I have been doing this blog for a long time. I originally started to use it as a form of venting my frustrations for various aspects of life. Over the years it morphed into a forum for making observations on all manner of things.
Lately I have found I have been making things up just to prevent long gaps in time from one post to the next. In order to address this issue I've decided to intersperse my regular blogs with stories I've been writing about my life.
These stories started at Christmas when my son got me a subscription to a web site called Storyworth. The idea is they send me a topic every Monday morning and I write about it. At the end of the year when I have over 50 stories they publish it in book form and I can get as many copies as I want depending on who might be interested. It's a pretty neat concept and it forces a person to reflect on his/her life.
I have thus far completed 20 stories. I am going to copy and paste the first one here. At some point later on after a couple of regular blogs I'll post the second one and so forth.
I hope you enjoy them.
Story 1
“What was your Mom like when you were a child?”
If you look up the term “care giver” in
the dictionary you’ll see a picture of my mother because that’s what she was. A
life long care giver. From the time she
was 16 years old to pretty much the day she died she looked after people.
She quit high school to work and help
out her Italian immigrant family. She
was one of 10 children. One died at
birth and one died very young. My mother
was the second youngest child. (By the
way: one should not assume that because she quit high school she was uneducated
and uninformed. Nothing could be further
from the truth. For example when I got
to college and had to take various American and World literature courses, I would
show my mother the reading list of the classical books I was required to read.
Guess who had already read them?
Correct. My mother.)
She married my father at the age
of 22. She then spent her life looking
after me, my father and my two sisters. My mother was a stay-at-home mom. We lived in a very rural area and for
economic and other reasons we only had one car.
My mother had polio when she was a little girl and it left her with one
leg shorter than the other which made driving very difficult.
Growing up I
remember my mother to be the
complete opposite of my father. Where my
father was rather impatient, demanding and volatile, my mother was the opposite.
She was kind, soft spoken and gentle. She was very often put in the role of
protecting my sister and me from some of my father’s demands and outbursts.
Thinking back on my childhood I realize that my mother was
not particularly comfortable meeting new people. She was definitely an introvert. I can’t remember a time when she visited
people or when people came to our house to visit her. That’s partly because of the remoteness of where we lived but I think
it’s also because my mother was simply comfortable being alone. I think that might be where I get that
tendency.
My mother was the kind of person who suffered in
silence. My father was not an easy
person to live with. We had many
financial difficulties and his alcoholism seemed to get worse as he got
older. For a long period of time my
mother’s job as a sales person at a department store was the sole source of income.
Eventually my father obtained steady employment but he lacked the
ability or desire to manage his money responsibly. He believed it was more important to spend
money on things he wanted rather than pay bills. This of course created all sorts of problems
in addition to being contrary to my mother’s beliefs so there was a constant
undercurrent of conflict.
In thinking back to my childhood I recall that my mother’s
method of discipline was to simply scold us for what ever it was we did wrong
(usually fighting) or worse she would look at me (or my sister) with a very sad
expression as if to say “I’m so disappointed in you, George”. That would be enough to make me feel
terrible. Very effective. Certainly better than hitting me in the head.
Modern day child psychologists could
learn a lot from her!
As I grew up and matured (some what) and inevitably changed,
my mother stayed the same. She continued
to care for my father as his health failed and eventually my Aunt Rose went to
live with her. When my father died, my
mother and Aunt Rose moved in with my family where my mother took over cooking
and cleaning duties. I didn’t like her
working for a family of six but I think she wanted to give back. Always the care giver.