Nanny

Hilda Gauthier, my mother’s mother. My Nanny was a career woman. She had always worked. She didn’t do housework, not really, she puttered on occasion, and straightened papers, but she didn’t have time for such things, so she hired live-in maids when my mother was young, and then housekeepers and cooks later on, the last of which was Mrs. D., who worked for her for years, the only one I’d ever known.

As you might expect, Hilda had not been a hands-on mother. Not that she was distant. She wasn’t. She just didn’t know how to express her love. I think that may be why she was never a tactile grandmother with Karen and I. We knew she loved us, adored us, but she was more comfortable in the company of adults. And yet she was always happy to see us, was always generous and lavished us with gifts, and visited us with regularity in Timmins, usually for a week at a time.

Back in the ‘20s, Hilda had begun working at Bell, the telephone company, when her mother, Susan, took in Mec, my grandfather-to-be, as a boarder, and saw an opportunity for her daughter in him. Mec would be a pharmacist, not a working man living from paycheck to paycheck, but a proper professional. I’m not sure what Hilda thought of Mec in those first years, he was 11 years her senior, but she eventually did marry Mec, despite their age difference. And moved north with him to Matheson. Which must have been a shock. Matheson was not Toronto. Matheson must have seemed the savage frontier, the very edge of habitation and barely civilization. And Matheson was French. There were very few people for her to talk to, I imagine. So, moving to Cochrane was probably a wish come true to her. English. A railroad town. And their own business. Their money. Her own money. While in Toronto, Susan used to meet her at Bell, palm out for her paycheck.

In time, they flourished, prospered, bought and drove a car back up north when the road from the south to the north was completed, and later still, they adopted my mother, raised her, or reared her, in any event. The housekeepers and later Mrs. D. may have had more than a hand in raising my mother.

Hilda may not have been an overtly tactile and lavishly emotionally loving mother, but she was always there for my mother. She and Mec helped my parents when they married; financed a house for them; used their social and political connections to make arrangements for my parents when their first, developmentally challenged child was born. She was a live-in babysitter for my sister and I when needed, no matter how harrowing the experience of dealing with me may have been for her, at times. She was there to listen whenever my mother needed to talk, never judged. She bought my parents a Caribbean vacation for their 30th anniversary.

She may not have lavished us with hugs, she may not have said “I love you” often, but she found her own ways to express it.