My mother passed away in February of 2013. It’s now been 12 years since she has been gone. Losing my mother was hard, but that was overshadowed by my oldest daughter’s suicide the same year. I don’t think I ever fully mourned or processed losing my mother.

At Coney Island with her brother

My mother was born in 1927. She would often say she didn’t have much of a memory of her childhood because of the home environment; she had blocked a lot of it out. Her parents fought like crazy. Her father was an alcoholic, but could be charming when he wanted to be. Still, when they got home and the door closed, he was a different person. This was back in the age when women didn’t have a lot of choices. She did remember when the picture above was taken. It was a day her mother was angry at her father for some reason and picked up the kids and took them to Coney Island.

They moved quite a bit as my grandfather wasn’t the greatest provider, and he often blew all of his paycheck at the bar. In later years, when we talked about it, I said I would have just taken all of the money out of his wallet when he came home drunk. He would have thought he lost it over the bar. Women didn’t usually have that sense of standing up for themselves, though, so my grandmother didn’t do that. One time, my mother remembers my grandmother dipping into her “pin money” when they were about to be evicted.

My mother was 14, almost 15 when World War II came to our shores. They lived in Ridgewood, Queens which was a very German-American neighborhood. There were stores there where the people only spoke German and never learned to speak English. Their children would to come out to translate, if needed, but most of the time you were out of luck if you didn’t know a few words in German.

My mother would recount to me later that for her, the War meant there were many soldiers and sailors in New York City. My mother was partial to sailors. They would meet them in Central Park and agree to meet them later, then never show up. She was attending a high school for the arts in New York City at the time. After the war was over, she worked for a magazine in the City.

She and my father were married in 1949. They knew each other from elementary school, but had reconnected after my father returned from his Navy enlistment (sailors, remember?) They lived in a cold-water flat for the first 5 years of their marriage before they bought the home they would live in for the next 40+ years in Elmont, NY.

My mother told me once she went to a doctor to find out why she and my Dad hadn’t been able to conceive a child. He told her to just relax and it would happen. They decided that my mother should quit her job. Still, nothing happened. Meanwhile, she was very involved with her church, including being the first female on the church council at the time.

Their next-door neighbors had three kids and both parents worked. My mother became a sort of surrogate Mom to them all, but especially the youngest, Jackie (on the right in the top picture). When I was about 5, Jackie’s parents divorced and they moved away. That devastated my mother, but Jackie still remained close to us and used to come visit in the summer.

They tried several avenues for adoption back in the day. The general consensus was that my father, who worked for the telephone company at the time, didn’t make enough money for them to be approved. At one point, they talked to a private lawyer who wanted them to “invest” in a real estate deal he had going. That was a euphemism for buying a baby. They turned him down. I came to them when they Pastor of their church, who knew my birthmother and her family, talked her into allowing him to place the child she had already decided to surrender for adoption.

When I was less than a year old, my mother needed serious surgery on her back. She had a disc removed, which back in the 1960s was a big deal. She was in the hospital for many weeks in a cast over her torso. My Dad could only take me up to see her one time. For years, that loomed over everything. My mother was scared of damaging her back again. She was picky about where she slept and there were many activities she just didn’t do.

She still taught Sunday School for many years, as well as being a Troop Leader for my Junior Girl Scout Troop. We took vacations to New Hampshire for two weeks every summer that I looked forward to the entire year. It’s probably what eventually led me to move here.

I loved my mother very much. She did the best she could with what information she was given. At the time, children were thought to be a clean slate of sorts, and if you just took them home and loved them then everything would be fine. No one thought there were any issues separating a baby from the woman who gave birth to her. Even when there were known issues, many of the same social service agencies that people turned to for family counseling also had divisions that facilitated adoptions. Were they going to acknowledge a problem? That’s rhetorical, by the way.

I remember I was about 5 years old and we were watching a made-for-tv movie where a woman found the child she had given up and wanted her back. I thought the birthmother was pretty, and liked her long hair. When my mother asked a 5 year old the loaded question of who I would want to go with I I were that kid, I chose the pretty woman with the long hair. I didn’t understand the dynamics, really, but I understood that I had given my mother the wrong answer.

My mother never full grieved for the fact that they couldn’t have children of their own. I saw that when I was older. I told her I thought the issue was likely my father. When he was born, he and his umbilical cord were shriveled up and they told my grandmother to take him home to die. He fooled them all and lived, but I’d wager he was “shooting blanks” his entire life. One time when I was an adult, we were talking about adoption, and I was trying to educate her about the problems they were seeing surfacing in adults who had been adopted. “Well what about me?” was her answer.

That said, I don’t hold it against her. They loved me as much as if I had been born to them. They weren’t educated about the issues, which are still often hidden even today. My father was more open to reading the books I found that allowed me to connect the dots with a lot of how I felt my entire life.

She was so close to my oldest daughter, Melinda, after I had my own children. I always said Melinda was the girly-girl she wished I had been. I was a tom-boy. I loved sports and hated dressing up, had no use for makeup. Melinda loved shopping and pretty things. I was kind of glad my mother was already dead when Melinda committed suicide. I think it would have killed her anyway.

When we moved up here, she discovered a lump on her breast. They did a partial mastectomy and then she went for chemotherapy 4 days a week for 6 weeks. She was pronounced cancer-free. That lasted 7 years until it came back with a vengeance. What we thought was a bad cold ended up showing the cancer had returned and spread. She was diagnosed the end of October 2012 and died on February 2, 2013.

I miss her a lot. She was creative and an artist. We have a number of paintings she did still in our home. I’m glad I grew up with a kind mother who taught me to be compassionate.