Naps and Attempted Rape

Most of the time, the matriarch is fine; mornings are great. But, after lunch, it can be seen in her face that she is slowing down; I take her for drives in the afternoon and she often falls asleep.  My children used to fall asleep in the car when they were little and in some ways, the matriarch is very like them.  Afternoon naps are good for the very old and the very young. 

In the twenties, the owner of a hotel in my mother-in-law's hometown attempted to rape her.  She fought him off and told him she wasn't that kind of girl.  The matriarch didn't quit her job and the owner of the hotel apparently never bothered her again but she remembers that afternoon as though it was yesterday.  She had never told my husband about the event and it was terrible to see it still bothered her eighty years later.  Later, when she was seventeen, the matriarch married her first husband; he was an alcoholic and beat her for almost fifteen years. He would get drunk, break all the mirrors in the house and then go after her.   When the Second World War broke out, he enlisted and she waved him off with the promise that if he returned the same man, she would leave him.  The matriarch told me that she had looked at herself in the mirror the day her husband enlisted and made a decision that she wanted a life without being hit.  She had elementary school education, lived in a farming community, and had no prospects but a lifetime of abuse. But, she knew she could do better. When her husband was sent overseas, she moved to Toronto and got a job doing laundry.  Eventually, she divorced him; in 1947, she became a known adulterer because it was easier to get the divorce on the grounds of female adultery than for reasons of battery.  No man ever hit her or threatened her sexually again.  My mother-in-law considers this an accomplishment in her life.