the adventures of me

A person can only hold their grief for so long until something has to shift, to break. Eventually the tears have to flow, the screams have to come, the anger has to be expressed. The dam inevitably bursts. If not, the pain will be turned inward to become guilt, self-hatred or some other destructive force. That’s just the way it is. In the absence of a healthy and positive way in which to express our sadness over the loss of our mother, my siblings and I started changing. Of course, this occurred in the context of our family culture and our family norms. Every family has its own history, its own dramas, its own expectations and norms, some of which are developed in the immediate family and some of which are passed down through the generations, and all of this plays out within the context of the larger community and the larger society. What my father brought to the mix was that he was reared by his grandparents after they chased off his mother, their only daughter, whom they adopted shortly after coming over on the boat from England. She married very young and began having babies one right after another, just like my mother. Did my grandmother get pregnant with her first child out of wedlock? Did her parents dislike their son-in-law, my grandfather? Whatever the details, her parents were not pleased with her. My father, his brother and his sister were still toddlers when the marriage fell apart. My great-grandparents told her they would bring up the children as long as she removed herself from the picture. Unable to see a way for her to care for three very young children as a single mother in the early 1930’s, my grandmother agreed to the arrangement. She went off to live her rebellious, adventurous life and marry her other assorted husbands, while my father and his siblings stayed with his grandparents. My great-grandfather had immigrated to the United States and become a college professor, back in the day when professors were considered part of the upper echelon of society and before we as a society decided it was a negative thing to be cultured and intellectual. They lived in a small New England city not far from Boston. I know that my father adored his grandfather, though rumor has it his grandmother was sadistically abusive. My father was the quintessential East Coast, left-leaning, progressive, liberal type. The term “Yankee snob” would not have been an inaccurate description. My step-mother was from a working class, Midwestern background, and grew up in a larger city. I wouldn’t be surprised if neither one of her parents had finished high school. Her father was a barber who also ran numbers to make ends meet during The Great Depression and died of a heart attack when she was still a teenager. Her mother went to work in a home for girls (as they were called in those days) to make ends meet, although she had retired before we came into her life. My step-mother finished high school and went on to secretarial school, started the marrying and baby business, and met my father while working as his secretary at the television station where he was hired as a reporter . She was not book smart but had a lot of common sense, and because of her interest in climbing the social ladder was well-schooled in the social graces as well. To complete the trinity, there was my mother, the oldest child of middle-class parents, from the Southern part of the Midwest. I describe it that way because there are big cultural differences between Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, for example, and southern Ohio, Indiana and Missouri. My maternal grandfather was a businessman who had a car dealership in the years following World War II, when car sales exploded. Growing up I assumed that my father had converted to Catholicism when he married my step-mother, though later I discovered that in fact he had converted in order to marry my mother. My grandparents didn’t have the traditionally large Catholic family because my grandmother kept having miscarriages. They had my mother and her brother and then managed to have a second daughter almost twenty years after the first two, so my aunt was around the same age as my oldest sister and we called her by her first name. When the little one went off to school, my grandmother went off to work, and she worked until she reached retirement age. When my mother was nine years old, they moved from the big city to a smaller, provincial city. She told me later that at the time she thought she had died and gone to hell. My mother was valedictorian of her high school class, yet was also quite the rebel herself. She was almost denied the honor because of her pattern of defying her teachers when they wanted her to do artwork as part of a history class project, for example, or caught her reading novels in shorthand class after she had learned the material so much faster than her classmates that she had grown bored. She met my father while he was married to his first wife and working at the radio station on campus of the large state university which was located in town, where my mother was earning a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. Within the family dance, every member has his or her role. In a large family like ours, those roles can be even more obvious and pronounced. Unable to appropriately express his grief, my older brother became extremely disagreeable and irritating. Whatever he could do to get under our skin, he would do. He would tease us and torment us, subtly or directly, physically or verbally, in any way he could. He did the same to his peers at school, and had a hard time getting along with the other students. As an adult he keeps it to the verbal and is the ultimate Devil’s Advocate, compelled to disagree with or comment negatively on whatever anyone else saying, regardless of whether or not he actually holds an alternate view. My sister, who was more or less a nobody in my father’s male-centered, misogynistic world, remained the good child that she always was, careful never to make waves and always doing exactly as she was told. I’m sure that somewhere deep down inside she was terrified that if she didn’t she would lose yet another mother, especially since this one – my step-mother – gave her more attention. My youngest brother, who had been only two years old when my father and mother divorced, became the court jester. To this day, I swear that he can say anything to anybody, no matter how blunt and direct or sarcastic and biting, and instead of being offended you want to laugh. He has a certain wit and a way with words. From my youngest years I can remember being observant, thoughtful, and analytical about my parent’s behavior. They say that children don’t have the same cognitive abilities as adults, and I don’t completely understand myself how I was this way. I became so incredulous, so angry and so disgusted with them. I was simply appalled, and I could barely contain it. I did not dare express these feelings overtly but still managed to make them very, very obvious. It was easy peg me as the trouble-maker, the instigator of whatever the others did that sent my parents into a tizzy, because I was so obviously displeased with them. It only got stronger as the years went by: both my disgust and their response to it. I went from what my step-mother called “my charming Christopher” to being the family scapegoat.