Mary Fairhurst Breen - Any Kind of Luck at All: A Memoir

Any Kind of Luck at All

dedication

For Emma

contents

Foreword: Any Kind of Luck at All

For years, one of my daughters or I would joke, Uh oh, this is going in the book! Sometimes it was more like, Well, fuck, this is definitely going in the book. There was no book at the time, but as our adventures and misadventures accumulated, it began to feel like there might need to be one.

The first, very raw, draft of what would eventually become this memoir spewed out of me over the course of five days at the end of 2014, during which I never took off my pyjamas. It coincided with a rare but severe depression relapse. Needing to write during that wintry week felt a lot like needing to barf, but not wanting the unpleasantness. Once it was over, it was a huge relief.

What I thought I had made was a document for my daughters that might answer some of the spoken and unspoken questions swirling around us at the time. I hoped it would explain how things had gone so terribly wrong. My original audience was just these two people. I also embarked on a project to digitize and caption images from my huge collection of family photos and ephemera. All I felt I had going for me at the time was the strength of my foremothers. I couldnt fix anything, but I could at least try to share that with my children.

My therapist once told me, You know, I dont think Ive ever met anyone with worse luck than you. His point being that I shouldnt blame myself for all the things that have gone awry; only some are the direct result of my life choices. My dad liked the old chestnut, If it werent for bad luck, I wouldnt have any luck at all! Maybe its the Irish thing; after all, on the Breen side, my story begins with a famine.

Id like to emphasize that plenty of people have far worse luck than me. I have always had loads of white and middle-class privilege, good food, access to health care, and a roof over my head, though the dwelling underneath it has become less commodious over time.

I have, however, experienced a series of rather momentous clusterfucks and a few cruel losses. I have bollocksed my selection of spouses. I have spent quite a while hovering around the poverty line. I have had to parent mostly unassisted. I have been a mother significantly longer than I had a mother, which has landed me in uncharted territory, where the landscape and its inhabitants can seem rather hostile.

What I inherited from my mother, my grandmother, and all the generations of aunts I never met is the ability to cope. I have coped, inelegantly but adequately, with everything that has walloped me so far. My foremothers creativity, humour, resilience, and gentleness have given me what power I have to either fight or accept each new shitty development (and perhaps to fully enjoy the good ones too). At this moment in history, when the refusal of reality is wreaking havoc globally, I am especially grateful for this gift.

Annie, Andy, and Andie

For a guy who tried to die repeatedly throughout the 1970s, my dad had a good innings. He made it past eighty, outliving my mum by almost seventeen years. Shed have been amazed.

I still unconsciously sprinkle my sentences with made-up words and arcane British expressions, like had a good innings. I must have picked them up from my maternal grandmother. She lived with us briefly, and I remember her reading aloud lots of bukes (thats books with a Lancashire accent), as I snuggled into her absent bosom, flattened by a double mastectomy.

Im chuffed when things go well, and gobsmacked by surprises. When visiting a new neighbourhood, I like to have a gruzzle. If you almost run me down while Im cycling, you may get a stern Flippin heck! I still use my grandmas century-old secretary desk; its moved with me a good dozen times. Its small, with only a hinged surface to work on, but I did all my translation assignments on it in university, huge dictionaries propped on top and on the floor around me. My fondness for grammar and language has never abated. I dont conjugate verbs as a form of meditation like she did, but I do play Scrabble to relax whenever I get the chance.

I remember my grandmother as rather sombre, influenced no doubt by her customary stern photo pose. One story that struck me was that she would do the dishes right after dinner without fail; she would not make an exception on holiday with the family in Ogunquit, Maine, even though it meant missing out on the sunset the others had gathered to enjoy on the beach. I spent a long time missing sunsets myself.

I do remember playing for hours with her magical button bag. The buttons would become charactersa grey elephant in the jungle, a fancy lady serving teaor we would sort them in every imaginable way: size, colour, texture, temperament. I still have that purple Seagrams drawstring sack, now faded to a greyish-mauve, and I keep adding buttons to it. When I pick it up, I am five years old again, entranced by a handful of little discs.

My older cousins remember the infamous Bad Manners Night, which happened from time to time when they were little, and throughout my mothers childhood as well. My grandmother was an absolute stickler for etiquette, with a knowledge of cutlery protocols to rival a Victorian footman. Table manners would have been symbolic of my grandparents upward mobilityan indication they had made something of themselves. According to family lore, my grandmother brooked no slouching, talking out of turn, inelegant chewing, or fork offences. However, on bad manners night, she not only slurped her soup, but wiped her mouth on her sleeve! Elbows were brazenly planted on the table, and on one occasion, right in the gravy. My grandfather was known to flick peas at his young dinner companions.

Like many immigrants, he came to Canada several years ahead of his fiance to establish himself. My grandmother joined him in 1916, stepping off the boat in Quebec City and marrying him that very day, as one could not spend the night with a man other than ones husband. She never got used to Canada; you can feel her homesickness in the postcards she sent to relatives back in England, wintry Krieghoff-style scenes on the front.

My grandmothers life transformed when she won a full scholarship to study at Bury Grammar School, an excellent private institution that paved her entrance into Manchester University (then Victoria University of Manchester) not long after it first admitted women. She completed a degree and teaching certificate, and became assistant headmistress at a girls school, instead of working in the cotton mills like her sisters. Her family would have been described as respectable working class. Her father was a stoker for the railroad; he lost an arm in a workplace accident but continued to be employed in other capacities. They lived in a two up, two down row house. Her four siblings were proud of their Rhoda and the older ones contributed to her tuition from their earnings.

My grandmother was an accomplished mathematician, about a hundred years before the kerfuffle over Teen Talk Barbies lament, Math class is tough! Her major was Latin (hence her command of verbs). She named her springer spaniel Gloria in Excelsis Deo (Glo for short). Both she and my mother were pioneering when it came to their education. It was my intention to match or exceed their academic achievements.