"Votre mère a eu la vie bien dure. Nous avons vécu deux ans chez mes parents qui étaient bien bons, mais pour une jeune épouse, ce n'étais pas chose facile et elle ne se sentait pas à l'aise. Après notre déménagement à Batoche les grossesses se succédaient les unes après les autres souvent sans médecin. Puis deux grossesses qui se sont terminées avec des bébés mort-nés. Ensuite arrivée à Vonda en 1943, petite maison, sans commodités, sans eau ni toilette. Je ne crois qu'il y en a eu beaucoup qui ont travaillé aussi fort: lavage, racommodage, lavage de planchers de bois, fabrication de vêtements pour les enfants avec du vieux linge et des sacs de farine, et garder des petits, les nôtres et ceux des autres. D'après mois elle a accompli une tâche impossible. Quand je pense à tout cela, les grossesses, les accouchements, la fatigue, se lever à cinq heures du matin, se coucher à dix ou onze heures, travailler sans arrêt toute la journée, je j'y comprends rien.
Merci ma Rose chérie"
"Your mother had a hard life. We lived for two years with my parents, who were good people, but for a young wife, it wasn't easy and she never felt comfortable. After we moved to Batoche, the pregnancies happened one after the other, often without a doctor present. And then two pregnancies that ended in still births. We arrived in Vonda in 1943 to a tiny house without plumbing, no running water, no toilet. I don't know of anyone who worked so hard: laundry, housework, washing the wood floors, making clothes for the kids with old garments and flour sacks, watching the kids: ours and other peoples. In my opinion, she accomplished the impossible. When I think of it all: the pregnancies, the deliveries, the exhaustion, getting up at five in the morning and going to bed at ten or eleven o' clock, working non-stop all day, I can't even imagine it.
Thank you my Dear Rose"
16 pregnancies! 14 babies! I can't imagine being the mother of fourteen children. Your great grandmother Rose was a hell of a woman. Grandpere Zenon obviously had deep respect and love for her. But with that being said, be thankful that you were born in a time where you get to have a career, where you aren't bound to extreme religious ideals, where birth control is readily available and it's use is strongly encouraged, where you have a flush toilet! Be grateful that you can earn respect in many different ways, not just at how well you manage a household. He really said it: "Your Mother had a hard life".
Motherhood IS hard, I think. Not necessarily as much so, or in the same way that it was for Grandmere Rose, but in that you have to work hard to be good at it. You need to do a lot of laundry and you lose a lot of sleep. You worry a lot, and often have to put yourself second. I'm very new at this motherhood racket, and I'm sure I will find a million other things that make it really hard.
But I know that there is deep reward in being a mother: not the cleaning and being up at 5 am part, but in the weight of a newborn in your arms, the cuddles, the gazes of admiration from your nursing infant. It is fulfilment of an entirely new kind. I feel more deeply than I have ever felt, and I love more deeply than I have ever loved. It's like a floodgate opened in me when you were born, and I became a new kind of person. I became a Mom, It's not all I am, but it's probably the most important part of me.
