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My grandmother was Bernadette Picard. She married very young, at sixteen or seventeen, had three daughters and by the time she was twenty two, she had her ovaries removed. This is significant because it would have altered her personality to some degree (in the absence of hormone supplements). From what my mom says she had little interest in doing the house work. My mother was quickly identified as the one to do all the house work.
My grandfather lost his job at the newspaper when "L'Événement" was bought by another paper and his position as manager of distribution became redundant. I also know that their appartment burned. So the family ended up living in a house on chemin Gomin, a house owned by a Senator (this house is today right in the middle of the Laval University campus). The problem with that arrangement was that it was in the middle of nowhere, my mom was forced to take care of the whole family, right when she was a young woman with hopes of finding love. Mom's sister who worked downtown had to walk a mile in the woods to get to a tram stop on St-Cyrille. My mom does not have fond memories of those times. My dad never felt warmly towards my mom's parents because they treated her like a servant. Everybody involved probably has a different view of what happenned and why. All I can say is that when my grandfather talked of moving to Montreal and wanted my mom to come along to continue cooking meals, she politely declined. Apparently that didn't go over too well. My grandpa was trying to start a business distributing magazines. He probably was going to be very busy and needed his home life taken care of. At that point my mom had met my dad and they wanted to start a life together.
I never understood how my grandfather could treat my mom like that when he seemed to really care in all those summer pictures at the cottage. I guess in those days the father's authority played a bigger role. But still it seems like a pretty big bias on his part, and it was unfair to my mother.
In any case, what I remember is that my grandmother after she became a widow, would spend months at my two aunts' (she lived at my aunt Monique's) but would come for dinner once or twice a year, out of a sense of duty it seemed. The Brunet kids never had a chance to feel close to her, we saw her so little. Of course my cousins would have had a totally different experience, but that would be my point wouldn't it?
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