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by Alexandra Heilbron

Source: The Avonlea Traditions Chronicle, Issue No. 29, Autumn 1999.

Last year while working on The Lucy Maud Montgomery Album, I wanted to go back and take another look at LMM's life. I wanted The Album to be special, to take a fresh look at her life from a new perspective. One thing which really stood out was LMM's harsh criticism of anyone she lived with. Her Macneill grandparents, her husband Ewan, and most of her maids.

I studied these relationships from all angles, reading not only her journals, but her letters and her autobiography. I had the added benefit of information gathered during the interviews I conducted with people who personally knew LMM.

To understand her relationships with her grandparents and her husband, it became necessary to go back to 1876, to the death of LMM's mother. At the time, LMM was a tiny toddler with a father who, as it turned out, was simply not prepared to stay around and raise her. LMM had many relatives, all of whom are lovingly portrayed in her journals. But none of these loving relatives took her in.

So who decided to make the sacrifice to bring up this little girl, who was virtually an orphan?

It was two people who are not at all lovingly portrayed by LMM in her journals-Grandmother and Grandfather Macneill, who had probably been looking forward to retirement now that their children were grown.

Most likely they had not been expecting or wanting to start over again with a toddler, but when the challenge was presented, they rose to the occasion, opening their home and their lives to this tiny girl.

However, it's important to understand that this was no ordinary child. This was a child who was abandoned by her mother through death, and then again willingly abandoned by her father. Dr. Laura Schlessinger, noted Family and Marriage Counselor, recently said on her radio program in reference to a father who had moved away to another State when his daughter was small, and hadn't seen her since: "Neglect is one of the most abusive things you can do to a child. Better you should break a bone. Bones heal. The psychological impact of abandonment runs deep."

We can see how deep, when we study the comments LMM made about people like her grandparents and her husband, and the choices she made in her relationships with men. If you read the article "Maud's Beaux" in The LMM Album, you'll see she had many, many beaux, and in every case, it appears LMM led them to believe she was very interested in them. And in certain cases, it appears that she did have a loving relationship, such as with Will Pritchard. But each time, before it could get too serious, she would laugh it off, saying she wasn't all that interested, or claim that she couldn't understand how Jack (or Lem or Lewis, etc.) had misunderstood their relationship to be more than friends (even though she'd been spending every evening with him and being driven about to parties with him). It becomes clear that LMM kept her emotions distant from men, because she didn't want to run the risk of abandonment again. If her father, whom she loved dearly and who she believed loved her back could abandon her, then certainly these men who claimed to love her were capable of exactly the same thing.

Strangely enough, LMM's father, even though he abandoned her, could do no wrong in her eyes. She always spoke of him in the most loving terms possible. Why? And just as perplexing, why did she criticize her grandparents so harshly? This becomes more clear when we take a modern analogy-an example of a divorced family of today.

In most cases, the mother gets custody of the children, while Dad gets them on the weekends. With him, they go to the zoo or an amusement park. They eat junk food. They stay up until all hours. Basically, he has fun with them.

Even if Dad is too busy for the kids because he has a new girlfriend and cancels some of the weekends he was supposed to be with them, this doesn't change their feelings for him. Ironically, it makes them all the more anxious to spend time with him, to please him and to make sure he loves them. They desperately want to feel they have not been abandoned by their father, so they go all out to make themselves lovable to him. In the process, Mom gets to be the disciplinarian-usually a thankless role. They see her every day. She's the one enforcing the law, making sure they eat their vegetables and go to bed on time.

This is exactly what happened in LMM's case. Her father was never around, so he could do no wrong. He wasn't the one telling her she couldn't go out on a school night.

An example is when LMM's grandparents wouldn't let her cut her hair in the latest style-bangs. She then asked her father (on a rare occasion when he was in Cavendish) if he would give her permission. LMM wrote: "Father wanted me to have them-he always wanted me to have any innocent thing I desired. Oh, how well he understood a child's heart!" But when she asked him, he said he was afraid if he let her, it would offend her grandmother. So it was enforced in her mind that her father loved her and wanted her to have whatever she wanted, while her grandmother was the 'bad guy.'

Shortly after that, her father left to go live many miles away in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. LMM didn't see him again until she was a teenager, when she went to visit him (and his new family). After living with him for approximately a year, LMM decided she wanted to come home to "dear old Cavendish" as she called it, and her grandparents.

Something happened during her year in Prince Albert which proves to the reader that LMM's fantasies about her father were just that-fantasies. LMM tells of a photo taken of her and her friends at a Sunday School picnic. She wanted a copy to remember her friends and her year in Saskatchewan, and was extremely disappointed when her father told her it was too expensive. The reason was that he and his new wife had just had studio portraits done of their children-LMM's half siblings. So much for his wanting her to have any innocent thing she desired.

LMM's complaints about her grandmother in the journals were numerous and they were extreme. Yet, when LMM became very ill at her Grandfather Montgomery's home in Park Corner and slipped into delirium, she pined for her Grandmother Macneill to come take care of her.

Grandmother Macneill was in LMM's own words, "The only mother I ever knew." When LMM came out of her delirium to find Grandmother Macneill was there, taking care of her, LMM couldn't believe it was really her. She later wrote in her autobiography, The Alpine Path, "I was so happy, and could not bear to be out of her arms. I remember stroking her face continually in amazement and delight." She was a child, she was sick, and she wanted her mom.

LMM also remembered how her grandmother, when baking a pie or cake, would make a smaller version especially for her granddaughter, and when it was ready would call her in from playing to sample the treat, fresh and piping hot from the oven.

Grandmother Macneill also helped fund Maud's education at Dalhousie University, and earlier, when LMM attended Prince of Wales College, seventy-year-old Grandmother Macneill drove her granddaughter all the way to Charlottetown by horse and buggy to attend the school. This was a long trip, for which the old lady had to get up at the crack of dawn, returning home by twilight. She did the same thing for LMM at the end of the school term.

Kenneth Macneill, Maud's younger cousin, had this to say about Grandmother Macneill: "Grandmother was one of the most lovable, thoughtful, competent and unselfish women I ever had the privilege of knowing. She utterly spoiled me with her attentions and kindnesses. She was surely an unforgettable lady."

Obviously he wasn't the only grandchild spoiled and loved by Grandmother Macneill. When looking at all these facts, it becomes clear that LMM was a very lucky girl to have been taken in by her grandparents. She may have had complaints about being raised by the strict, elderly couple, but she owed them a debt of gratitude. And a close examination of her journals does show reference to the fact that she did appreciate them for the sacrifices they made for her.

In fact, it appears that although she loved her grandparents and her husband, because they were there every day, the small annoyances which the closest people in one's life provide became inflated in her thoughts. Once written down, they were off her chest and forgotten. She didn't have a confidant to whom she could voice these complaints, getting some sympathy or feedback in the process, so she had to turn to her journal.

Perhaps because her journal was-as she described it-her grumble book-the gratitude and love expressed is minimal and the complaints are many. But ironically, the people she complained longest and loudest about were the people who meant the most to her.

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