I am a housewife now. I live in a middle-class house in a middle-class suburb of Montreal. To some people my housewifely routine in suburban St. Bruno might seem dull, but I cherish every commonplace moment. I'm usually up at 6.30 a.m. to make sure I get the oldest of my three sons - Jean-Francois, 8½ - off to school in time for his Grade 3 classes. Then I prepare breakfast for my 33-year-old husband, Germain Allard, so that he can leave at precisely 8:20 a.m. in our 1962 Thunderbird for his $10.000-a-year job as branch manager of Beneficial Finances Company.

I spend the rest of the day doing household chores, cleaning each of the eight rooms in our one-storey, ranch-style, $20.000 mortgaged bungalow. (A perfectionist, I refuse to have a maid in to help me.) I do the dishes, make the beds, wash and iron the clothes, and water my plants.

I may take time out to exercise on the stationary bicycle in our knotty-pine-panelled recreation room (My husband thinks I'm a little too hippy for my 5-foot-2, 125-pound figure.) Whenever my younger sons, Charlie, 6 and Eric 4½, come running in from the backyard playground of an afternoon, I feed them some cookies and milk (although they'd prefer hot dogs).

I sometimes curl up on the brown leather rocking chair in front of the blazing fireplace to read - perhaps it's Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift From the Sea, or a book on my current hobbies, palmistry and astrology. Or maybe I'll watch a movie on TV - I dote on escapist musicals, especially those starring Deanna Durbin in the past and Julie Andrews today.

Before I know it, it's time to prepare one of the family's favorite French-Canadian pork or chicken dishes for supper, to bed down the kids and, after a walk and a read, to kiss my husband goodnight at 10 p.m. It's the end of another housewife day - perfectly tedious to others, perfectly tranquille to me.

Yet can you blame me for treasuring such humdrum serenity?

This Sunday, May 28, I will mark my 33rd birthday. For the past 10 years I have been striving to live the normal life of a normal suburban housewife. For the 23 troubled years before my marriage, I was regarded as a medical curiosity, a freak living in a glass cage. From the day we were born, my sisters - Emilie, Marie, Cécile, Yvonne - and myself never enjoyed any small, secret corner of our lives that we could call our own. As the Dionne Quintuplets, we were considered "the world's No. 1 peepshow." We were the most photographed family in Canada and we were child movie stars who kissed a queen and greeted a king; shook hands with a princess and her prince; became the first living babies ever to be mentioned in the Encyclopaedia Britannica; we were the centre of a bitter tug-of-war for our custody that drew global headlines; and were publicized as "the poor little rich girls" who were heiresses to a fortune estimated at $1.000.000. In short, we were adulated as animated baby dolls who would never grow up. Well, we have grown up - and what has happened to us?

Poor Emilie died all alone 13 years ago, accidentally suffocated in a pillow during an epileptic seizure. Her body now lies in the weedy family cemetery near the railway tracks at Corbeil, Ont. Even in death she could not escape public curiosity. After her funeral, our parish priest, Father W.F. LaFrance, was shocked to find souvenir-hunters plucking rose blossoms from her graveside wreaths. "Please", he murmured sadly, "have more respect for the dead."

Marie, incapable of bearing the loneliness when she tried to become a nun, and having lost $20.000 in an unsuccessful attempt to run a Montreal flower shop, has failed to make a go of her marriage, For the last two years she has been separated from her husband, Florian Houle, a Quebec government sales tax inspector, who is 15 years her senior. She live quietly in Montreal now, with a housekeeper to help her look after her two daughters.

Cécile's marriage fell apart, too. For the last three years she has been separated from her husband, Philippe Langlois, a former CBC technical expert, now a sound technician for the debates held by the Quebec Legislature. She lives in Quebec City with her daughter and two of her sons, while her oldest boy, 9-year-old Claude, lives with us in St. Bruno.

Yvonne, who also wanted to be a nun but who was unable to face the rigors of being a postulant, left her convent at Moncton, N.B., after two years of training. Still unwed, she is now trying to carve out a new life for herself, teaching a handicraft arts course to children in the Beloeil district of Montreal.

I suppose I have been the luckiest. I married Gerry, a bulwark of hope, and our happy marriage has given strength and security and courage to all of us. Yet, like my sisters, I have not escaped unblemished from the hothouse environment that threatened to smother our individuality. Like them, I was cut off from the world and deathly afraid of its people. I therefore sought to retreat from life, like an oyster into its shell. Thanks to Gerry, I am gradually emerging from my shell and learning to embrace life. Indeed, that is one of the two reasons why I am putting these words down on paper. My husband, who once studied to be a priest and a psychologist, believes that confession is the healthiest form of therapy, and perhaps other shy recluses can learn from my attempts to conquer my fears. My second reason is that I wish to rectify the false impression that my sisters and I are estranged from our parents. Four years ago, author James Brough wrote a sensitive and accurate account of our life story, entitled We Were Five, which was serialized in McCall's magazine. Even before the full publication of his book by Simon & Schuster, wire service reporters were ripping sentences out of context from the condensed magazine installments to imply that we were blaming our parents for all our woes. Our father, especially, was presented as a kind of whipping boy.

Well, I would like to state clearly right here: we harbor no grudges, no resentments, no hostility toward our parents. Why should we throw stones at our mother and father? They are the only parents we have, and we love them. If the unwittingly made us lose faith in our fellows, we forgive them. If they suffered as much guilt and suspiciousness as we did, we understand and have compassion for them. If the committed errors while trying to defend their children from a prying world, what could be more human? There they were, poor and isolated in the backwoods of northern Ontario, and suddenly they were thrust into the centre of a bizarre happening. Five babies came out groping for life from our mother's womb - a phenomenon so rare it could occur only once in every 57.000.000 births. In the consequent glare of the global spotlight, when everybody was trying to capitalize on out uniqueness, who can blame a confused mother and father for making mistakes? After all, there is no precedent to guide parents when they produce a miracle.

The story of our dramatic birth has been recounted again and again in books, magazines and newspapers. I have read many of these accounts, and yet they all seem to have an air of unreality about them. It is as though they were telling a folk tale about five fairy princesses and not about me. It all began in the early morning of May 28, 1934, in an unpainted, six-room, birch-frame house located a dozen miles south of North Bay, halfway between the villages of Callander and Corbeil. It was a primitive place for a delicate birth, devoid of plumbing, gas or electricity. Our father, Oliva - a short, iron-willed man of 31, not without humor, who scraped a living out of 300 acres of stony farmland - was worried. He hadn't expected the arrival of a new baby for at least two months. Our mother, Elzire - a plump, pious woman, nimble at sewing, who avidly read the French diary novel of Berthe Bernage, but who was bashful about showing her affection openly - churned about in painful labor. At 25, she already had five children: Ernest, Rose-Marie, Therese and Daniel, who were sleeping upstairs, and 11-month-old Pauline, stirring fitfully in a small crib at the foot of her wooden bed.

Since a premature birth appeared imminent, mother was attended by two experienced midwives. These were Madame Donalda Legros, her sister, and Madame Benoit Lebel, a friend who had 18 children of her own. Frightened by our mother's unhealthy state, they sent father to summon Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe, the country doctor from Callander. A few minutes after 4 a.m., the first premature baby arrived. She was a gnomish infant, bluish-black in color, with a bulging forehead and spidery limbs. Aunt Donalda gently blew into her mouth to start her breathing; Madame Lebel tied off the cord with cotton thread from Mom's sewing basket. She was quickly baptized with a dipperful of water, and was being wrapped in a blanket heated at the oven just as a second baby was born. A third infant was appearing when Dr. Dafoe arrived. He scrubbed hurriedly, delivering the baby, and worked hard to bring her to life. Dr. Dafoe muttered "Oh, gosh!" when a fourth baby appeared. A moment later he cried out "Oh, gosh!" again. Dr. Dafoe sponged all five of us in warm olive oil. He swaddled us in squares scissored from a blanket. Then he deposited us in a wicker butcher basket. When he weighed the nine-inch-long fragments of humanity in a scoop potato scale, our collective weight was 13 punds 6 ounces. Dad exclaimed: "Five babies - five girls - impossible!"

Quite understandably, Dr. Dafoe didn't believe we would survive. Of 33 previously recorded quintuplets born, not one survived more than 50 minutes. (We were to remain the world's only living quintuplets until the birth, on July 15, 1943, of Argentina's Diligenti quints, with whom we have since exchanged autographed photos. Then in a single quintuplet week, in September, 1963, five Prieto boys were born in Venezuela and four girls and a boy to Mrs. Andrew Fischer of Aberdeen, South Dakota.) It was therefore natural for Dr. Dafoe, a Protestant, to summon the parish priest in Corbeil, Rev. Dan Routhier, to administer the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church. When Dr. Dafoe returned at 10:30 a.m., he was astounded to find us all still alive. He eye-dropped a little rum and warm water into our mouths; he called in the graduate nurse who lived two doors down the street from him, 20-year-old Yvonne Leroux.

That morning our Uncle Léon, then running a garage in Callander, heard the news and telephoned the North bay Nugget.
"How much will it cost to announce the birth of five babies?"
"What do you mean?" asked the editor, Eddie Bunyan.
"I mean five babies born at the same time to the same mother during the same confinement!"
"It won't cost you a cent", said the astonished editor.
He wired a bulletin to the Canadian Press in Toronto, and withing minutes, it was flashed around the globe. Swarms of newspapermen descended upon the farmhouse. Charlie Blake, editor of Hearst's Chicago American, flew up with a 30-year-old copper incubator, heated by hot water instead of electricity. The Toronto Daily Star dispatched Gordon Sinclair, just back from covering Africa; Fred Davis (who for the next five years served as "official photographer of the Quints"); and a reporter chauffeur, Keith Munro (who later, on request of Premier Mitchell Hepburn of Ontario, became the Quints' business manager at $6.000 a year). Happily, the Toronto newsmen had the foresight to buy a small bathtub and 12 dozen diapers for us at Eaton's.

Those next few weeks must have been a nightmare for our parents. Twenty-two people were living crammed in the small farmhouse. Since Mom was too toxic to provide mother's milk, it had to be flown in from Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children. A Red Cross nurse, Madame Louise de Kirilinem introduced gowns and masks and generally initiated a reign of antisepsis, overcoming the objections of Mom who couldn't understand why she couldn't open the incubators and sprinkle her babies with holy water. In the midst of the turmoil, Dad was greatly troubled. It was the height of the Depression; he had a $3.000 mortgage to pay; and now he had five extra mouths to feed. So he could not be blamed for being susceptible to a phone call from Ivan A. Spear, a Chicago promoter, promising him $250 a week for exhibiting his children at the Chicago World's Fair. After receiving the approval of Dr. Dafoe and Father Routhier, Dad signed a contract with the promoter, in Orillia, Ont. Spear was to receive 70 per cent of the profits, Dad 23 per cent, and Father Routhier, as manager, 7 per cent. As it turned out, the arrangement was declared illegal. Spear filed a $1.000.000 law suit for breach of contract. But Dad was most stunned by the newspaper abuse heaped on him for considering the sideshow act.

The invective was even more shrill when Dad and Mom, desperate to raise money, appeared on the stage in Chicago, Detroit and South Bend, Indiana. As a result of this "disgraceful venture into vaudeville," as Ontario Premier Hepburn phrased it, the Legislature passed a Dionne Quintuplet Act, which made us wards of the Crown.

We were moved into a hospital-nursery right across the road from the farmhouse. And we were put into the hands of a board of guardiansm which included Dr. Dafoe, Ontario Welfare Minister David Croll, and J. A. Vallin, a retired North Bay judge. Though Dad, too, was a member of the board and being paid a salary of $75 a month, he resented surrendering custody of his beloved children to strangers. Vainly, Dad tried to make Dr. Dafoe understand that, to a French-Canadian Catholic, love of family was everything. "Nurses can't take the place of a mother's love," he protested. "Even pigs are allowed to bring up their own young!" When a reporter once said admiringly, "The babies all look just like you," Dad retorted, "If they look like anybody, it must be Dr. Dafoe." Dramatizing his opposition to government interference, Dad crawled though a drainpipe to visit his daughters, after he had been barred from the hospital because the farmhouse was under quarantine for measles.

People who who had most loudly criticized Dad for sanctioning the proposed exhibition of his daughters in Chicago were now proud of the local vaudeville show that was to attract more than 5,000,000 tourists. We were billed as "Canada's greatest natural wonder," and the Ontario government earned an estimated 90 cents in gasoline tax from every car driving up to the Callander carnival. At 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. daily, two Ontario provincial policemen, who guarded the hospital night and day, unlocked the high outer barbed-wire fence. Crowds larger than those visiting the Statue of Liberty or the Pyramids then flocked into a U-shaped playground pavilion to peer. Callander itself assumed a circus atmosphere. The midwives, Mesdames Legros and Lebel, presided over a souvenir booth displaying "The True Basket that Cradled the Quints;" they sold 25-cent booklets, describing how they helped bring us into the world. Hot dog booths hawked Quint postcards, tinted pictures and binoculars. A gas station at the main corner of Callander named its five tanks in our honor, because it apparently delighted tourists to ask for "five gallons of Yvonne" or "eight gallons of Annette."

Toronto Controller Fred Hamilton urged that the Quints be housed at Casa Loma "because they would bring more money into the city than 50 industries." However, Toronto's Board of Control turned down the motion by a three-to-one vote when Mayor Fred J. Conboy argued, "It would be looked upon as 'Hog Town' trying to grab the Quints from Callander." Perhaps the most outstandish exploitation stunt was staged by 20th Century-Fox. It paid $50,000 for the rights to film Country Doctor starring Jean Hersholt, and later $250,000 for its sequel titled Reunion. To drum up interest, Frank Parrott, publicity agent for the film studio, planted a grotesque story in local newspapers. He concocted the yarn that childless married couples, in hope of becoming miraculously fertile, were picking up pebbles from the Quint hospital grounds and sleeping with them under their pillows. Overnight the myth became a reality. Thousands of superstitious couples clamored for the "fertility pebbles." The only trouble was that there weren't enough loose stones in the vicinity. To oblige the tourist trade, the Ontario highways department had a truck pick up a load of rocks each morning from Lake Nipissing. At 7 a.m. before tourists had arrived, the pebbles were dumped into two troughs on each side of the hospital gate. Requests for the magical stones came all the way from India. Marriage proposalsm offers to endorse products poured in, along with celebrities. Movie star Bette Davis visited us, shook her head and said, "Those Quints would steal a scene from any actress." Radio recounter Alexander Woollcott made a two-reel film with us, amazed that the outside world was more impressed with us than the citizens of Callander who took us for granted. "People in Niagara," he mused, "seldom go to see the Falls."

The slightest change in the "gold nuggets" - as we commercial properties were nicknamed in Callander - was under public scrutiny. Dr. William Blatz, psychologist director of the University of Toronto's Institute of Child Study, was called in to fingerprint us and footprint us and otherwise put our behavior under the microscope. "In the period of the 22nd to the 38th month," Dr. Blatz clinically noted, "there were 1,434 emotional episodes recorded and analysed... Of these periods, 1,301 were anger and 133 were fear." It all suggests a grim picture of researchers hovering over five helpless babies, pads ready, pencils poised, ready to dissect solemnly the tiniest peep for milk. In one of his reports, Dr. Blatz significantly recorded, "Dr. Dafoe has been the 'father substitute,' owing to his more than daily visits to his five charges." Our parents resented the mounting intrusion. They kept the story of the fight for custody of their children on the front pages by appeals for help to Pope Pius XI and King Edward VIII.

The bitternessreached its peak in May, 1939. It was then our parents filed a libel suit against Dr. Dafoe for holding them up to ridicule at a luncheon of the Circus Saints and Sinners Club in New York City. Amid a barrage of wisecracks from Jimmy Durante and Chic Johnson and Ole Olsen, Dr. Dafoe had appeared at the function as a guest "fall guy". A scholar's mortarboard perched on his headm he carried a bag labelled "A.R. Dafoe, Mass Deliveries" and wore an apron festooned with Quintuplet pictures, to receive a mock degree as "Doctor of Litters." The lawsuit was withdrawn after Dr. Dafoe agreed to resign as guardian. Not long ago, I saw a revival of Country Doctor on the TV late show; while the film deified Dr. Dafoe, it seemed unnecessarily cruel to portray my father as a buffoonish caricature climbing up a tree to catch a glimpse of his daughters. I prefer to remember Dr. Dafoe as the jolly, smiling great uncle, with the cropped moustache and white hair, who used to dandle us on his kneed while we playfully tried to remove his steel-trimmed spectacles. I can recall how we girls wept when we heard the news, on June 2, 1943, that the brave little doctor had died of pneumonia in a North Bay hospital.