Finding Mom at Eaton's

Ellen Pilon is a library assistant in the Patrick Power Library at Saint
Mary’s University in Halifax.

In the “Afterword,” George Morrissette explains the germ and growth of Finding Mom. The poem stems from “obsessions,” as he calls them, which he tried to express intermittently over the past decade in verse as well as in oil painting and watercolour. Finally he was able to divert the obsession to the typewriter, experiencing “the reward which poets sometimes receive, a gift after years of writing in loneliness and apparently endless failure. The poem seemed to be writing itself.” The reward Morrissette felt is justified; the poem is a beautiful work of art. The obsessions emerge as emotions and sensibilities felt by the poet in his search for his family identity, and they are transmitted to the reader.

An adopted son’s search for his true parents is the theme. The poet’s father “made two / women pregnant / within two weeks” and chose (or was forced) to marry the woman who was not the poet’s mother. The poet, George, was kept by nuns in an orphanage, then adopted by Aurore and Fred, a Metis couple who gave him a good home. At 15 George learns that he is adopted, but he waits 17 years to discover the identity of his parents. The poem is not a recrimination or lamentation; George accepts that he is adopted. The poet feels incomplete not knowing his origin: what do his parents look like; what are they like; are they, and thus he, Russian, Jewish, French? Once this need to know is satisfied, the poet would be “free / to go on / with the task / of mastering myself.” He finds his mother, who agrees to meet him at “the Eaton’s statue at quarter to 5.” A brief meeting is all he asks from her, and it satisfies him; but from this meeting develops an overwhelming desire to know his father. The father will not meet him or acknowledge him, but George’s need to know him dwindles and fades as “Fred my father” becomes sick and dies. The natural and the adopted blend. The roles of father and son are muted. George son of Fred, in the final section, emerges as George the father.