My mother, Philomene, also known as Magna, was born in Desruisseaux, Micoud, on Sunday, January 20, 1929, as the fourth child of Jonah and Marie Francis, who would birth a total of 18 children, with 13 surviving into adulthood. According to the star sign my mother was an Aquarius, and according to the Chinese Zodiac she was a Dragon.
In that year the heavens celebrated my mother’s birth by dimming the sun with two solar eclipses and two lunar eclipses. I don’t know how these signs and heavenly manifestations have conditioned my mother’s life and helped fashion her personality, or what other constellation of forces came together to give rise to her. But she was born in an auspicious year. In that year, as if mindful of my mother’s birth, the Privy Council, a British high court, decreed that Canadian women are persons and are eligible to be members of the legislature.
Of course, my mother wouldn’t have hesitated to tell them she needed no piece of paper to know she was a person, no more than she needed someone else’s confirmation to know she was a woman and a mother. It was the year of the great Wall Street crash that heralded the Great Depression (1929 to 1941), the decade-long, worldwide economic depression that ravished the world. So in the first year of my mother’s life, a blow was struck for women, and in the first decade of her life, the world was in the grip of an economic calamity.
My mother’s children were her most precious. As she lay dying at the ripe old age of 91 going on to 92, she would repeat the names of her children in the order of their birth. I don’t know why she did that. If it was to relish the existence of her most precious or to make sure that as she was losing touch with the world, she never forgets her most precious—her nine children.
We were our mother’s most precious!
Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers of the world.