Discussing the concept of "domesticity," the author, Jane Brocket, mentions that she has always been drawn to paintings of family life in past generations, whenever she comes across them in galleries and museums. They are so revealing about life in other times.
Here is one from her book - a picture of a Victorian mother and her children in England (an 1878 painting entitled "A Life Well Spent" by James West Cope.)
Although my mothering experience came in another continent a hundred years later, I can completely identify with the mother in the painting. I have fond memories of multi-tasking - being with my children, cooking supper, while they did homework on the kitchen table. (My sock knitting came a few years later - but I did start to quilt around that time!) The older daughter, reading a book while rocking the baby's cradle in the foreground, is also learning to multi-task!
What pictures of domestic life does our family have? I wondered, heading to my photo album.
Hardly any!! (I guess we didn't think to take pictures in the kitchen!)
But I did find one, taken by a photographer friend. (He must have brought his lights, otherwise we would never have been able to take clear pictures in our dark kitchen. Flashbulbs weren't common yet in the early 1950s.) I think his aim was to see people "in action" - so here I stand with my mother beside the new gas stove!
But I did find some authentic glimpses of family life in our Village of Hay Lakes, Alberta in the late-1940s, where my father owned a garage - Dick's Repair Shop - and we lived in an apartment above it.
Like me holding my baby brother... (Note the clothes line of diapers in the back yard.)
Here is my young aunt Marion taking my cousins, Rose-Marie and Gary, and me for a wheelbarrow ride...
And a day at the lake... our family arrived in the only vehicle we owned - a large truck!
I don't recall having any "real" play equipment. Just a pile of sand and a few old tires...
We played where our parents worked... And we were happy!
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