To understand ourselves, we must know where we came from

Maternal Grandmother Agnes

Where do we get our talents, our drive, our sense of ourselves? Last night at dinner a woman asked me if I had had a good relationship with my grandmothers, and I had to say, one died before I was born and the other was sickly most of the years I knew her. She died when I was fourteen, and because we did not live in the same town, I never knew her well.

But then I found myself telling my dinner companion more about my grandmothers. The one I did know, Agnes (photo at left), was divorced from my grandfather, a rarity and a scandal back in those days--the Forties and Fifties--and especially a scandal among Polish Catholics, who are among the most conservative and steadfast Catholics anywhere. I barely knew the man she had been married to, my grandfather, nor did I know know why my mother seemed not to like him, or why we almost never visited him. I remember that at his funeral--when I would have been about fourteen--my mother and her older sister were dry-eyed and grim, a younger sister was full of tears. I wondered why there was such disparity in how they were reacting to their father's death.

BEING PROUD OF GRANDMA
Only many years later--and I mean, decades--did I learn that this man had molested my mother's older sister, and bothered my mother once but didn't do more than scare the hell out of her. The youngest sister apparently didn't even know about this. My mother said that when her mother--whom she idolized--found out what he was up to (I do not know the details), she began sleeping on the couch, and soon after moved out, taking her children with her.

My mother

That put a whole new light on this woman. Instead of seeing her simply as someone who was sickly, I gained a new respect for her. She got up and left when the going got ugly. Now I could frame her divorce and remarriage in a renegade Catholic schism in a completely different way. Now I could be proud of her courage. This is a woman who stood up to her husband, and took the censure that came with the divorce. No one outside the immediate family knew why, and she did not tell--hence the youngest sister not even aware of what had occurred.

As for the other grandmother who died two years before I was born? According to family lore, I am a great deal like her. My middle name, Blanche, is for her own Bronislawa, the Polish equivalent. I know that she left a relatively well-off family in Poland by herself to come to America, and met and married my grandfather here.

Rule breaker Bronslawa Drozdusky

 When I learned that she wrote numerous letters to the newspaper in the hardscrabble town in southwestern Pennsylvania where they lived, I remember feeling a internal shift of joyful recognition. Ah ha, that's where I got that from. I also knew that she supplemented her husband's meager salary as a coal miner by making bathtub gin at home during Prohibition. My dad said she sold a Mason jar of her "white lightening" for fifty cents, and the miners came by on the day they got paid. The police came by once too. Grandfather took the blame and spent a night in jail. It's unlikely I will ever be a bootlegger, but I sure do urge us all involved in adoption to break unjust laws if necessary to find one another. I've often said that blood on the steps of the Department of Health where sealed records are kept would wake up some knucklehead legislators to the desperation of the situation. Knowing what I know about my grandmothers, I think they would think the same. Both strong and determined women, they both broke the rules. And when I came out of the birth mother closet, my mother did not hesitate to support me wholeheartedly, despite the negative gossip this generated in her home town. Thanks, Mom. ♥

Everyone in the family said I was most like my father's older sister, Jean, who left Pennsylvania when she was sixteen and went to New York City on her own, and made her way. When I knew her, she was a waitress in a restaurant near City Hall, and worked there until she married one of the customers. It was from her suitcase when I was twelve I found and read Bonjour Tristesse, barely understanding what was going on. I adored my Aunt Jean. Even when my mother was with Aunt Jean and me, people on the street used to think that Jean was my mother. I sounded like her too. Today I am noticing how similar our hair styles are in the pictures here--all waves, with bangs--even though the styles suit our times. And I notice my mother has one of those Marcel waves too.

My aunt Genevieve

The stories of these women are my history. They are who I come from. They inform and influence who I am. And it is comforting to know these things, to know about them, to feel them living though me.

IT'S NOT JUST THE COLOR OF YOUR EYES
This rumination came about today after reading David Brooks this morning in the New York Times. He was writing about Mitt Romney. What Brooks had to say has a direct connection to what it is like being a product of a certain family, and having that history written into your DNA. Brooks wrote:

"Romney’s salient quality is not wealth. It is, for better and worse, his tenacious drive — the sort of relentlessness that we associate with striving immigrants, not rich scions.

"Where did this persistence come from? It’s plausible to think that it came from his family history. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott once observed that it takes several generations to make a career. Interests, habits and lore accrue in families and shape those born into them." [Emphasis added.]

Brooks then related a brief history of Romney's family, taken from the book The Real Romney. Romney's not going to be my candidate of choice, but you can read into his history the tenacity that is a hallmark of the man today. In understanding the man, what matters more are not the particulars of Romney's Mormonism--which we certainly quibble with--but the exodus in his history, and the dogged determination to overcome odds.

High school senior Lorraine

You can see where all this led me, right? To have a whole history swiped from you is an unspeakable crime, yet it is done by the hundred fold in adoption. Knowing what we know today about the need for a history--emotional, cultural, medical--no one can participate in any adoption that is not fully and freely open and feel they are doing the right thing any longer. As for me, not adopted but having participated in one when I surrendered my daughter, I was left with an overreaching sadness. Everyone needs to know where they came from to best deal with where he is going. Any other way is to be handicapped for life.--lorraine
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Source: The Wealth Issue

See Also: Romney urges single woman to give up her baby--or be outcast from LDS