Growing up, I heard the worst things said of my birthplace, Windsor, Ontario, and the surrounding county. I remember hearing “the Armpit of Canada” and “Lunch Bucket Town”, the latter referring to the industries that made factory workers solidly middle class because they paid so well. I also remember killer sinus infections because those same industries caused rampant air pollution. I happily moved to Waterloo – for cleaner air, higher ed, and a fresh start after family troubles.
Like so many families in the late 1940s and early 1950s, ours suffered serious trauma. We did not endure unhealed WWII terrors that precipitated alcoholism and domestic violence. Nor were we affected by the systemic racism and poverty of those pre-civil rights times. Medical isolation and divorce led to our family’s dissolution.
At two, when my lung collapsed during a tonsillectomy, I received a “tuberculosis exposure” diagnosis. The government regulated health practices of the day meant that my recovery took place over seven months in what was then the Windsor Western Tuberculosis Sanitorium’s Preventorium, its children’s wing. Already an adventurous runner and climber at two, during my convalescence I lived in a crib with five sides – a cage – to ensure I rested during a period of strict quarantine. Found to be the carrier of the disease, my mother’s quarantine in the sanitorium’s adult wing lasted two years.
Given the world events of the time, a few months or years in quarantine didn’t seem like much of a trauma. Nuclear bomb testing, segregation enforcement in the south and red lining real estate practices in the north, revelations exposing Holocaust genocides, deepening antisemitism throughout the Joe McCarthy years, and deadly war chemicals contaminating North American farming were the sources of “real” trauma. These global horrors made personal quarantine in my socially aware, working-class family seem like “nothing”. Given the growing fault lines in society, this remains an accurate assessment.
And yet at two, no one has the cognitive development to understand the necessity for that kind of isolation. Nor does anyone at twenty-nine, my mother’s age. Quarantine policy allowed visitors once weekly, through a glass partition in my case, and on the faraway lawn viewed from a high balcony in my mother’s. Returning to my cage after visits from my grandmother, my older sister, and my aunt deepened feelings of a despair not easily remedied as I matured into a young girl, teen, and adult. I was the youngest in the children’s wing, along with five Indigenous children, ages six to twelve. I believe they suffered profoundly because of systemic racism and their relatives’ inability to make the journey from their northern communities to visit them. Together, we did our very best to survive unfamilar food, the sterile atmosphere, and the rough hands of strangers.
I’ve often wanted to reach out to the kind strangers whose names and faces I no longer remember, to thank them for including me in their little family. Because of them, a small part of me felt connected to life despite deadening hospital routines, Draconian policies, and the casual cruelty of personnel who believed that TB only sickened the morally depraved. And yet disease is a powerful equalizer. Many of those same cruel hospital workers discovered that with their own diagnoses.
Healing After Quarantine
When released after my seven-month caged quarantine, my widowed, maternal grandmother took me in. A wise woman, she initially sensed my distress over losing my hospital family. She spread a blanket on her back lawn, her small English garden abuzz with late-April life that immediately seeped into my bone marrow. John James, the neighbourhood tom cat, visited me regularly, one outcast comforting another. Every day the familiar songs of birds I recognized from before my caging enlivened the memories of what hospital routine had taken from me. Like an old friend, the sun found me, too. Within the arms of this harmonious bounty I imprinted, like a young duckling, on the steadfast presence we call the natural world. This Presence became my mother, my father, my entire family.
Trauma, whatever its source, ruptures our ability to trust ourselves and others. Whether caused by unhealed war experiences, gender violence, systemic injustice, or exclusion because of a physical disability or illness, emotional dysregulation, or DSM diagnosis, we are robbed of our sense of belonging. Each member of my family experienced this rupture of trust to lesser and greater degrees. Because of my age, I experienced it as broken attachment to my parents and my other family members.
It wasn’t until I moved away from Essex County in the sixties that I sensed my deep need to remember and nurture my relationship with the place that sparked my healing after my release from quarantine. Returning to Essex County during university breaks to visit Point Pelee and other county haunts provided a sense of belonging far deeper than anything I experienced with my human family. My uncomplicated, healthy attachment to the scents and sounds and sights of Essex County’s rare Carolinian forest and climate oddities in the Great Lakes Basin more than made up for the problematic relationships I had with my human relations. These relationships with the greater-than-human world grounded me, soothed my nervous system, assured me that I always had a place I belonged. Because I did belong, do belong, in this larger world. This is the world in which we all belong.
My Mother’s Journey
Having lost her sense of identity during quarantine, when my mother returned to our family she couldn’t hide her sense of estrangement. During our quarantine, my father left our family. My mother, loyal beyond reason, simply couldn’t understand how a husband could abandon his wife and children during a crisis. Hypervigilant, sleepless, and without emotional support, she entered a world that had abandoned her. No one stood at the sanitorium gates with a pamphlet explaining how to navigate the social stigma of divorce in those times, nor the stigma of TB quarantine. Because of our father’s absence, she became our family’s sole support and soon found comfort in the routines and responsibilities of her various workplaces and in the acknowledgment of her intelligence and skills. Work and unhealed trauma reactivity exhausted her, making her fall asleep in the early evening and wake, in the small hours, her anxieties churning.
Luckily, she too found solace in her mother’s garden. And when she was strong enough, she made sure we experienced the solace offered by the larger world of Essex County. Visits to Jack Miner’s, to River Canard, to Amherstburg, to Leamington, and most important, to Point Pelee, restored our small family’s ability to feel joy after that isolating time. As an artist, my mother saw harmony and beauty everywhere, her visions spilling out on the paper and canvas she kept close to hand. We had challenges when at home, but when out in the county, we sang, we explored, we listened to and told stories. And we ate. Strawberries, peaches, apples, pears, these our desserts after hot dogs, the speciality of the Burgess concession stand at the Leamington dock. On the way home from these weekly excursions into the county, we shopped at farm stands for vegetables grown in Essex County rich black soil.
Making Sense of the Senseless
It took decades of solitude and reflection to piece together how we survived quarantine and divorce as a family. One day, as I gazed at a tiny fragment of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Maine, I named the gift our tragedy bestowed. This gift took the form of our shared awareness of the natural world’s constancy, its beauty, its resilience. We’d lost our human family temporarily, and into the space created by our losses, my mother and grandmother invited Essex County riches.
if we are lucky, when we lose our birth family, we become members of a surrogate family that loves us, wounds and all. Our surrogate family included migratory bird and butterfly visitors and a rare swath of Carolinian forest complete with walking sticks, prickly pears, puff balls, and Lake Erie’s ever-shifting shorelines. In finding comfort and safety on these day trips, we were primed to name the whole of the natural world as our extended family.
When I left home, my surrogate parent kept me close through the gardens, parks, and forests of other places. Oceans, rivers, lakes, and streams felt like family because of my early relationship with Lake Erie and the Detroit River, Lake Saint Claire, and Point Pelee’s Marshes. Our small family learned that when the natural world flows into the spaces created by loss, we trust again, we recover our adventurousness, and we forgive our human kin for letting us down. From this perspective, the judgments against my birthplace lose their sting, and all of Essex County is, while not a human parent, an Archetypal one, steadfast, nurturing, always accepting. So are all places for those who open to relationships within the greater-than-human world.
For our Indigenous Teachers, this larger world contains All Our Relations. This kinship circle is a world of plants and trees, rocks and water, desert and marsh, a world that offers human beings an all-encompassing source of comfort and strength, of belonging. Like the rest of our kin, we are Earthlings long before we assume any national or political or individual identities. When we experience the deep conviction of belonging within a web of such varied richness, we long to protect and cherish it. No longer do we treat this sentient, ubiquitous Source of our existence as a never-to-be-depleted “resource”. We stop building pipelines and dams; we protect our trees and wetlands and oceans. We learn to listen to our inner cries for meaning and connection rather than the corporate voices urging us to pursue power, domination, fame, money.
As Earthlings, we mirror a suffering whole, and, at the same time, a whole capable of regeneration and restoration. Seeing ourselves as belonging to Earth, we change, become engaged participants in the web of life whose tatters are everywhere crying out for repair. When we claim our Earthling identity, every place becomes parent, and we are alive to being at home and responsible for what happens here. As Earthlings, we live in a circle whose centre is everywhere. When Place becomes Parent, we become fully human. This is our potential. This is our calling. This is our true identity. This is the Mother/Father/Sibling we all share.
Until next time,
Jane