Looking Back: Remember My Mother

Mary Margaret Kinnear , my dear departed mother, was as they say, one of a kind. People called her Marie and I eventually discovered that with her being born in Cape Breton that Mary was pronounced “Maree” there.  Marie was one of eleven children born to Katie Agnes and Bill McInnis.  Bill chose to leave his job as a coal miner and fisherman in Port Hood, Nova Scotia and to go out onto the prairies where he had heard there was good money to be made stooking wheat and perhaps have a farm of his own. A seven day train ride in 1917  brought them to an area around Cabri, Saskatchewan . There they spent a couple of years but the crops failed two years in a row and they were forced to abandon their farm. They eventually found their way here to the Pass where Bill worked in various mines, eventually putting in 26 years underground in Bellevue. 

Mom recalls as a young woman working for the Wolstenholme family in Bellevue cleaning their palatial home that entrepreneur Fred Wolstenholme had built for his wife.  Mom worked a whole year for them and every cent she made was used by her father to buy a cow. 

She recalled being sent out one time to fetch that cow and on locating this recalcitrant bovine,  found that this milk cow absolutely refused to come back home. Mom yelled and chased and smacked that cow with a stick for quite some distance until finally she got Betsy almost to their house in lower Bellevue. Her sisters, of which she had seven, were sitting on the door step, laughing and smacking their thighs as she approached. On asking what was so funny they informed her simply, “wrong cow”.  

Mom was married in 1938 to John Andrew Kinnear, a Scottish immigrant who came with his parents to the Pass for work in the mines. Mom raised five of us with kindness and humour and you just never knew what she would say or do, mostly in fun.  Pranks made the drudgery of housework and “making buckets” (lunches for work) a bit more fun. She had a keen mind and an amazing memory. We learned special poems and ancient songs from her that stay with us to this day. She was a great cook and baked bread most of her married life.  Hot cross buns at Easter and delicious cinnamon rolls that just got better the longer they were around. With five of us that usually wasn’t all that long. Feeding five kids that mostly grew over six feet tall took some logistics but she was always there with a good meal. 

Mom played the piano by ear and she loved to work those Nordheimer’s keys over with songs that all could sing. Her absolute favourite was Jim Reeve’s “ Put Your Sweet Lips Closer to the Phone”.  She would close her eyes while singing it and never miss a key. There was many a Saturday night, after the weekly trip to Bellevue to shop and perhaps some time in the legion, that mom and dad, often with some company or neighbours, would join together and sing the night away.  

She was president of the Coleman Catholic Women’s League for a time and I remember her going and cleaning the church. She saw us all baptized in that church, saw her two daughters married in that church and buried her beloved son Alex in that church. 

 Her practical jokes were legendary and she kept us on our toes.  When I was working underground at Vicary Mine, Mom was making buckets for three of us(Dad, brother Alex and I), who were all working on different shifts. It was a lot of work and she occasionally displayed her boredom with this task by what you might call “creative inserts”. They included things like a raw egg which one expects to be boiled and unsuspectingly cracks on one’s knee . Or there could be something carefully wrapped in tin foil that when unwrapped, usually in front of other miners, would not be a treat but instead just a piece of coal.  Turnabout is fair play they say, so when I had enough of this tomfoolery I caught a live mouse and left it in my bucket which she eventually opened to clean for the next shift. The antics stopped abruptly thereafter. 

She taught me the importance of memorization and I can recite many poems and sayings verbatim because of the important art of repetition, that fixes a memory in your brain.  She would make us recite it to her until we got it right. One of my favourite poems is called “The Country Boys Creed”, and speaks to how rural life is better than urban. The first two lines of that poem are, “ I believe that the country which God made is more beautiful than the city that man made. That life out of doors and in touch with the earth is the natural life of man”. 

One of my favourite pranks of hers involved an old heavy wooden ironing board.  My older brother Alex came in late from the Grand Union one night and snuck quietly into the house. Mom was waiting for him and hid until he, quiet as a mouse, slipped into the bathroom. While in there she leaned that heavy ironing board against the bathroom door so that when he opened the door it fell towards him and he fell backwards holding onto it.  Someone asked her this question once when she was ironing, “ Marie, how come you never hum or sing when your ironing?”  Her response was, “ I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was enjoying it.”

She was always up for something completely different. One day I left her to go to Blairmore on my motorcycle to watch the Barbwire Johnny parade. She was quietly ironing clothes on that old ironing board when I left. I parked in front of the Greenhill Hotel and as the parade approached I noticed two people dressed as clowns walking down the street, causing a ruckus and working the crowd. One clown was wearing a red polka dot costume and jumped on the hood of a convertible with a dignitary in it. Much to my chagrin someone in the crowd hollered out to me, “Hey Kinnear, isn’t that your mother?”  And it was. How she so quickly managed to move from ironing to being  dressed as a clown and show up for that parade I will never know. 

Mom passed in 2007 at the age of 93.  Her mother Katie Agnes lived to just short of 104. It is my fervent hope that this longevity that they enjoyed has been passed on to my brother and sister and I.  All mothers are committed to loving and nurturing their children, teaching them good morals and habits and being there for them every step of the way. To be a mother is to be the guiding light that sends us forth into the world.  Marie was certainly that for me. 

“Our parents cast long shadows over our lives. When we grow up, we imagine we can walk in the sun, free of them. We don’t realize, until it’s too late, that we have no choice in the matter; they’re always ahead of us. We carry them within us all our lives-in the shape of our face, in the way we walk, in the sound of our voice and in our skin, our hair, our hands, our hearts. We try all our lives to separate ourselves from them, and only when they are gone do we find we are indivisible.”  I am indeed my mother’s son. 

To my mind mother’s day is every day and we should always show gratitude each day for how they shaped our lives. And show gratitude that we, and our parents, are not thrust into a merciless war where children are obliterated from their mother’s lives, with all their hard work and love crushed. 

I pray for all the mothers in Gaza who are enduring unrelenting destruction.  There must be so much heartache.  I pray that all mothers, wherever they are, are allowed to raise their children in a peaceful world where love and respect reign. I am sure that all the mothers in the world share this same universal hope.  

The Heralds new feature writer Irina Alekseevna had this keen observation to share with me about our parents.  She said, “Only with age comes the realization of how great the influence of our parents is on us and that we are really their continuation. And not only parents, but also our other ancestors. Each person has a specific genetic cocktail, habits, attitudes and at the same time each one is unique unto themselves.”