NOT DEFINED BY OUR OCCUPATION

"What did you do?," asks the rhuematologist peering over her glasses. "This is impressive."

She is perusing my chart of how auto-immune disease has impacted me over the course of my life and the stresses that have added fuel to the disease process.

What did I do?

I hardly know. The years have whirled away, faster than I could grasp.

Truth to tell, I feel as though I lived in the moments while managing the chaos that has forever raged around me.

At sixteen, I thought I'd not live to see thirty, but the danger passed and at that auspicious milestone I became a mother; the only job I could never have again. I gloried in my children, their growth, their personalities, their joie de vivre. With them, I experienced the childhood I never had.

At forty, I was once again trying to right my world turned upside down by abuse and divorce and poverty. What did I do? I was a contract driver and drove the roads at night while my children slept so that I could be with them by day. During the days, I prepared meals for patients on restrictive diets and delivered them from my home. We survived.

At fifty, my health had utterly collapsed and through the social benefits tribunal, the province declared me disabled. What did I do? The kindest and best of man offered me and my two children a roof over our heads and three square meals a day in return for supper at 5 o'clock and his shirts washed, starched and pressed. Then when he sold his home, we were given an apartment in a handicapped building. What did I do? I became the Flower Lady, building gardens for other residents to grown vegetables and keeping planters on the entrance patio filled with seasonal greenery.

Then the unexpected happened. I chanced upon a man I once knew. We found ourselves both lonely. We began as companions and then married, blending our two families into one covering every decade from 80 to under ten.

What did I do? Everything! The answer to every question was ask Cathie/Mom. I once again cleaned a 1500sg ft house, I cooked meals for anywhere from 6-14. I struggled to bring order to the chaos of his fifty years of hoarding. I gardened both for beauty and for bounty, introducing the grandchildren to horticulture. I finished raising my children. My husband and I traveled widely, attended the deathbed of several family members, took photographs and I wrote about our adventures.