By Patrycja Romanowska, PitR 2006 alumna
EDMONTON -- It was the eve of the final birthday of my 20s and the last one I will ever admit to. Given this momentous occasion, my friends, family and the half dozen people informally living at my house had already been celebrating for five days. I was exhausted.
Thinking that pushing 30 entitled me to certain privileges - such as, perhaps, taking a nap - I decided to forego an hour's worth of eating or fighting with my brother and get a bit of shut-eye. I went upstairs and lay down beside my boyfriend, who, sapped of his will to live after only three days with only half of my family, was trying to muster the energy for yet another evening of what passes for fun around here.
We had been lying there for less than five minutes when my visiting mother - whose ominous presence was the reason we were carefully lying atop the covers - came into my room, got up on my bed, walked between us to the wall and nailed a picture of the Virgin Mary directly above our heads.
If I were someone else, I might have been so embarrassed that I would have burned right through the bed, the floor, the next floor and the concrete in the basement. Instead, I calmly got up, walked downstairs, poured a glass of wine and tried to see the nearest hills, for which, I was certain, my recently acquired boyfriend was already running.
I wasn't sure whether this was worse than the Christmas before last when my mother pushed me into a chair vacated by a caroling priest and announced triumphantly to everyone at the party - including, of course, the guy I had a crush on - that this was a Polish tradition to ensure the old maid of the house gets married soon. Months later that guy, who unsurprisingly never became my boyfriend, still brought it up.
Perhaps it is just immigrant mothers. In the two decades since we came to Canada, I have often wondered if my mom's behaviour was a throwback to her upbringing in Catholic, communist and (relatively) culturally homogenous Poland or if she was simply trying to ruin my life. Granted, I spent only a third of the time she did growing up in Poland but I readily embraced Canadian secularity, tolerance and local culture.
Not so my mom. From going onto small-town radio to ask for help finding her lost babushka (who calls it that??) to trying to integrate cabbage into western dishes like lasagna, my mother never let us forget that we were not from here.
After many years of rebellion and resentment, this birthday has procured an acceptance of the cultural influences I once rejected - and an understanding of how they have shaped me.
For instance, the image of the Virgin Mary was placed above two pieces of art depicting a mother and child, a subconscious manifestation of the religious images I was inundated with as a child. Similarly, I often cook Polish food, cabbage and all, and have a penchant for scarves (which, for the record, I don't call babushkas).
It is also worth noting that even after last weekend my boyfriend didn't run away, because - age being the harbinger of wisdom - this time around, I made sure he was Polish. CR
This column originally appeared in the Edmonton Sun.
Among other things, Patrycja Romanowska is graduate student in natural resource economics at the University of Alberta. In her parallel life, she is also the associate editor of Alberta Oil Magazine, an Edmonton Sun columnist and a mother to a beautiful five-year-old boy. In the oodles of free time that this leaves her, she cooks, bakes and goes on wilderness trips.
