Mother’s Sorrow

“Alone” – Edgar Allan Poe
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then – in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life- was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

I wish my mother had named the demons of her tortured childhood. My suspicion, that she was herself abused as a child, were confirmed only a few years before she died. But she never directly admitted this. And so the wreckage of it got passed on, distributed among her children in various ways but I was the primary target for her unburdening.

I felt a sinking sadness for my mother as well as her younger brother John when I learned that they had been brutally hurt as children. In marked contrast to my mother’s hidden truths, my Uncle John had spoken frankly to his daughters about the hellish childhood he and my mother endured. He recounted a bittersweet moment of his big sister moving away from home during high school. Happy for her escape – for he intimated that her suffering was worse than his – John dreaded his fate of being left behind to shoulder all of their alcoholic father’s abuse.

My mother went her grave with an archive of untold secrets. These she kept obscured behind an impenetrable wall of anecdotes that deftly distracted the listener. Anyone who knew her, even for ten minutes, was regaled with one of her stories, their sheer volume intensified by their repetition. This flummoxed any attempts to discuss, deconstruct, or disengage from her storytelling agenda. If ever her children interrupted her monologue with, “enough, you’ve told this already!” then we immediately felt guilty.  She would collapse into hurt silence, then meekly offer up a mournful litany of her shortcomings.

This was not a woman who would have embraced yoga. Nor meditation. She needed ceaseless talk, on her terms. I cannot describe her resilience as teleologically healthy, for she remained stuck in a high functioning loop of post-traumatic behavior. The wounds of her traumatic childhood would have been assimilable into a healing resilience only if she would admit their existence. This she avoided as vehemently as she would deny molesting me.

The Open Book Facade 

Throughout her life, my mother’s stream of pseudo-authentic anecdotes gave one the impression that her life was an open book. Like an artful cook, she skillfully measured in just enough shock, sadness, moral righteousness, and insight to spin a compelling compendium of tales about triumph over hardships, tinged with self-effacing humor and a buoyant optimism. I believe she relied upon a steady outpouring of these stories to block the chaos lurking beneath her subconscious. Silencing the jarring inner conflict, she reinvented herself in an idealized life as a wife, mother, and master teacher in a thriving rural Midwestern community.

That the demons of my mother’s past would burble up through the cracks of her (literally) storied life and overpower her at times does not negate all the good that she accomplished. But such fissures in her personality left an indelible mark upon me. I feel certain that a great deal of her ambition to accomplish good deeds was fueled by a desire erase the abusive marks left upon her own tender soul.

The first time my mother ever admitted anything concretely terrible about her childhood, she blurted out something she immediately regretted. I was nearly forty years old, and we were in my therapist’s office for a series of sessions toward reconciling a four-year silence between us. Like a time portal in sci-fi movies, my momentary glimpse into a memory buried deep within my mother’s damaged psyche snapped shut forever. But it was enough for me to question more deeply her stock stories about growing up poor and motherless. Perhaps they contained clues of something far more sinister.

I accepted, eventually, that my parents were from a generation that addressed trauma very differently. It was not a social norm for people to seek therapy to talk through any psychological wounds. Whether they were of childhood abuse or of fighting in a world war, memories were not aired for processing toward post-traumatic growth in those days. It was, as my paternal grandmother  remarked, “one’s lot in life” to have unresolved grief.

Lament was a trope within the repertoire of my mother’s childhood recollections, rooted in grief over the premature death of her mother when she was but five years old.  More tragedies lay ahead of her, not the least of which was a string of stepmothers or “aunties” who wafted in and out of her life. Her father had a gambling habit along with heavy drinking and nefarious money-making schemes; what little he offered as acceptable parenting seems to have occurred only sporadically.

Two stories my mother recounted ring a particularly confessional tone to my ear.  They bear the marks of human and economic abandonment. Her keening for a loving, stable home life was underscored by the hardships of the Great Depression.

My mother often recounted how a schoolmate bullied her about her poor parentage. At her elementary school, the smartest student sat at the head of the class nearest the teacher’s desk. That was my mother’s spot, her sole source of joy and pride.  The spiteful schoolmate demanded that my mother abdicate the coveted desk, on the grounds that she had no one at home who cared about whether she was the smartest pupil in the class.

Mother invariably concluded her story with martyred defiance: “…I realized that it was up to me to care about myself, and that my caring was enough.  I kept my desk.  And that became my life’s theme, that I would care about me even if no one else did.”

Decades later, my mother wrote down this story during a senior citizen writing course. She also shared the story in an interview for receiving a lifetime teaching award. As a girl, I heard this story whenever she needed reassurance of my gratitude for having parents and a loving home.

Additional testimony often seemed to reinforce her expectations of her children: “I decided to be a mother someday, and that I would give my children all the love and care that I never received.” This was my cue to lavish recognition and appreciation upon my mother’s starving soul, to acknowledge her sacrifices in raising a family with no guidance whatsoever. Silencing myself in complicit humility, I suppressed any misgivings toward her and any memory of wrongdoing on her part.

Another story my mother told likely had a more limited circulation because of its rather prophetic lesson about maternal dominance. Mother would shift into her didactic “teacher’s voice,” to tell a tale of two cats:  A mama cat and her kitten lived together in a house, but only the mama cat purred. The owners showered the kitten with all kinds of affection and yet it would not purr, not even after it matured into an adult cat.  On the day that the mama cat died, the daughter cat purred for the first time in its life.

Whenever my mother dredged up this “Cat Story,” I held my breath in perplexed fear.  Although I can visualize clearly, even now, her expectant expression upon finishing the parable, I have no memory of my response. In the blank spot where a memory ought to surface, I feel only a knot of self-hatred for failing once again to meet my mother’s needs.

A Child of Immigrants

My mother’s neediness was understandably connected to the gaping hole of neglect she suffered as a child. Her parents were emigrees from Eastern Europe who arrived in the United States around the time of the First World War. Mother claimed that she was born on a kitchen table somewhere in West Virginia. Memories of her mother were scant, and ended abruptly when both mother and baby died in childbirth.  Of her brother John’s arrival, she recalls only an unfamiliar woman showing up at the house, dropping him off, then leaving by herself.

Sketches of scenarios were all that my mother offered to describe what it was like for her growing up. She told me her father was an alcoholic, and that he married several times or introduced the latest live-in women as “aunts.” Both my mother and my cousin Frances hinted that one stepmother was running a brothel in the home. The family frequently moved around, ostensibly because her father bought the new wife a house. Perhaps also they moved over his many broken relationships with women, or because of other problems.

Mother suspected that her father encountered legal troubles related to issues of divorce but also bookies and loan sharks. A great many East Europeans settled in the midwestern cities of Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Cleveland, but not all entered the United States legally. Apparently, my grandfather made money selling forged work visas and other residency documents. Wherever the family called home, it often bustled with visitors seeking various things from my grandfather.

One of the more kindly adults in my mother’s childhood was a man who seems to have tended to her father as both butler and secretary. My grandfather’s various “community activities” were such that he needed someone to escort and introduce visitors, drive the family car, and sometimes walk my mother to and from school.  She never knew his actual name, but simply referred to him as “Peoples” for serving as a liaison between her father and people who called on him.  He was an ever-present, protective figure in my mother’s life until one particular stepmother moved in with her own son (and possibly, a brothel of clients).  My mother doesn’t recall seeing Peoples in the house again after that stepmother arrived.

My mother disclosed to me a particular story about Peoples just once (an unusual departure from her pattern of repeating stories). She was a young girl, and a man visiting her father beckoned her to come sit in his lap.  He was sitting out in the back yard, and the man said he had a toy for her.  As soon as she hopped up my mother realized that there was “something fishy” going on there in his lap.

When she told told Peoples about the man, he intoned that there were bad people in the world. Peoples told her to stay away from the man and other bad people. My mother believed that this man later died in an unfortunate, suspicious hunting accident.

Uncle Johns’s reminiscence to his daughters about his big sister’s vulnerability at home caused me to wonder about the identity of her abuser. Perhaps it was their father. Perhaps it had been the husband of the family she worked for as a laundress. My mother recalled that he’d made a pass at her; and when he wanted her to move and continue working for the family, her father flatly said no. I can’t imagine my mother telling her father about the incident, since he was both abusive and alcoholic; yet his decision spared her from certain escalating and unwanted attention from at least this predator.  Perhaps, like me, there were multiple perpetrators.

Truth Peeking Out

Parsing the truth out of Mother’s stories proved a tricky task. Had I not re-connected with cousins thirty years after my mother declared them off-limits, then I would not have learned that the family was Catholic. She seems to have turned that fact on its head through a story about John converting to Catholicism against their father’s wishes. When I finally ventured out to his two daughters, they were perplexed at the explanation of their vocation. Mother had told us all that they were entering religious life and taking vows of silence. They did indeed become nuns, but they were neither silent nor sequestered from society. Moreover, my mother stayed in contact with and even visited them.

The story about brother John’s exile from the family home seems to have been actually about my mother. Her conversion to Methodism was a plausible reason for leaving her father’s home, but religious grounds may have been one of many. Her rants about the Catholic Church would later raise  questions for me, after re-connecting with my maternal cousins, about the identity of her abuser(s).

To be sure, my mother often embellished her stories with details difficult to believe. Under the guise of describing someone else’s experience, she seems to have been masking hers. She adored her brother John, but his daughters were quite surprised to learn that my mother claimed he traveled the world as an FBI agent. It wasn’t true. John’s work with the FBI was to administrator of lie detector tests; he returned home from work every day. Travel was my mother’s dream, and although she did eventually make it to China, she lived vicariously through details of trips Dave and I took to far-off places around the globe.

Mother’s embellishments do not negate the traumas of her childhood. Her colorfully creative spin on stories underscored a personality grounded in an indomitable sense of survivorship. In a manner of “making lemonade out of lemons,” she found allies along the way, ever adapting her survival skillset.

The most inspiring stories my mother told lauded the kindness of those who stepped in to help.

During high school, my mother worked in a department store, where the women working in the tailoring department figured out her dire living circumstances. Collectively, they saw to it that she had a meal at the store commissary. They selected the most fashionable business attire from the store’s inventory, fitting the garments for her to wear as a model while she worked. My mother was allowed to keep the outfits.

Having left the family home during high school, my mother found other homes. She had befriended another school outcast, a girl named Magda who had entered school in the middle of the year and who spoke only Hungarian. My mother was assigned to teach her English. They became lifelong friends.

Two critically positive maternal figures my mother’s life stepped in just as conditions at home became intolerable. Friends who were spinsters and Deaconesses in the Methodist church took her under their wing. Their service could be equated with that of nuns, as well as their prayer rituals and communal lives that reflected Protestant religious practices. They served the destitute poor through the Broadway Methodist Church on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland. It was there that they met my mother.

Turning away from her family religion (Catholic) to embrace Methodism may have had little to do with religious dogma. The two kindly Deaconesses, stepped in to be surrogate mother and auntie.

That she was a bright student is evident by the many teachers who advocated for her throughout school and college. Of all the stories she told, what usually brought tears of gratitude to her eyes were recollections of teachers who praised her intelligence, encouraged her studies, and made sure she made it to (and through) college. Education for my mother provided the positive catalyst needed to intervene and build core resilience. More specifically, in her educational mentors my mother found the affirmation, guidance, and skills she needed to develop the competencies to grow into adulthood. Education meant freedom on many levels. Not surprisingly, she embraced a vocation in teaching as her life’s calling.

Selective remembering, of course, is something we all do. But my mother’s skillful weaving of snippets from her past, carefully chosen for their malleability into a master narrative far more positive than the truth, illuminates her formidable powers of creativity.  So too, it shows the force of her will to control the sovereignty of her reality.  That made it all the more devastating when the mask slipped, and when I confronted her with memories completely at odds with hers.

In a rare moment of disclosure, my mother drafted a letter to her brother as an assignment in a writing course for senior citizens. She marked the page as Christmas Time, 2001:

“My dear Little Brother:

Your Christmas card ‘I reminisce of years gone by when we were children. There was much sorrow in those days.’  Yes, yes, yes.

Ours was indeed a childhood of much pain. I am taking a memoir writing class but know I can never write about our lives to anyone. My mind blocks most of it out. It was my survival mode – just don’t think about it and move forward…Life really was difficult, trying, unbearable, painful.  When I was in the ninth grade, I   left home. But that is another story to tell.”

To unearth this letter was to begin understanding my mother’s life strategy. She would not acknowledge unspeakable things. Willing them out of her mind, she moved forward. And in choosing to forget what happened to her, she developed a failsafe method for disavowing what she did to me as well. Her stories made sure of it. That was the legacy she left for me to carry on in my own life.

I grudgingly acknowledge my debt to Mother’s storytelling, but I proved to be a poor apprentice. Her stories concealed the full measure of the trauma she endured as a child. She revealed only enough to set up hollow, un-redemptive victory tropes, like the refrain immortalized by Frank Sinatra, “I did it my way.” I kept my stories buried until persistent, massive interruptions broke through a protective wall of denial inherited from her.  To it, I added many more layers of my own making.