The yearbook
She was beautiful. Radiant even. I’ve always loved this photo of Mom…such a face of youthful joy beaming out from her high school yearbook page. So much might have been in store for a spirit like that.
And yet, by that photo she had written a single word: “Hopeless.”
My God. What a statement. It just begs for clarification…which is too late to get.
Questions race. When did she write that? And why? Was it a lonely teenage girl wondering what life held for her? Or a self-deprecating joke with friends? Maybe a young adult despairing of her prospects for love?
Or…was it later? The scribing of a scarred and disillusioned wife looking back and regretting her choice?
Years later, I struggle to reconcile the picture with that word. In fact, I literally cringe at the word, pained to think that “Hopeless” is what she felt about herself.
Yet to look back now and know what her life became, was it the word that set her up? A chilling prediction of where the path would lead?
Then
It’s a fuzzy, 1940s picture but the only one I have of my mother as a child. She was the youngest of four — the oldest sister destined for the convent. The brother behind her went into the Army, then an electronics career and marriage. The brother next to her eventually became a priest. And her?
I only know that she thought about being a nun like her sister, but didn’t choose that. And she tried out nursing school, like one of her cousins. But she quit that. And for all the times we asked her why, she would never answer. Never. And I also remember my father would keep goading us to ask her. What did she feel about that?
She spoke of her childhood as lonely. As the youngest child, she often had no one to play with. Just her dolls and tea set. The others were older, off doing their things, and her older sister headed to the convent school as a teen. Mom spoke of them all as being brilliant and accomplished.
Still, this photo must have been a rare moment of joy. Easter, I think she said. And obviously, it was a moment of silliness, something that I think was rare.
The other times in their house?
The “Old Country”
Her father, John, was born in the US, but his mother, who was sick of her husband never being around, took my grandfather and his sister back to Slovakia – the Old Country – as they called it – to live with relatives. Not that long after, she died, and the relatives shipped him and his sister back to the US, alone, on “the boat.” They were just kids.
When they got to Ellis Island, the officers sent his sister along to relatives in Connecticut. But because he had a lesion on his neck, they rejected him and shipped him back to Slovakia, alone, even though, as a US citizen, they should have let him in. It had to be terrifying and traumatizing for both of them to be separated. And especially for him, sent back on the boat to Europe. For all of his life, he never spoke a word about it.
Whatever those next several years included for him, I don’t know. I do know that with the coming of World War I, he escaped to Switzerland and fought to come back here. Even though he was a US citizen, they tried to deny him, but eventually he managed to get back. The only reason I know this part of the story is that his sister, my great-aunt, told me years later. And apparently, while she had been allowed to live with relatives here, they were an alcoholic lot. So her childhood was undoubtedly chaotic, too.
For the rest of his life, my grandfather worked in a factory – the brass mill – where somewhere along the line he lost a finger. He was a hard-working man, but also, at least on Sunday afternoons at the Slovak club, a hard-enough-drinking man, too.
Mom talked about the every-Sunday-afternoon fights. Her father would start the day at church, then the club, then he would stagger home. Waiting for him on the second-floor porch was my grandmother. And then the fights would start. Every… single…Sunday.
Mom’s mother, Mary, had been abandoned in childhood by her own mother, who ran off with another man. So Mary’s father took her and her brother back to Slovakia, not far from where my grandfather was growing up. Maybe they even knew each other there. I don’t know. I only know she, her father, and brother returned here when she was a young adult. She worked in a factory and then married my grandfather.
After marriage, there were four children in five years. And the ravages of the Great Depression. My grandfather’s work schedule was cut, so there was very little money. Food was scarce – vegetables from their garden and bones from the butcher shop to make soup. Always, soup. For the rest of her life, my mother hated soup and would only have it if she was sick or during very cold weather when she was old.
During those Depression years, my grandmother had a nervous breakdown, so she was unavailable, emotionally, at least. My grandfather’s sister came to live with them to help out with the kids and the finances.
To hear my mother tell it, it wasn’t a good time, and her aunt wasn’t a warm presence. So I think, in many ways, my mother raised herself. The bottom line was that hers was an often lonely, unpredictable life.
Vulnerable
So was my mother vulnerable? Absolutely. Did she pick my father because he seemed like a way out of that? I can’t say. I think she loved him. And I don’t doubt he would have been attentive and charming.
She knew him from their Slovak gymnastics clubs that they participated in when they were kids. Hers in Torrington, his in Bridgeport, and they sometimes met up for competitions.
How they exactly started dating, I don’t know. Did he choose her? I know he was in the Navy at the time. He would get leave, take his parents’ car, and drive to Torrington from Bridgeport. There he stayed the weekend to visit with her, sleeping with her father and she with her mother, in the cramped apartment. And that’s how the courtship went.
He must have seemed like a shining hero to her. He had money. Was well-traveled because of his Navy time visiting the many ports in the Mediterranean. So no doubt he had stories of many exotic places that she’d never been to and had no hope of ever seeing on her own.
He, too, had an alcoholic father, and so they both shared a hatred of that chaos. Neither drank much. Dad would occasionally say something about his childhood and how tough he had it, but then my mother would quiet him and say, “Leave it alone. We said we’d never put that on them.”
And I think he was ambitious. He was a radio operator in the Navy, had gotten his GED, and I imagine, had dreams of what he wanted to do in life. So it must have seemed like a dream come true for a woman who penned herself as “Hopeless.”
For him, I suspect that he soaked up her awed attention and her gentleness. Here was a woman unlike his loud, violent mother. Here was a woman who could fill all his needs, give him the adoration he craved, and perhaps, truly “obey him” – letting him take the lead and the control. And she was a virgin, that strong kind of woman who would help him keep in control because, as he noted, “Women were the strong ones and men were weak.”
Whatever it was between them- love, mutual desire for escape from their respective homes, need- they eventually married.
They laughed when they told the story of how their November wedding almost didn’t happen because of a freak snowstorm that was so bad people barely made it to the church. They had to put chains on their tires to get through the snow. Hmm. A blizzard to mark your wedding. Looking back, was that an omen from nature?
But the wedding took place, and then, she was his.
He said that the early times of their marriage were “fun.” But then stresses mounted quickly — four kids in six years, the loss of one child, his job and school demands, the death of Mom’s beloved sister in a car accident. And always, as far back as I can remember, her abuse by him. And…his abuse of me.
So years later, the radiance of that earlier photo was gone.
For a while
I think for Mom, despite the difficulties, she was happy enough in those earlier years. She probably thought things would change once life wasn’t so stressful…if that time would ever come. But back then, she had a role in life she valued. Like her older siblings, she now had an identity. She might not have become a nun or a nurse; she didn’t have a formal profession, but she took pride in, and loved, being a wife and mother. It gave her value.
And at least back then, my father reinforced that he didn’t want his wife working. He wanted her home with the kids. The way he said it, I think he liked the idea of people thinking he was so successful that his wife didn’t have to work. And he also loved seeing her pregnant. He commented one time that when he saw her pregnant, he felt pride at “what he did.”
That always sounded self-serving and egotistical, like pregnancy was some prize to prove his manhood. And he would always say how he had wanted three daughters. Why? And why did God take back the first child, a son, and give him his wish for girls? Was the son the mistake that God took back and then sent the girls? Why? So he could abuse us?
Questions…
The question I have always had is, “When did things change between them?”
I have always wondered: When was the first time he yelled at her? Demeaned and blamed her? Hit her? What did she feel in that moment?
I can only say that as far back as I can remember, he hit her. And since my earliest memories of my own abuse go back to when I was about three, that would suggest that for most of their marriage, he abused and dominated her.
The question that most horrifies me is: “Was he doing this to her even before they were married?”
I have always wondered if she had ignored red flags during dating, out of love, or believing his excuses and love-bombing, or…because he was her best chance for getting out…and she thought he would change?
I’m not sure what would be worse – her shock at him doing a complete personality change after they were married and she was “his property,” or knowing he was already mistreating her before marriage…and she naively accepted that.
Life with Mom
I don’t know what my father actually felt for my mother. I know in the early years, she seemed happy being mom and wife. Every day she produced a home-cooked full dinner, AND a fresh, homemade dessert. Every spring and fall, she cleaned the house, which included emptying all the cabinets of dishes, supplies, and pots. Then she’d wash everything, reline the cabinet shelves with new paper, and put everything back, all with no dishwasher. She sewed dresses for us, and even for our dolls. And baked special treats for holidays.
In the summers, she would walk downtown with us to do all the errands. We only had one car that Dad took to work.
Before we headed downtown, we would help her glue in all the loose S&H green stamps into booklets so we could stop at the redemption store and get something we needed. And then sometimes we could talk her into lunch at Woolworth’s.
She used to work there before getting married and still knew some of the staff. It was always the same. We would ask, hopefully, to go there for lunch. She would pretend to resist, then give in. And we would always share the same order – we’d split a turkey club sandwich – each of us getting a quarter of it, along with milkshakes or orange sodas from those circulating fountain tanks on the counter for us, and coffee for her. And her friend would come over and visit us. It was always the same thing, a simple thing, but we loved it. And in those moments, her soul just shone with the satisfaction and joy of what she was doing.
I worried the times she had to go to the hospital because she’d had “lumps in her breasts.” We had to stay with Dad, and I was so afraid that she might die. It scared me enough one of those times that I actually yelled at Dad despite my fear of him. We were cleaning the house before she came home, and Dad was doing a poor job. Worried and angry, I told him off and said he was doing it all wrong, not like how Mom did it! I think I surprised myself. But every now and then, even as a young child, some of my inner fire would blaze and win out over my fears.
Once as a young child, I remember going to a church raffle and winning. Standing there before all the prizes, I passed on all the toys because I wanted to get something she would like. I still remember that set of six amber-colored glasses I picked out, my gift to my mother. I also made sure she had chocolates for Valentine’s Day, and a few years later, I helped buy her a wicker chair she longed for.
The year she worked at our school helping the nun to set up the school library, I loved to stop and visit her at lunchtime. I was so proud that my mother was doing that.
And I still look back fondly on Halloween Trick-or-Treating nights because he wasn’t there, and she was. For whatever reason, his work schedule was always the night shift on Halloween. So we went out with Mom and our neighborhood friends and their mothers and had a wonderful time. I didn’t want him there.
The bottom line was that Mom was happy with the things she did. She didn’t want a lot. She was content with “enough.” Time with us. Sewing and baking. She created amazing desserts. It was a simple life, and she was fine with it. She didn’t even care about vacations.
But more and more as time went on, he wasn’t satisfied with her. Where he initially wanted his wife home, so much that he wouldn’t even let her join the church choir because that meant she wouldn’t be home to cook Sunday dinner, then he changed his mind and wanted her working. He wanted more money. A bigger house. And because she had no profession, she wasn’t enough for him. He had seen there were professional women at his job, and now he wanted his wife to be that, too.
He had married what he wanted, but then he didn’t want what he married.
What did she think?
There will always be the question in my mind of what she knew…or didn’t know… of what he was doing to me. Or what she thought of his too many red flags.
When I had revealed the whole truth to my family when I was pregnant with my son, she was shocked and said she didn’t know.
But years later, her friend said to me one time that no one could be married and have it go on that long and not know. I share that feeling. Because it seemed like there were too many obvious signs. I also concur with a therapist who felt my mother might have lived in a very deep state of pathological denial.
There was that time in the pediatrician’s office when I was very young, and the memory is so vague. I just remember that there was a “discussion,” possibly something he told her “about his exam of us” that upset her. And denials. But it is too fuzzy.
And there were all the other things over the years that just seemed wrong. What did she think in all of those moments:
When he insisted on a family shower? Or when she told him she didn’t like how he kissed me?
When she asked me to help her one Saturday, then he told me I was coming with him, and she was so upset. Yet she didn’t confront him, but asked me in agony, “Why don’t I love her?”
When I told her I wished “Daddy” wouldn’t come home.
When he told her it was her fault he didn’t feel attracted to her?
Or when he yelled at her along with us, like she was one of his children?
When he sent her to bed because she fell asleep on the couch, then he stayed up late and tried to grope me even though she was just across the room?
When, as a young adult, I went camping for a weekend in Vermont with a friend and her family, and he drove four hours each way in one day, just to hunt me down deep into the woods where our campsite was, to see what we were doing? I was away with part of the group at the grocery store, so I missed it, but I was so upset when I found out later what he had done. And I look back now and wonder, WHAT was she thinking in those eight hours of driving with him that day, to Vermont and back?
What was she thinking when, years later, I confronted him and told him I would have him arrested if he ever hit me again?
When I was pregnant and told the family in the therapist’s office what he did to me?
When, even more years later, I confronted him and told him our kids’ safety came first, and that is why I threatened him with jail if he ever touched them?
Or when I wrote her a heartfelt letter toward the end of her life, asking for open conversation about our pasts, and her only response was that my letter was long?
In so many of those, she was the silent shadow in the background. No response. No reaction.
Was she glad I challenged him when she couldn’t?
Afraid I would upset her own security?
Both?
Loyal to the end
A friend asked, “Did she ever bad-mouth him?” No. Yes, she would make digs about things later in life. But she would never tell us if he still hit her, even when we asked if she needed us to help her. She was loyal to the end. Even when his dementia became obvious, she treated him with dignity. Knowing he had always been the one to pay for everything, she let him keep his wallet – a comfortable thing to him. And she gave him a few dollars to have so he could have the dignity of still thinking he was paying. But she took the credit cards and anything else that might be a problem. It was the right thing to do. But better than he deserved.
Up Next…
I will never know the depth of what she meant by the word, “Hopeless.” Or when he actually started abusing her. Those are gone forever.
But…as to what her childhood caused, and what that first moment of getting hit might have felt like…I would soon get some “clues.” And I’ve always wondered if they were her speaking to me from beyond the grave…
Note:
I am seeking financial support to complete my memoir, work with an editor, and make a visit to my home state for fact-checking. Your help would mean the world to me as I take this step toward healing and giving voice to my journey.
Please like, comment, and share this post to help spread the word. The link for my fundraiser is on GoFundMe. Thank you for your support.
Leave a Reply