I am slowly but surely going through my mother’s things so that I can pitch what needs to be thrown away, and keep the parts that might be important to my children and grandchildren in the future. I need to do this all before September because starting with the new school year I want to put my mother’s illness and death into my past. I need to put my grief on a low simmer on the back burner instead of taking up so much space in the front of my mind.
So I am going through drawers and boxes and boxes of letters and cards. My mother kept just about every piece of correspondence she ever received. But what has fascinated me the most are the letters from my grandma to my mother when she was a young bride in 1958.
First a little background. My mother went to college at great sacrifice on the part of my grandparent’s. She got her undergrad at St. Mary’s College (across the way from Notre Dame in Indiana) and then she got her Master’s at Michigan State. And while she was in college she brought home quite a few guys to meet the folks. She brought home a man from Saudi Arabia, and one from Scandinavia, and even one who in retrospect might have been a Nazi. She never brought home Joe ordinary-guy-next door. So when she brought home my Dad, I think my grandma was happy that at least he lived in this country! But mom lived in Michigan and my Dad lived in New Mexico and in 1956 or so that was a lot of geography.
My parents did marry in 1958. I was born in 1959. My mom (pregnant with my little sister)brought me home to her parents house for a short vacation in 1960 and never went back. What happened in my growing up years was a lot of animosity and anger and maybe even some hatred between my grandparents, my mom and my dad – all of them against each other but even changing sides from time to time. It was very confusing.
So today I started going through some of these letters and cards and was amazed at some of the things my grandma wrote and how loving and caring she sounds in the letters. And of course I knew that she was a loving woman, because I loved her with all my heart.
My earliest memories of my grandma are of sitting on her lap during a 7:30 a.m. Sunday morning mass and just burying my head into her soft, warm chest. Her dress always smelled so good, and she always had some sort of interesting broach or necklace to finger and admire. I remember feeling, safe, warm and loved on her lap. I loved my grandma so much.
And out of that love came admiration. My grandma was a fierce determined woman when she had to be. I remember when I was about 4 or 5 she had a massive stroke and we were all afraid that she would die. But she didn’t. She did all of her therapy. She relearned how to walk and she wouldn’t let anyone tell her that she could not. To get strength back into her arms the doctor told her to squeeze a red rubber ball a few times a day. She squeezed it all the time. In fact, she wore several balls out! Failure was not an option for her.
Unfortunately she was like that in her relationships too. If grandma was mad at you, she could hold a grudge for a long, long time. I remember she went a week without talking to me once and I thought I would die! She could hold her on in a debate or discussion. She would never back down. But sometimes there was a cost. After a heart attack and a stroke in the 1960s was mood was more severe, her tongue more cutting, and her temper much shorter than the woman who wrote these letters of love to my mother.
On the other side, even decades after my grandmother’s death, mom held grandma responsible for the failure of own marriage, never mind her own culpability.
But as I’m going through these letters I’m seeing a different side to my grandma and maybe gaining some deeper understanding of what happened, although I don’t know that I will ever understand this mixed up dynamic for sure.
Over the next few days I hope to have some of these letters put into chronological order and reproduce some of them here. Grandma was also the rectory secretary and there is a view of that life back in the 1950s as well. But mainly I want to put them someplace so that my kids and my nieces and nephews can get a better understanding of where they came from and how they came to be.
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