Another Strange and Wonderful Story

‘MUMS’ was the acronym the women gave their union as they emerged from the battered women’s shelter, empowered to take on all manner of injustice and brutality.

MUMS

Mothers United for Metro Shelter.

This was 1984….A brave New World was available, if only we had the map, and the wisdom to use it.

MUMS had a great start. 6 women who had joined together to protest the prejudicial and falsely inflated Halifax rental housing market. They held up traffic on the Angus L MacDonald bridge one day, and handed out fliers describing the pitiful state of housing for poor women and children in Halifax. Describing how they were dubbed the ‘welfare bums’, but how $700.00 out of the $900.00 they were ‘given’ each month to support a family went to line the pockets of landlords. How hard it was to feed and clothe children on $200 a month.

Have you ever noticed  the ‘nickle and diming’ that goes on? It’ will be the death of us.

MUMS were radical in that they suggested that (aside from the fact that the bulk of the widows and orphans fund  they were given  each month was going to the fattest people in town) the true state of affairs is that they were , in essence, paid employees of the government, bringing up the next generation of wage slaves in the absence of that brutal ‘milk cow’ they used to call their husbands. They were a Union ,of mothers, employed by the government, enduring the full stigma of the hand out. No benefits but the health and happiness of their children, the sort you can fashion on the meagerest of wages. A very hard job.

They called for a public demonstration of their powerlessness, and they gave a date for their intended act of civil disobedience. They planned to march on City Hall, and hand the Mayor an eviction notice, and give him a bogus cheque for $900.00, and tell him to find new accommodations for his activities.

On the designated date, they set out from a site half way down Gottigen St, a place heavily damaged by munitions explosions in the various World Wars. A place where the corpses of the Titanic washed up, along with their sad, water logged possessions. They walked along the water front, to City Hall, these 6 women…..so purposeful, proud, and adamant.

On the way, they gathered others… folks watching from the side lines, but invigorated by their passion. When they passed the docks next to the bridge separating Halifax from Dartmouth, the entirety of the union of dock workers joined them.

A half dozen women, and several hundred men, converged on City Hall. The women served their eviction notice,  and the Mayor, noting so many potential voters in his presence, made the necessary promises.

A rent controlled apartment complex with a daycare. 

The Mayor never made good on this.

But I told my daughter about these stories to tell her about the people we come from, the places we’ve been. The dreams lost, the promise shown and denied. The ability of people to rise above the squalour, the hope of brother and sisterhood.

I can’t tell the story about those dock workers joining the ‘Mother’s Union’ without crying, and I did some serious boo-hooing when I told my daughter about them…….a silly middle aged woman crying while she sat on her livingroom floor in the middle of America, so far away from the fray.

And I cry now. But it’s for the same reasons that I told my daughter as she patted my head and kissed me while I cried on the ‘Tree of Thanks’ day.

"Sometimes, people are so good, and they have so much dignity, that they just break your heart."

I only wish I could’ve laughed.