"Success...

"Success is not measured by what you accomplish, but by the opposition you have encountered, and the courage with which you have maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds." - Orison Swett Marden

Saturday, August 25, 2012

The Hope Of A Family

She was the youngest of five children. The oldest brother and sister shared a different father than the three younger. Her next oldest sister and brother and she were within a few years age of one another. Billy was a casualty of the war, and idolized by my mother. Sylvia married a man who came out of the war to be a drunken abuser. How badly he abused my aunt I'm not sure of. They owned a store, a little store in a little Pennsylvania town that we would visit from our home in Ohio. My cousin Kelly (Sylvia's granddaughter from her oldest of two sons) and I knew that a stop at the store meant our pick from the shelves of candy! Aunt Sylvia would sneak it to us if Uncle Paul was around, we wouldn't want for him to yell at her. She babied those she loved, some might say she was a push-over. I remember she was diabetic and didn't keep it well controlled. From what I recall my mother and she were close. We loved Aunt Sylvia, she was very endearing. I was a young woman, in my teens when she passed, I do believe from complications of the diabetes.

As for her full siblings there was a lot of tension between her and them. She had quite possibly as a child been annoying as the baby of the family I suppose, and from what I could gather from my mother she disdained their need for appearances. That being so you could understand why they weren't favorable to the reflection she might cast on them. I was too young in those days to be aware of when and how my mother's mental illness affected their relationship with her, but no doubt it did.

Her father was physically abusive to their mother. While she shared that with me as a young child, she was not real descriptive. I do vaguely remember trying to get details of it out of her. She was great for pauses in conversation that accompanied distant stares. I never met my grandmother, she died a few years before my birth. I knew she was Hungarian and spoke broken or scarce English. My grandfather was a child of immigrant parents from Italy, he was an electrician and a ditch digger. His children had at one time or another worked with him on jobs....back when we didn't protect children right out of the responsibilities that moved them into adulthood. They learned a good work ethic. But he was a stoic man, he did not show affection.

My mother had more than one miscarriage before giving birth to me. I knew from her that she had wanted a child so badly that my father behaved jealously over her importance for a baby. I do believe, that like myself, a child/children represented the hope of a family for her. Where was the love and closeness for her within those that were her family? Billy died when she was but a child. She rarely saw her older sister Sylvia, who left home to marry, and then at the age of 16 herself she left to marry and join my father as he was stationed first in Florida in the Air Force, next in California. Her mother passed when she was only about 25. The remaining of her 'family', not close or loving relationships. And then 2 months after I was born she and my father divorced. There she was, a single mom with a 2 month old infant, some serious mental health issues, and the only people she could call family a couple thousand miles away. People that thought of her more as a burden than a family member compromised by distance whose life they wished to enhance with their support - Ha!

2 comments:

  1. Lynne, I think we are psychic "sisters". We think, feel and write in the same philosophical literary, brave emotional mindset. It takes a lot of courage and guts to write your heart and soul out about your Mother's life, as she was as a child and as to your mother-daughter relationship, as emotionally painful and heartbreaking as it was. You are a living shadow of your Mother's life. I believe that is why you are writing about your Mother today, on a public Internet blog no less, as she is speaking to you from the spirit of her soul to help you understand, to enshroud you with her motherly love she was not emotionally able to give you as a child, and perhaps asking you to forgive her. Our mothers speak to us forever through our hearts and spirits of our souls. There may be a physical disconnect at the time of our Mother's death, but never an emotional, spiritual connection, which rises above from her earthly grave. You clearly were the adult and your mother the lost, lonely and troubled child. Sometimes our roles in life are reversed. You may never know what a joy and love and emotional support, as a young child, you were in your mother's life and emotional support you gave her just by being her child daughter. I think all those years as a child you were developing emotional strength and endurance. I have posted blogs about my Mother's life events, but never my deepest, real feelings about her personally, positive, negative and about our mother-daughter relationship. It remains hidden and locked in my heart and soul. Besides, I have 4 siblings out there. Each child in a family always has a different relationship with the father and mother. All I know is that when a mother shows favorites to other siblings, this causes a deep resentment and loss of self-esteem to that child, damaging the relationship between the mother and the favorite sibling for a lifetime. It never heals. It's too bad your Mother (I won't mention her name here as I do know it from Ancestry) was a black sheep and left behind in the family. Family dynamics and relationships can be really cruel and heartbreaking to a sad, loving, little loner out there like your Mother, who longs desperately for a close, loving family and as she reached out to them, they were never there. The saddest part of this whole episode Lynne, is that we, as daughters of our mothers, never learn or understand about the dynamics of our mother's childhood and her carrying over of emotional issues into her daughter's life until well into our adulthood, as you mentioned you did not realize this until you were 38 years old. It's like a stone being thrown across the river of life, and it ripples on from one generation to another, forever. Until, finally, some day, some generation, some daughter is born and the mother breaks the cycle of emotional and neglectful abuse (unintentional as it may be by the mother). I sincerely believe that we all go through heartbreaking, emotionally painful life events, as a destiny only to come out and develop as stronger, courageous women, such as you. I understand this clearly.
    Love,
    Nanette

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  2. Lynne, Regarding the last paragraph of your "Hope of a Family" blog, I am haunted by your Mother's life timeline, as it crossed roads and paralelled my life for a very short time (1 year)in relationship to your father, whom you never mention by name, as though you have a bitter taste of dismissal and disregard of this father in your life. I knew your father for only one year of my life in 1967 in Santa Monica, California. As I read the last paragraph of your blog, I am calculating the dates and timelines as to how my life intercepted with your mother's life, indirectly, and intervened with your father's fateful life directly in California in 1967. I calculated the time dates according to your time dates as mentioned in this blog. I was 6 years old in 1948 when your parents were married in 1954. They divorced in 1964, 3 years before I came on the scene with your father in Santa Monica, California. He must have been cruising the Pacific Coast up and down California from San Francisco to Santa Monica from 1964, like Blue Beard the Pirate destroying women's lives and involved with drugs in Oxnard to at least 1969 in California as far as I know. I had learned from his friends in Santa Monica that he was in the U.S. Air Force and that he was a twin (which it turned out correctly he has a twin sister in Pennsylvania) and that he had a daughter and wife in Oxnard and that your Mother was in Carpenteria. He worked as a tool maker in a little tool shop in Oxnard,had a wad of cash, drove a beat up Ford pick up truck, and lived with various friends off and on up and down the Pacific Coast. One day he showed up in Venice, with a brand new Pontiac GTO. Did your Aunt Sylvia or someone in your Mother's family live in Woodland Hills, California? That's all I can remember. Then in 1997 I learned by correspondence from the Sheriff's Office in Oxnard, California, when I was living in Palm Springs, California, that his drug possession case was closed because he died in Jasper, Arkansas in 1977. Why don't you ever talk about this so-called father of yours? It's easy to figure that one out. This man had a tremendous, tragic, heartbreaking and cruel and destructive effect on the lives of 4 women, that endures and haunts me to this day. I crossed his evil path one day in Santa Monica Pier, when I was a naive, stupid, innocent girl of 18 years old, he was 30 years old at the time, and I am still haunted and astounded as to how one year in the life of one person can affect and haunt you the rest of your life, and affected by his impact on my life 46 years later to this day. What the hell is going on with ripple effect of this man's life to 3 women who are still living on this earth, and you know who I mean. Two women will never forget, and one woman chooses never to remember. The ripple effect of that black rock thrown by your father across the river years ago is still thundering like a hurricane storm across 3 women's lives. I could never understand how a man who was raised by fine German/Switzerland heritage parents in Pennsylvania, was an officer in the U.S. Air Force and his life turned out to be a disastrous tragedy. From good to bad, this is what drugs do to people in life. It starts with marijuana, cocaine and heroine. It destroys them in the end. Even at my age of 18 years old when I knew him I had enough sense to know that drugs were deadly and illegal. Not him. I have no forgiveness for this man's soul, he was bad in life, he deserved his fate and I am still paying for this influence on my life by him of shame and regret for being involved with this man, today with my daughter. Sorry, Lynne, for this testimony of your father, but truth to reality is cruel, and this episode needs to be released verbally back into the universal energy,in retribution of the bad karma that he released onto this physical plane called earth.
    Love,
    Nanette

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