My mom, Tina Martha Doerksen, was born in
rural Montana on June 4, 1919 at the end of WWI. She lived 88 years and passed
away in November 2007. During her last five years dementia obscured her clarity
and memory. As a boy, adolescent and young adult I appreciated my mother for
all the customary reasons within happy families. My reasons for missing her
today are explained by her history that I understood later in my life. An
illness claimed her homesteading father's life when she was two years old and her
sibling brother Peter was four. With her two children, her mother Marie
emigrated to Saskatchewan and soon married Abram Willems who had been recently
widowed and left with the care of his six children. It was a marriage of mutual
convenience. Over time, this couple had five more children. Farming small
acreage was a grim way to support a large family. My mom was able to go to
school as far as grade 9 after which she had to find work, house keeping and
childcare to farming families. She met and married Edward Richard Unruh, the
youngest of four children. She was then 22 and he 26. I was her firstborn in
1942 and very soon as WWII involved Commonwealth countries, my Dad was enlisted
in the Royal Canadian Air Force. When the war ended, Mom and Dad made the
decision to move to St. Catharines, Ontario where factory jobs were available
and where many Mennonite friends and some family members already lived. Mom
bore two more sons, Murray in 1947 and Neale in 1953. She lost twin girls years
later when I was in my early teens. Dad's employment as an assembly line worker
required my mother's supplementary labour at anything that paid. In the early
years she was a housekeeper, and a seamstress. She made costumes each year for
the St. Catharines Figure Skating Club. In time she became known for her
cooking and from that developed a business, catering to small and large
gatherings, serving coffee and baked goods daily at the Ontario Paper Mill Home
Office, managing food services at Fair Havens Conference and Camp in summers.
She assembled her recipes and published a cook book. She was always a woman of
faith, and over time became respected and valued as a leader. She was humbled
and amazed that she, with her grade 9 education was given responsibility to
speak publicly and to lead a province wide women's organization for her church
denomination. My mind still sees her distinctive handwriting with which she
wrote her notes and letters and recipes. I would like to write this to her today, "Well done Mom. I love you."
