Generations

My mother grew up in rural Finland, in a traditional red wooden cottage. She and her sister slept in the side building, perpendicular to the main house. From the rocking chair in the middle of the living room, you look through the far window and all you see for miles is field and forest – or, if it’s wintertime, snow upon snow. In the summertime, the children trekked cows through the forest from one pasture to the other. The next house over is a short distance; the nearest town a twenty minute bicycle ride away.

I grew up in a neighbourhood of one of the biggest cities in England in a four story house with a wild garden. A short distance away is a row of family-owned Indian and South Asian restaurants, including our favourite spot. There was a hole in the hedge that joined our garden with our neighbour’s which I would clamber through sparingly, usually to retrieve my brother’s errant tennis balls. In the next street over lived a man who used to shoot the squirrels (and once, by accident, a neighbour’s cat) from his backyard, the sound echoing through the densely-inhabited area.

She moved south to the city for university to study English; the post-war generation, where everyone had access to higher education, regardless of their background. I moved south to the city for university to study Linguistics, exactly as I was expected to coming from an academically-focused family, albeit at a time when a bachelors degree alone could put you into crippling debt. She moved to Britain in the 1970s, already engaged to my English father. She settled in quickly, but struggled to find work. I moved to Canada two years ago, by myself, for a change of scenery. I picked up my first job within a week of arriving.

Through my teenage years and into my early twenties, I’ve always felt as though our lives couldn’t have been more different. It was a source of frequent frustration and tension between us. She claimed I was impatient, always in a rush to do the next great thing I’d thought of. I claimed she couldn’t understand, that my path was too divergent from hers for her to be able to grasp my motivations. It’s only as I’ve grown older that I’ve come to realize how parts of our trajectories have been the same. Only now that I’ve begun to grow an appreciation for the fact that, maybe, my mother might know what she’s talking about. Only now that I have been editing her memoirs, have I realised how truly similar we are as people, if generations apart. 

The messages she has instilled in me over the years take on a new clarity as I consider them in light of her own history and the paths she has taken. I have always been encouraged to be independent and to think for myself, by my whole family. I was the youngest by a mile, a mere thirteen year age gap between me and the youngest of my siblings, but I was rarely made to feel the lesser for it. I was welcomed at dinner parties with work colleagues, rather than kept quiet to my bedroom. I would sit and absorb from those around me, a curious mind growing and expanding.

This set me on a steady path as a young adult. Although I scrambled as much as any to find my footing in the first days as I set off to university, fundamentally, I knew how to take care of myself. I knew how to exist in my community as a sole entity without needing someone to tell me which turn to take next. That was at eighteen years old.

My mother was living almost independently from the age of eleven, when weekdays were spent staying with families in the city where the high school was. Her and five other children from the area took the bus into town. Armed with their season ticket and enough pocket money to cover any incidentals for the five days coming, they then trekked back again each Friday to spend the weekend at home. 

Moving to Britain, if a little to foreign to her, was not something she faced alone, with the support of her husband’s family and colleagues there to greet her. For me, the many challenges of moving so far away from home were more logistical: where would I live? Where would I work? But the alone of it all never bothered me too much, in part from a fair pot of solo travelling experience stashed in my backpack. But her ingrained resourcefulness would come in handy in the years to come, as she continued to struggle to find work and soon, too having child to support on a young academic’s salary.

This resourcefulness that she passed down to me has fuelled my occasionally nomadic lifestyle. I’ve become accustomed to springing from one day to a next, whether that be keeping myself from getting lost while travelling or finding somewhere to stay in a pinch when, two weeks in to having moved to Toronto, I found myself homeless the day before the long weekend.

But it’s certainly true to say that we came to our experiences from different backgrounds. I was privileged to be a seasoned traveller by the time I was a teenager thanks to my father’s work. I was the child in the back row of a conference hall with her nose in a book who benefited from time exploring and learning from wonderful places with my mother at my side. My mother’s travels were more reserved, aided by scholarships that took her and her classmates to eastern Europe. 

It is also a different time. The world of today looks so different to that of the 1970s – at least, in some ways. (Politically speaking, Britain seems to be on a repeating twenty year loop but now is not the time for my socialist manifesto). At my age, my mother was already married and expecting her first child. I’m a far way off from those particular life milestones. Sometimes, trying to reconcile those generational differences can be difficult. Yet, whenever I approach another inevitable quarter-life crisis, anxiously fretting over all the things I haven’t yet achieved that I think I ought to have by now, she will consistently be the first one there to reassure me. 

At this stage, my mother has been in Britain longer than she was in Finland. The government’s recent xenophobic stances and the ensuing convoluted paperwork aside, she feels at home there. Her family is largely there, although we’ve scattered a little in recent years. Only now, my father retired and thoughts of moving coming to mind, have they considered returning to Finland. 

I grew up a city kid, more adept to winding concrete than to dusty backroads. The closest I’ve come to herding cows is the neighbour’s chickens I fed last summer while at a cottage in Finland and that was more than enough for me. But the life lessons passed down to me from my mother don’t stop at the end of the pasture. They adapt to the city streets that I am more accustomed to treading, guiding me forward.