My great grandmother came from Ireland to Canada. …

My great grandmother came from Ireland to Canada. From Canada she made her way by herself to Brockton, MA. By the time she was 15 years old she was working in a shoe factory and sending most of her wages back to her family in Canada. She married a man named Patrick Whalen. It doesn’t seem like much of story, or a story very different from other girls of her age and hertitage.

This tiny nugget of information about the matriarch of my family came from a letter I wrote to my grandmother in which I asked her for the details of her family’s history. She didn’t have a lot of information. She knew some of the basics and hoped that was enough for me. What came through, more than the facts and non-fiction of my Great Gram’s story, was a sense of longing. There have been lessons of sacrifice taught from one generation of women in my family to the next. Women of my clan work for the greater good of The Family and will suffer a personal sacrificial foul in order to put the needs of another (especially a child) first. There in the loose, loopy, scrawl of my grandmother’s handwriting I heard her longing for something more, something else, something that was just hers. I thought then that maybe she would have liked to go to school and then college. I thought then that she probably just wanted to be away from my Grandfather, from the 10 kids they had together, from the ghost of the girl she used to be. The longing in that letter could have been any or all of those things but I think there was something more to it. I think she longed to know life in a less compromising, sacrificial way.

I’m not sure my Nan wanted to have 10 children. I wonder what her life would have looked like if she had been able to go to school and shed the ancestral weight of expectation. I wonder if she would have been a happier woman if she were able to know herself beyond the bonds of Irish Catholicism and the guilt that plagued her heart. Did she think she was a bad person because she longed for more than being a mother and a wife? I can see her sitting at the kitchen table, staring intently out the window. Her cigarette burned down to nothing but ash because she was so lost in thought. What were the dreams behind her brown eyes or her mother’s, or any of the women who came before? Were there wishes for freedom? Were there dreams of travel and romance? Or was it more basic than that? Did she simply wish that her endless list of tasks and demands ease even by one? Did she just want affection, someone to come and wrap their arms around her and whisper soft, sweet things in her ear? Would that have made her heart soften to the simple joys of life?

I don’t know why I am thinking of these women this morning. I guess it’s to learn the secrets that they kept locked inside; I want to know if they are the same secrets I have. I believe in learning from the women who came before me. I believe that their stories and secrets and dreams can lead me to being a better woman. We should learn these stories before it’s too late to get the details and specifics, before all we can know are the distilled and vague notions of the women who paved the way for the rest of us.