Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

October 5, 1953. Alice was just twenty-two at the time.
    As anyone who has had children knows, a baby’s arrival changes the life parents have had – utterly. During the 1950s most of those changes fell almost wholly on the mother. In just over a year after Sheila’s birth Munro was pregnant again and, less than two years after that, she was pregnant a third time. Remembering this period, Munro has said, “I was reading all the time, things that I would never try to read now, and [I would] write, and of course keep house and have babies to look after and dodge the neighbours.” (This dodging, she now says, happened when they lived on West King’s Road, not on Lawson.) More than this, Vancouver was not a place Munro took to readily. The image of the narrator in “Material,” pregnant and sulky in the midst of unceasing rains, captures her feeling of discomfort, but the best imageof Alice Munro, as young mother in Vancouver during the fifties, is found in “The Moons of Jupiter.” There, Janet, the narrator, says that she was offended when her father told her that the years she was growing up were a blur to him. She is offended because those same years are so vivid to her. Yet the years when her own children
    were little, when I lived with their father – yes, blur is the word for it. I remember hanging out diapers, bringing in and folding diapers; I can recall the kitchen counters of two houses and where the clothesbaskets sat. I remember the television programs –
Popeye the Sailor, The Three Stooges, Funorama
. When
Funorama
came on it was time to turn out the lights and cook supper. But I couldn’t tell the years apart. We lived outside Vancouver in a dormitory suburb: Dormir, Dormer, Dormouse – something like that. I was sleepy all the time then; pregnancy made me sleepy, and the night feedings, and the West Coast rain falling. Dark dripping cedars, shiny dripping laurel; wives yawning, napping, visiting, drinking coffee, folding diapers; husbands coming home at night from the city across the water. Every night I kissed my homecoming husband in his wet Burberry and hoped he might wake me up; I served up meat and potatoes and one of the four vegetables he permitted. He ate with a violent appetite, then fell asleep on the living-room sofa. We had become a cartoon couple, more middle-aged in our twenties than we would be in middle age.
    After this vignette, Munro writes a summary two-sentence paragraph that, along with the ending of “Miles City, Montana,” stands out as a profound articulation of the child-parent relation: “Those bumbling years are the years our children will remember all their lives. Corners of the yards I never visited will stay in their heads.” 28
    The two houses, with their separate kitchen counters and places for laundry baskets, correspond to the Munros’ moves. They were in the house on West King’s Road – a small, one-storey bungalow they moved into in 1953 – and lived there for just a few years before in 1956they moved to 2749 Lawson Avenue, West Vancouver. It was a larger, grander house, ringed round by luxuriant hedges and bushes and with a view looking down over other residential streets and Marine Drive to Burrard Inlet with its ships at anchor west of the Lion’s Gate Bridge and, more distant, Vancouver itself. There they lived until the family moved to Victoria during the summer of 1963 in order to open Munro’s Bookstore. On Lawson Sheila and her younger sister, Jenny Alison, born June 4, 1957, grew, played, and went to school. The Munro family left that house on Lawson during the summer of 1961 to make a trip back home to Ontario, for a visit that became the basis of “Miles City, Montana,” one of Munro’s most autobiographical stories.
    Between Sheila and Jenny, Alice and Jim had a second daughter. Catherine Alice Munro was born early on the morning of July 28, 1955. But before that day was through she was dead, having been born without functioning kidneys. Initially, it looked as if the Munros would face a long-term infirmity. The Munros opted to have Catherine buried without a funeral in an available grave – the body placed in a small box, a common practice in such situations – without any formal marker or service. In subsequent years, Munro was deeply affected by the memories of Catherine; she told Ross that she had recurrent dreams about Catherine until Jenny was born in 1957, dreams that involved a lost baby left outside. Another story