway, and what’s worse is, (your mother must have told you!) your face will turn to stone.

The world is not an elephant’s foot. And even if it were, there is great honour in being a worm or a mouse or an ant caught in the act of doing the obscene (even if you die under the weight of it). You would know this already if you had taken the time to think – think, my love – instead of reading all those god awful texts that teach you how to do everyhing but.

Would it help you to know that I have never lied to you? You smell sweeter than the dung of an elephant. You are sharper than the sharpest nail that has been hammered into the shingles of this roof. (how can you not know this?)

I shall say it to you only once, my love: You do not equal the weight of your penny jar (does this bear repeating?). I am sorry to have to tell you that Freud was obsessive, and that the psychoanalysts continue to misguide and mislead. This is the reason that they themselves, are now, misguided and misled (who’s to love their little hearts?). I think, now, that they probably mean well.

Stuffed shirts/skirts and shiny cars do not equal your mental health, or theirs, my love. Damn them. Damn the good will and straight intentions of every analyst. They are difficult to hate. But look! Please don’t turn away: The artists are being held up for auction at garage sales. There is nobody doing the bidding. Many of them will die with nothing but cheap noodles in their hollowed guts. Fancy theories, instigated by Sigmund Freud himself, will try to explain away their poverty. Their dead minds will be assessed; their sanity doubted for what their bodies could not endure. Don’t love me like that! Don’t take the Beauty from my voice (thinking my gifts for free). Don’t steal the beauty from my song and ask me to prove my worth by the weight of my penny jar. Don’t love me like that!

Did you not hear what I said to you a zillion times over? I care nothing that you should retire in 28 months and sixteen days. These kinds of details are enough to bore it blind! (the eye of the hurricane, I mean). Only those without knowledge of the moon’s eternal sustenance should worry about tomorrow as you do. “Are you a man or are you not?… Are you a woman or are you not?… Have you not a good paying job? (God will bless you for having the right job in these times, you know. You will be redeemed in God’s boring heaven for all of eternity, and you will go on and on and on. Not one artist will be there to lull you into the heart of life itself. You will only wish your pennies could buy your way out of this one!). That these kinds of questions should precede the highly poignant question I put to you in this very moment is absolutely proposterous: Now, will you or will you not, have a root beer with me?

With all of my heart I am asking you to hurry up and claim the heart you’ve won, my love. It’s free! It’s free of charge! You’ve already been informed of this. Don’t sit awhile and wonder. You know I was nothing before you wooed me and won me. Now woo me and win me.
Oh my beloved you, sit me down again and drink me into the blueest eyes of you. Sit me down and sing me an upside down queerest of all love songs. Kiss the lips of me with those lips that are pink and full – glorious as the vulva of another woman! Kiss me with the pink rose of those glorious obscene lips. Weaken me with the obscenity of you. Don’t bore me with stories of women who go to church and love men but who have no love for other women – women who are sanitized and never swear. Who, in their right mind, could claim to love a man who never swears?!

Tell me now. Tell me what it is I already know, my love: that you are queer. Queer as the first bump on the bum of a crocodile. Queer as the the mother of God who might still be working at the Walmart if Joseph hadn’t come along. Tell me, again, what it is I all ready know: that you are there hiding away – soft, soft, soft as the skin of a tulip inside the foreskin of you.

Tell me you love shredded wheat without sugar, my love, and I shall forgive you your awful choice. Turn yourself into a catholic, for Christ’s sake, and I shall forgive you even this! Do as you please, my love! Be as you please! Make mudpies on my door step and I shall eat them for supper!

…Make the rain fall so hard upon the earth on this day, that all the trees bend over with the weight of your request, and I shall beg god on my hands and knees to forgive you. Stand on your tip toes and rip the most glorious leaves from the tops of gods most glorious of trees and I shall make a case for you on this highest, most holiest of ground, my love. I shall stand my ground!

Refuse to save your good leather shoes for another day, my love. Undo the awful knot of that precious silk tie and burn it with the dry leaves of autumn. Don’t come to my door smelling of cologne and holding twelve red, dead roses in your hands. Don’t come to me with the apology of an open wallet! Don’t love me like that, my love (for Christ’s sake). Come naked. Come as I know you, my love. Come as I know you!

My father is an old man and sometimes the nurses that work to feed him and bathe him now will sit him up in a chair and wrestle with the dead weight of him so they can dress him in a shirt and tie.

It was the day after Christmas. I walked into his room and saw a shirt and tie of his thrown over the chair as though he himself had just taken them off. My father’s hands and legs are heavy as gravity now. They don’t move by themselves. I ask him, “Why do you wear a shirt and tie in here daddy?” His mind is near full of dementia. He doesn’t know the answer to this.

He can’t say “yes,” on this day, so, of course, he can’t say “no.” He told me only 6 months ago that he needed a change of scenery. Looking at the wall is hard on him. After I heard him say this, I turned inward (in on myself with the pain). I stay away for months. The next time I visit he is in another room.

He can’t say “yes, I see how the leaves are falling from the trees now,” or “no, I don’t want your godawful beef stew for supper again.” He is fed his meals here in much the same way young children are fed pablum. His food is mashed. Everything is tasteless and textureless as pablum. Patient, able-bodied people stand on the other side of his supper fork waiting for him to swallow. Nobody questions why his hands don’t work, suddenly. The attendants smile. They smile while they wait. I look toward the shirt and tie lying over the chair.

His teeth have been removed. I found them by mistake one day. I was searching for a phone book. They were in the drawer second to the bottom. I picked them up and tried to imagine them back in his mouth. I couldn’t. His face is caved in now, hollowed. It is not the face of the man I know.

I tell him a lie. I tell him that soon I am going to buy us a piece of land. I tell him that soon I am going to build a house for all of us–for all of his children, and him. I tell him that soon I am coming to get him from this place. Soon he will be looking out onto the pink skies of autumn and the ocean that he loves. Soon he will be able to smell the wind and the grass with me. He tells me that yes, this is what he wants.

There are clouds inside his eyes now. They are full of mist. I call him, “Daddy!…Daddy…can you hear me?…It’s me, Daddy.” His mind is so full of dementia. I want him to remember the brown sugar fudge he’d make us on Sunday nights. I call him, “Daddy!”

I hold his hand now, heavy as gravity. The skin is cool. The veins beneath the skin are blue and shrunken. I tell him, “I’m going home now Daddy, but I’ll be back tomorrow.” He looks around him, wondering where I’ve gone even as I stand directly in front of him. He shouts out to the frame of the door, “I love you, too, dear.” The shirt and tie hang over the chair like yesterday is still now. The tie is knotted perfectly for tomorrow.

Most of us will never become wealthy corporates. Most of us will never own a highly successful business, become a famous rock star, or attain the status of a highly paid professional athlete. Most of us, in fact, will consider ourselves lucky if we get enough food to eat in our lifetimes — if we are able to afford even the smallest of luxuries in life, like getting our teeth filled when they are in need filling, or going out for an ice cream or a movie every now and again. Most of us will never be able to afford most or even all of the commercial products that call to us through the seductive market of free exchange.

We blindly accept that Capitalism is the only or even the best economic system we, as humans, are capable of imagining. And while it’s true that Capitalism works for the few, it most often doesn’t work for the many. In fact, as many economists and political scientists will tell you, Capitalism is dirty business. It thrives off the most vulnerable among us — the lowest paid and the unpaid.

Capitalism doesn’t concern itself with fairness. It doesn’t promote an ethical conscience and it, in reality, has very little to nothing to do with the principles of fair exchange. Capitalism is not a system that concerns itself with the principles of “freedom” or equitable exchange. In a very real sense, then, Capitalism is, quite possibly, the very antithesis of good mothering.

There are large groups of Canadian citizens whose job it is to care (compassionately) for the people around them. Some mothers are among this group of people. It’s true that not all mothers would consider themselves compassionate domestic workers, but for those mothers who take the role of domestic work/parenting up in this way, they soon find that in a culture that attaches such monumental value to the exchange of monies, there really is no place for the social recognition or celebration of those who will work or must work for absolutely no financial compensation.

The logic of Capitalism, it appears then, runs something like this: If you get paid for what you do for society, you will receive recognition, money and status. If you work for free so that others might benefit from your labour, you are entitled to no recognition, no financial compensation and no social status. Worse, you may, in fact, be disgraced and degraded for not having the foresight to see how absolutely ridiculous your free, compassion efforts were perceived to be (through the eyes of Capitalism) in the first place.

There are many good mothers among those who, unwittingly, became lone parents. There are many good mothers who entered into marriage contracts believing that they too, would be on the other end of people’s honesty, compassion and sense of fairness. Most mothers do not, in fact, give their consent to a lifetime of servitude for the advancement (or “love of”) Capitalist exchange. We need, as a culture, to recognize this.

Mothers without men are particularly vulnerable to the deficiencies in Capitalist ideology. Capitalism does not pay mothers to care for children, and yet children are people in need of care. If a woman is mated with a man, he may willingly work to contribute financially to the welfare of the family so the woman can focus on the more domestic needs of the home. But if a woman is not mated to a man (and many single mothers aren’t) there really are no safety nets available to women through the market of free exchange.

A woman’s labour is simply not considered to be labour when it is performed in the confines of the home. Job sight is everything in Capitalism. On the job domestic workers are perceived, through Capitalist ideology, as people unworthy of financial entitlement, status or recognition. Capitalism doesn’t concern itself with the care of the home or the children. This is somebody else’s responsibility. Somebody else is responsible for the maintenance of homebound women and children.

Social assistance is not a paycheque for domestic workers. It does not pay women enough money to feed children adequately, and it demeans, without a doubt, the daunting, laborious, compassionate nature of quality care that many children in our city receive on a daily basis.

Sadly enough, we are all complicit in acting out of Capitalism values every time we treat mothers or the work of mothering as though it had absolutely no significance to the maintenance of culture.

Carole E. Trainor is a published writer, mother and university instructor. Her doctoral focus is the role of domesticity in Capitalist Education. She lives in Nova Scotia.