The more I dig
into my mother’s family history, the more I am surprised by how different their
life was at the beginning of the twentieth century. Now, let me say,
first, that I was born in 1939, and I grew up convinced that the twentieth
century was “modern.” We had great cars, television, single-party telephone
lines, women voted, girls got to wear slacks, and we had McDonald’s as a
hang-out. Oh, i know things have changed a lot since I was in high
school, but the changes I've experienced have always seemed to me to be a
natural progression, not some grand sea-change. But now, as I look back
at my mother’s life, and the lives of her seven sisters, I’m recognizing a
tremendous gulf between our worlds.
Among the
stories I’m finding are these:
• A developmentally-disabled child, raised without
benefit of medical intervention or therapy or adaptations to make her life
better. She just lives out her life as best she can. And if she cannot do
something, or reach something, or understand what's happening, then it’s just
too bad. Things pass her by.
• A child born out of wedlock, who carries that label
of “illegitimate” as if it were she who has committed some great sin. Her
mother, too, faces a lifetime of shaming and ridicule, which drives her to make
even worse decisions with her life. Who was the father? I wonder, but I
find no record or even any effort to identify him or make him bear part of the
responsibility.
• A father, knowing that he was dying, mortgages the
family farm to hide the fact that he cannot work, which ultimately leaves his
wife and children homeless and penniless when he dies.
• Another child, born to a mentally unstable mother and
left solely in her care although she is clearly incapable of understanding her
responsibilities. Even when the child comes close to dying at his mother’s
hand, there is no intervention. There’s no social worker, or child protection
agency, or thought of notifying some authority — because there is no authority
to turn to if a child’s life is just plain rotten and dangerous.
• A man with what appears to be early-onset Alzheimer’s
disease, whose tendency to get lost, whose forgetfulness, whose failure to
recognize family members, whose sudden and violent rages are all
explained by his devotion to God.
• A teenager who dies from a lack of medical attention,
and another scarred for life by an incompetent doctor — both of whom should
have been able to live long and healthy lives.
• Another teenager, taken in by a new family when she
was left an orphan, only to find that when the wife died, she is expected
to marry the husband.
• An adolescent boy, so traumatized at the age of
twelve by the loss of family members that he develops a debilitating stutter
that leaves him unable to communicate. and he is made fun of, not helped to
overcome his problem.
• A young wife who suffers a devastating stroke that
leaves her unable to say anything beyond “a-no, a-no.” She never sees a
doctor, never receives treatment. She is just allowed to wither away from
neglect.
• An alcoholic husband who refuses to speak to his wife
because she will not join his church. And his absolute silence lasts not
just for a period of days, but for years.
These stories,
horrible as some of them were, were not told to me as anything other than
simple explanations of why things were as they were. And when, in the
course of these tragedies, someone did step in to help, it was not a parent or
a grandparent, a policeman, a pastor, or a teacher. Invariably in this
particular family help came only from one sister to another. I’m struggling to
understand.
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