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When you're a child, and you don't know any better, you assume your mother is like everyone else's mother. Then you grow a little older and realize with some bewilderment that that's really not the case.
You visit your classmates' homes and see that their moms are nice, matronly, middle-aged ladies with buns in their hair, who sport sensible shoes and demure print dresses layered with flour-covered aprons. They stay at home, cook dinner and bake pies, content to live in the shadow of their husbands and children (or maybe they weren't – but that's how I saw them when I was 12).
That was not my mom, however. My mom was an amazon, in the most complimentary sense of the word. Tall, slender and great-looking with raven-coloured hair, she wore leopard-print dresses in summer and a fox-fur coat with matching hat in winter – on the subway, no less. And with all those stylish clothes, the highest of high heels.
Her nickname at Toronto City Hall, where she worked, was Legs. In the Mad Men days of the 1960s, it was deemed okay for guys in the workplace to call tall, good-looking women Legs and talk about what great "dames" they were.
It first occurred to me that my mom wasn't typical when boys at school would ask if they could walk me home, then ask if my mom was going to be there. They always did this with a slightly guilty look on their faces. Then and there I knew I was going to be in this dynamic woman's shadow for the rest of my days.
Life wasn't always the easiest for her, but boy did she make up for lost time when she finally had the resources to do so, or at least the gumption to get a loan. She spent a good chunk of her childhood in bomb shelters in Sheffield, England, trying to avoid death by German artillery. Since Sheffield made most of the steel for Britain's war effort, it was deemed strategic and bombed heavily night after night.
After that harrowing childhood, Mom grew up and eventually met my father, a Polish soldier stationed in England. After marriage, they set out for Canada, where I was born. I was 3 when it became painfully obvious (metaphorically and literally) that my father wasn't the most sensitive of guys, and had a mean backhand. Mom soon bundled me up, took a buggy full of clothes and very little cash and headed out into the city on her own. Fortunately, she found steady employment with what was then the Metro Toronto government, beginning her 40-year working career – and, more importantly, her independent and adventurous life.
There was a 10-year relationship with her great love, Bill Daly, that lasted until I was 17 and graduating high school. That was followed by short flings and longer flings with wonderful, robust men who wined and dined her, and then eventually bored her to tears. Some she lived with, others she didn't, but she was never tempted to remarry and she was always the one who ended things.
Her longest, truest relationship was with her best friend Stella, whom she met at work. Both single mothers with very young girls, they understood each other's many challenges. When they could swing it financially, they travelled the world together – Russia, China, Europe, the Middle East and dozens of cruises to tropical islands and to Alaska. There are albums and albums of adventures: posing with tigers, riding elephants and camels, boating down exotic rivers and hiking glaciers.
Yes, my mom was different from those other moms. She loved life and was not afraid of it. She was the essence of brave; she wasn't prone to holding back. At her retirement party, an all-evening love fest, Tom Jones sang She's a Lady in the background all night, and my mother glowed amid all the praise from colleagues.
When my husband and I bought a boat for water-skiing, Mom was keen to try "tubing." We were shocked, since she was in her late 60s, but she was always the one giving my husband the thumbs-up to go faster. In her youth, she'd hiked the moors of Yorkshire, and she never lost her love of the physical. Now 80, she can still outwalk most of her friends.
Six years ago, when my dear husband Robert died suddenly of a heart attack at midlife, she was the one who stayed by my side and wept with me into the night for weeks on end, sleeping with me in our marital bed and stroking my hair, giving me some relief from my all-consuming grief. She was there, telling me that life goes on and that I would heal and eventually meet a new love.
She has always been my pillar of strength, the one I call when things are bad and the one I laugh with when life goes well.
Just 22 years old when I was born, Mom was the most daring, strong mother a young girl could have. Even now, she is still that woman: that strong amazon woman who gave me my strength, my independence, my life.
What a dame!