My Blog

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.