It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World.
Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about some stuff from my childhood. It doesn’t deal with me directly; although knowing this stuff does provide some insights into what my childhood was like. Frankly, the stuff I’m going to write about doesn’t even meet the threshold for stuff scary/ traumatic/ upsetting enough to discuss with a therapist / counselor when compared with other things from my childhood. This is the stuff that just sits in the back of my brain and cooks. It does color the way I look at the world, but since it’s not about me directly – well… enough introduction, on with the story.
Actually, I do have another small piece of introduction. Some things related to abortion are going to be mentioned in this post. However, nothing in this post is really ABOUT abortion. This is not a pro / con kinda thing. I really don’t want to entertain any discussion around an abortion debate. The mention of abortion is important to the story… but it’s not ABOUT abortion. Therefore, if you surfed into this page because you did a search on that word, please just go away.
OK, enough with the introductions.
Here’s the deal… Most of you know a few facts about my family; however, I’m going to repeat them because if you don’t know these facts, the story and follow-up essay questions will not make sense.
Fact 1: My mom is crazy.
Fact 2: My mom had rubella when she was ten weeks pregnant with my brother. Because of that, my brother was born deaf. Aside from his deafness, he is a perfectly normal person with all his fingers and toes and all of his mental faculties (well at least as normal as you could be after growing up in my family.)
Fact 3: My dad was born into a Jewish Family. He lived his entire youth in Queens, New York. In graduate school (before he met my mom) he had a profound conversion experience and became a Christian. After completing his graduate studies, he went to divinity school to become a Methodist Minister.
Fact 4: The divinity school my dad attended was in the Deep South and his first churches were all in the south.
There are two parts to this story. So, let’s start at the beginning.
Growing up there was a family myth (and I use that word in the technical sense of the word
myth) surrounding the events that lead to my mother contracting rubella.
The story goes like this… Since my dad was a big city slicker Jew boy, he was hated by most of the parishioners at the church where he was assigned (remember we’re talking Deep South in 1964.) According to the original story, a woman in the church knew that her daughter had rubella and knew that her daughter was contagious, but her daughter didn’t look sick. So, at church one Sunday when greeting my mom, the woman told her daughter, “Go give the nice minister’s wife a big hug.” My mom ended up getting such a horrific case of rubella the teaching hospital at Duke University took pictures of my mom’s body for a text book. Additionally, at this time and place, abortion was illegal except for medically necessary situations. The doctor’s offered my mom an abortion, but she refused it.
That’s the story I believed until my late thirties. When my dad realized that he was losing his memory to cancer he started telling me a lot of the family secrets. He said he didn’t want them to get lost.
One of the things he said was that the story I just told you was completely and totally made up. Well, the part about the text book pictures and being offered an abortion were true. But he said my mom completely fabricated the entire story about how she contracted the illness.
According to my dad’s account, most of the people in his church didn’t hate him that much. Nobody loved him, and that fact that he was a northern Jew boy was an issue for some people. But he said there was no one in the church that would have given my mom rubella on purpose.
He said that during that period my mom was exceptionally depressed. He said that my mom only had one friend. It was that friend’s daughter who had rubella. According to my dad, the doctor told my mom that she had to stay away from that person until her daughter was no longer contagious. But, he said, that she didn’t want to stay away from her friend; so she took the risk (knowing full well that deafness was just one of the possible outcomes and frankly one of the better possible outcomes at that.) He said that my mom deliberately and repeatedly went over to that friend’s house knowing that she was putting her child at risk.
I have to honest with you. I’m having a really hard time with this. My mom is crazy. My mom has done some horrible things to me. But I’m having a really hard time wrapping my brain around this story.
My dad is not a liar. He knew full well that telling me this story was going to be upsetting to me. I’ve always believed that he told me because he felt some complicit guilt for not stopping my mom. Honestly, I don’t know what my dad could have done to stop her. But my dad and I are a lot a like and I know I’d be feeling pretty damned guilty if I were him. I think my dad told me to try and ease his conscious at the end of his life. I wish he had told someone else, but I don’t really hold it against him that he told me. I mean, how can a mother do that to her child? I don’t care how friggin’ depressed you are!
I’m not sure why I’m telling this story. I guess for some of the same reasons that I attribute to my dad. This really is an awful burden to bear. Ever since my dad told me that story… I can’t look at my mother or my brother the same way. Being deaf has caused him so much heartache and so many difficulties. HOW COULD SHE DO THAT???? And Lord only knows… what if his
disabilities had been worse?
Well, that’s the first half of the story. Then there is the part from my actual childhood. This didn’t happen often, but every once in a while my mom would say terrible things to my brother. She said these things in front of me. This is not hearsay.
Once in a while, my mom would get really, really mad at my brother. She would scream at him. She would get so mad that she would say things like… You know, I could have had a legal abortion when I was pregnant with you. I really wish I’d had that abortion when I had the chance. The first time I remember my mom saying this I was about nine or ten (that means my brother would have been seven or eight at the time.) The last time I heard her say it, I was in college.
The first time she said it, everything and everyone stopped. Obviously we were in the middle of big family blow-up so at the moment she said that (I mean yelled) we were all running in different directions, screaming our heads off, and trying to take cover so we wouldn’t get beaten. When she said that, everyone stopped dead in their tracks. I wasn’t completely clear what the word abortion meant, but I had a clue. I’d heard the family myth enough times to realize that:
1) since abortion was illegal at the time, being offered a legal abortion was a big deal
2) my brother would no longer be my brother if she had the abortion
3) that was a really mean thing to say to someone
At the time, she would never apologize for saying that. She said it was our fault (the collective family) for pushing her to her limits where she would be forced to say such a thing. Nothing was ever her fault.
I remember the last time she said it, too. I remember the look on my brother’s face. It was so sad that I just started to cry. How could a mother ever say that to her child? How???
Recently I asked her some questions about my childhood. I didn’t specifically ask her about this. But my mom now claims that she has complete and total amnesia regarding my childhood. She claims she doesn’t remember anything. It’s funny… she seems to remember what Santa brought me when I was ten. She remembers the one and only vacation we took when I was 12. She remembers the birthday that I got my first Barbie. So I’ve taken this all to mean that she’s not going to talk about what happened during my childhood.
I had said there were going to be essay questions at the end of this. But truthfully, I don’t really expect answers. My questions are simple to ask, but impossible to answer.
How could she do these things?
Why did she do them?
What would possess a mother?
Why didn’t someone stop her?
Please, if you have answers, please, please share. But if I’m anything, I’m pragmatic. I’m not really expecting any answers.
