Clan MacKenzie

A wooden sign made by my mother hangs on the front of our house.  It features our house number, a plaid tam-o-shanter, and these words:  Clan MacKenzie.

We live in an old Catholic rectory.  We aren’t Catholic ourselves, although many people in town assume we are.  That’s because there are six of us kids – Karen, Brian, Heather, Rory, Tricia, and Dana. People hear that “Mac” and see all those kids and assume we’re Irish Catholic, when in fact we’re Scottish and English Protestant.  My parents aren’t at all opposed to using birth control.  They’re just not very good at it. 

As the six of us make our way through the public school system, teachers can pick us out on the first day of school just by the way we look – pale white skin, glossy black hair, crooked teeth, pointy chin, green or brown eyes, glasses.  The exception is my brother Rory, who has blondish brown hair and blue eyes.  He’s a throwback to my father’s Cape Breton ancestors.  But he has the unmistakable MacKenzie face.

The old rectory is an interesting house to grow up in.  It’s divided into two parts.  The front of the house belonged to the priests.  There’s a living room and a dining room on one side of the front hall and a grand staircase on the other side.  That staircase, with its carved wooden bannister, leads up to two large bedrooms and a large bathroom.  Our parents sleep in one of the big bedrooms and some combination of kids share the other one.

The back of the house belonged to the maids, who cooked and cleaned for the priests.  There’s a big country kitchen, with a narrow, crooked staircase that leads up from the kitchen to two tiny bedrooms and the back bathroom.  As the oldest, I have one of these small bedrooms all to myself.  At times, various of my siblings are awarded the other one.

The back staircase is the source of constant accidents for us kids.  It’s enclosed on both sides with walls, so it’s kind of dark.  And there’s a door at the bottom, which is usually kept closed to keep the youngest of us from climbing up unescorted.  So when, as often happens, one of us loses our footing on the skinny, slippery wooden stairs and tumbles down, insult is added to injury when we get to the bottom and smack our heads on the closed door.

There’s a sort of middle zone in the house, where there is both a downstairs and an upstairs study, each of which is more of an alcove off the hall than a proper room.  My parents wall off the upstairs study to make another small bedroom and the downstairs study to make a room for my father’s desk and my mother’s sewing machine. To keep our toys and junk out of the living room, they turn the dining room into a TV and rec room.  We don’t understand until we’re older that “rec” stands for “recreation.”  Given the usual state of that room, we think it stands for “wrecked.”

My family has a feeling about itself – that we truly are a clan, that being one of the MacKenzies means being part of something special. My mother is the center of our family. She’s the glue that holds us all together. She seems to have boundless energy.  In addition to taking care of us kids and running the household, she grows flowers and vegetables, sews clothes for us and herself, paints and wallpapers our old house, and sings in the choir at our church.  She even takes a photography class through the mail and when she finishes, with straight A’s on all of her tests, she sets up a darkroom in the back bathroom.

My mother is younger than other kids’ moms. When the saying, “Never trust anyone over thirty” becomes well-known, my mother has four kids, with a fifth on the way, but is only twenty-seven. I’m nine years old at the time and find this pretty amusing. My mother is a bit of a kid herself.  She often goes around the house singing the song, “I Won’t Grow Up,” which Mary Martin sings in the movie Peter Pan.  She’s not very strict with us and doesn’t have many rules. She’s a fun, loving mother.

Money is always tight, but my mother knows how to make the family’s resources stretch. She keeps a cast-off appliance box in the rec room closet.  It’s full of hand-me-downs from our cousins and second hand clothes my mother has picked up at church rummage sales.  She buys any piece of children’s clothing that’s in good condition and not too expensive.  She figures it’s bound to fit one of us. Sometimes my mother lets my siblings and me play in the box.  We snuggle together on top of the clothes, like a litter of kittens in a towel-lined basket.  When the seasons change, she gathers us all in the rec room and goes through the box.  My mother throws a flannel shirt that looks like it will fit to Brian, a pair of corduroy overalls that seem like the right size to Heather.  We try on clothes all afternoon and soon each of us has a pile of “new” things.  

My parents’ marriage involves a traditional division of labor – while my mother takes care of the kids and the house, my father earns a paycheck as an engineer and later a manager. He mows the lawn and shovels the driveway. He repairs broken appliances and writes the checks to pay the bills. While he reads to us kids every evening, plays games with us, and drives us to many of our activities, he seems peripheral to me. My mother is the center.

When I’m in high school, my mother begins to have terrible headaches. By the time I’m in college, she is diagnosed with depression, and then manic-depressive psychosis. But my parents do not accept this diagnosis. They eventually become convinced that my mother has MCS, multiple chemical sensitivity, and that this is the cause of her wild mood swings and episodes of dangerously low blood pressure. With my mother frequently ill and nonfunctional, we start to lose that glue that has always held us together and our family starts to fall apart

My parents develop a complicated system of rules that my siblings and I must follow in order to spend time with them, believing that these behaviors will protect my mother from the scents that threaten her. For example, we must take a shower and wash our clothes the minute we enter the house, to get rid of any scents we may be carrying in our hair or on our clothes. Those of us who struggle to accept the MCS diagnosis or don’t follow the rules, even accidentally, are no longer welcome to be part of my parents’ life. Some of us become estranged from my parents and our family becomes hopelessly broken. Our feeling that we are part of something special is lost.  We are no longer Clan MacKenzie.