Understanding Helen

Where do I fit into this story? Maybe you dear reader can help me find the answer.

February 1920 in Cantley, Quebec. The snow is up to the farmhouse windowsills, the wind is howling, and night is coming on; but, the house is warm, not cozy, but warm. Candles and oil lamps are lit, and the stove is blazing. The heat adds to Kate’s nausea. She is rocking six-month-old Vincent in his crib next to her marital bed. His whingeing is disturbing his grandparents and uncles.

This is not what she had envisaged when marrying her childhood sweetheart Harold McNulty. He who could dance and sing the birds out of the trees. Harold grew up on the farm next to hers, the Powers farm in a small Irish community on the Gatineau River.

Harold’s wheezing and relentless coughing could be heard throughout the house. And, oh God no! He is coughing up more blood. As Kate wipes his brow, she feels the movement in her womb. Kate prays: God give me strength…

Her mother-in-law, the harridan, stands in the doorway, hands wringing. Kate senses that she is being blamed for Harold’s Galloping consumption. The fall and winter months have been brutal, nothing but wind and rain. No wonder his weak lungs had failed.

Finally, the inevitable Silence… a silence heavy with unshed tears. All the tears had fallen in the previous months as Harold strength had ebbed. Vincent’s hiccups and sniffles lessen as he is rocked.

July 7, 1920, in the Powers’ cabin, they call it a house but in the photos I’ve seen it looks more like a shanty. Hard to believe that it embraced the nine surviving Powers children and their parents Margaret (O’Brien) and Black Pat Powers. The Powers sisters gather round Kate holding her hands, massaging her back and murmuring encouragingly. “You can do it Kate.” The Hail Marys float in the air like motes. And push! She arrives … a squalling “let’s go girl” baby…my mom Helen.

Pregnancy is a time when the emotions of the mother influence the baby’s development in the womb. “… pregnant women’s distress, like their nutrition, influences children’s long–term development, i.e., fetal exposure to the physiological alterations associated with women’s psychological distress affects child outcomes, evidence of this maternal influence is detectable during the prenatal period.”

It beggars the imagination to consider the maelstrom of emotions that Helen would have metabolized in utero. Surely Kate’s dismay discovering that she was pregnant while still nursing newborn Vincent; the nausea, the slow dawning of the reality of Harold’s cough, a long with the constant demands of her difficult mother-in-law and the never ending taunts, (they called it fun) of her young brothers in law, would produce toxins that would pass through the umbilical cord.

I believe that this explains Helen’s lifelong depression; but, like most depressives her coping mechanism was humour. Often that humour could be brutal, she took no prisoners. Ergo “Sex Ed a la Helen” and “When Jesus Appeared to Me”.

More to come