Childhood context

My parents were very different temperamentally. 

If my parents were ships, my mother would be the ship in full sail anchored in the harbour, without means to trim her own sails OR pull up anchor, just tossing around in her own windstorm and if you were a tug boat nearby, look out.
My dad was more like a paddle boat, steady, serene, chugging along a glassy calm river, getting stuff moved, hauling stuff from here to there, moving through life in a calm and peaceful way, on his tractor, zen-ing out, round and round, back and forth, covering the square mile or so that he small-farmed. 

My mother was the daughter of a Polish-American Catholic man who migrated north into Saskatchewan with his family in the late 1800s, a time when there was a lot going on in North Dakota, and in the US, and Canada was holding its own in the building-a-country department by welcoming farmers from everywhere to move in and help feed a new nation. 
I never knew him. He died when I was just two years old. He seemed to be involved with community and Catholic church stuff, according to family history. I don't know what was going on in Poland specifically, only that in the late 1800's there was upheaval everywhere and that Poland is in a particularly turbulent part of the world. I don't know when his family came to the US, whether it was before or after serfdom was de-legalized in that Polish part of the globe, sometime in the mid-to-late 1800's. I suspect he came from agri-Culture from way long before that, though. I imagine him as a benign authoritarian at home. 
My mother was the first daughter of his second wife. His first wife had died postpartum, also the child. But two other sons lived, so my mother was both a first born, and a third born. First girl. 

My maternal grandmother had come as a tiny child to Saskatchewan with her family from Quebec. She was one of the younger of about a half-dozen kids. 
She moved in with my grandad after his wife died. He needed someone there to make the place run. Feed the family. Keep the house. They married. Then la mere was born, in 1924.  
I remember my grandmother as a quiet person who sat at the kitchen table, always wore an apron, did not really engage. She had become blind from poorly regulated diabetes. I know insulin came along in the early 1920's and eventually arrived to Saskatchewan, accessible by my grandma, but by then most of the damage may have been done. La mere told me a story about how when she was a kid she was given the task of injecting her own mother with insulin, and worried about getting the dose just right. I can't imagine how stressful that must have been.
A kid.
Keeping her mother alive by injecting insulin. 

My dad? He was raised in a large family, close to the last of 11 kids, two of whom died as babies. The family itself was part of a large religious community of people who were another branch of agri-Culture entirely. They evolved in England, I think, but it could have been the UK in general. Maybe Ireland too. They outgrew Ontario and went west at some point in time. 
Farming people. Protestant. Self-regulating. Modest in dress and behaviour. Kindness and care for each other. David Sloan Wilson would nominate them for being pro-social, at least with one another.
As organized prairie tent religions go, this one seems pretty tame. No coercion, no one had to live in a compound or anything.
Yes, there were the usual signs, the long hair in buns, the dress, long sleeves, no jewelry or makeup,  no live music.  No work to be done on Sunday. No TV or distractions. Rules. But people lived independent lives. 
My dad went against family rules and took music lessons and learned to play the fiddle. He smuggled a radio into his bedroom so he could listen to music and what was happening in the world. There was a lot going on. He was born in 1922, and was a teenager in the 1930s. Depression years. War years. Waste not want not. Thrift is a virtue. Honour thy father and thy mother. Children are to be seen and not heard. Spare the rod and spoil the child. He survived all that.  He also survived being hit with horse reins by his authoritarian father for some infringement or other, and in a separate incident a chair being broken across his back by the same authoritarian father because he came in late from a music lesson one night. Violence that my aunt, his sister, had witnessed and shared with me at his funeral. All had not been roses in that family. 

He grew up, left home, traveled around for awhile in Canada, worked in construction in Ontario and in BC, came back to Sask, went to a dance, met my mother, and 7 months later in 1949 they married and moved into their little farm near his oldest brother's much larger and older farm a mile away. 

They were politically compatible, which is what kept the marriage going.
Both of them were fervent Tommy C Douglas / CCF voters and workers and supporters and meeting attenders. and poster putter-uppers. 
They were religiously incompatible, which made for some very loud arguments. My dad's position was that the pope hogged the wealth and was a therefore a capitalist and capitalism was evil, surely she knew that? and capitalism was evil because machine companies ripped off farmers and that crow rate, remember? and and and... somehow it was all mushed together in his mind.
She never had a good argument and would collapse into cognitive dissonance, feel defeated and cry and yell. She had grown up as a good little Catholic girl in a home where everybody she knew was Catholic and it was totally normal that the pope would have fancy gold stuff and she could aspire to being like Mary Mother of God, or Queen Elizabeth, her other female role model.  
Anyway, because of their religious incompatibility, lucky me got to grow up without indoctrination by any official religious body or community. I was allowed to remain heathen. Secular.
My mother insisted. 
I feel very free that way and am grateful she made that happen. 
I did not ever feel any need to be part of a religion or its interpretive community. 
I did choose to support their pro-social political perspectives about how wealth-hoarding is inherently wrong and bad and that medicare is good for all, because that just made good sense.