Last month I volunteered to take another Feminisms slot in January, though this time without any real topic. Although I’ve had my antennae alert for any political and/or cultural news that might inspire me, no one single topic or event quite pulled me in. I considered doing a relaxing Night at the Movies, featuring some favorite films by foreign (read non-USA) women film directors, but never had the time to properly rent and review them.
In the end, I’ve decided to just present the small story of one woman, born in 1932 and died in 2001, and how her private life played out against the social developments of 1950s, 60s and 70s. I’m not even sure what the message or moral of this tale is; I hope to hear your opinions on the matter in the comments.
In any case, I hope you find it interesting. Please join me below...
Feminisms is a series of weekly feminist diaries. My fellow feminists and I decided to start our own for several purposes: we wanted a place to chat with each other, we felt it was important to both share our own stories and learn from others’, and we hoped to introduce to the community a better understanding of what feminism is about.
Needless to say, we expect disagreements to arise. We have all had different experiences in life, so while we share the same labels, we don’t necessarily share the same definitions. Hopefully, we can all be patient and civil with each other, and remember that, ultimately, we’re all on the same side.
Growing up in a single-parent home, all I really knew was that my mother was divorced. I’d been born in Delaware, the divorce came when I was an infant, and when I was four she decided to move to California. That was the sole explanation she gave, and I was content with it.
There were no photographs of my father. There were a handful of my paternal grandparents, however. I even had a few hazy memories of visiting them in New Jersey, before we moved to California. But there had been no contact with them since.
When I was nine, my mother remarried, and this man became fully a father to me, and so the absence of a father became no issue at all.
It wasn’t until late in my high school years that I really questioned my mother about her first marriage and my real father. Even then, I was driven less my any true curiosity about my biological father. Two things motivated me. Partly, I was looking for a way to broach the subject of my already nascent feeling that I did not want to have children of my own. But more importantly, I think my adolescent self was trying to figure out how a woman, who in 1960 had been a single mother brave and independent enough to pick up and move across the country to start a new life, seemed in the early 1970s to have become so dependent, timid and anxiety-ridden, despite a seemingly happy marriage.
And so it was that my mother told me a longer version of her story: My father was an immature man, really not ready to commit to marriage and family. They divorced when I was very young, my mother won custody of me, and for years he had nothing to do with us. But when I was four, my father remarried, and his new wife persuaded him to fight for shared custody. In that era, no matter how absent the father had been, the courts were loathe to fully deny rights to the father, so the judgment ended up with some arrangement in which I would be shunted back and forth between households each month. My mother outwardly accepted the arrangement, but in reality she was having no parts of it: she would not have me living a divided life. The move to California was, in truth, a flight, a disappearance.
She offered to put me in touch with my father, if I wanted. "I’m sure I could do it with just a few phone calls."
But I wasn’t interested. This story was enough. It gave me increased respect for my mother’s early adulthood, although I was still puzzled that she no longer seemed to have much of that spark. I thought this was a pretty cool story; much cooler, in fact, than actually knowing my father. Indeed, this story sufficed for me for decades.
Friends over the years often expressed puzzlement and disbelief that I was so incurious about my biological father. But I felt strongly that I already had two people who raised me in a loving home: my mother, and, since I was nine, my stepfather. This other man had played zero role in my life, aside from contributing some DNA.
My curiosity did not become piqued again until 1994. I was 39, and six months into my relationship with the woman who was to become Mrs. DebtorsPrison. It was around Yom Kippur that year that I first mentioned to my Mom over the phone that my ‘girlfriend’ was Jewish.
My mother stunned me by telling me that my paternal great-grandmother was Jewish, a Russian Jew, she thought. She recalled visiting her in New York City, that she didn’t speak English, that there were newspapers in Yiddish. My grandmother had become a Christian, and been disowned because of it. This seemed to open up a whole new part of, if not my past, exactly, then at least my heritage. It compelled me to ask my mother some more questions, and thus came Version Three of the story.
Really, it’s not so different from Version Two, just expanded, told to me as an adult rather than as a teen. In her teens, she’d just been itching to move out of the house. She shared an apartment with a sister for a while, then with a girlfriend. She married my father in October of 1954, when she was 22. They separated seven months later, when my mother was three months pregnant. She found out he was cheating on her, and had gotten another woman pregnant. Still, she refused to grant a divorce until after I was born, presumably to give me legitimacy.
Though the situation sounds daunting, especially considering this was 1955, she says she was thrilled to be pregnant and delighted to be a mother. My father had visitation rights, but never visited. She didn’t even want any child support, but friendly advice prevailed and she accepted the $25.00 per month child support granted by Family Court.
But then, when I was four, my father remarried, and his new wife urged him to return to my life. He sued for joint custody, wanting to have me for a minimum of one weekend per month.
The legal battle lasted four months. My father did poorly on the psychiatric evaluation, and indeed his own mother testified against him getting shared custody. My mother felt the chances were strong that joint custody would be denied, but she also knew that there was a judicial bias towards granting the father rights, and so she made secret preparations to flee.
The call from her attorney came while she was at work on a Wednesday. My father would get me for one weekend per month on a trial basis. By Saturday, my mother and I had vanished. Letters were sent to her job saying she would not be back and to Family Court relinquishing child support. Our belongings were disbursed among family to be shipped later. Only my maternal grandparents, my mom’s oldest sister and my godparents knew where we were. My father came around while relatives were packing up the apartment, demanding to know where we were, but everyone’s lips were sealed.
And so, in 1960 this young woman, this single mother of a four year old son, engineered a clandestine flight and took the train to California, the Golden Land of Opportunity, to start a whole new life. Imagine the excitement...
OK, now, after all these decades, my curiosity had been piqued sufficiently. I knew my father’s name, I knew my paternal grandmother’s name, I knew where they had lived in New Jersey...and by now the internet existed. It wasn’t long before I had the contact information for my paternal grandmother. She was still alive. In 1996, I made the call.
"Hello. This is kind of a strange call, but my name is ___ ____ (my adoptive father’s last name), but 40 years ago it was ___ ____ (my biological father’s last name.)"
There was a gasp, and then she repeated my former name, but adding my middle name on her own, as if it were a code by which we would recognize one another. "Oh, I’ve been looking for you for so long! Where have you been?!" She seemed overcome by emotion. It was a very touching moment, like something out of the movies. It didn’t last long.
Almost immediately, 35 years of anger and bitterness spewed forth. She’d lent my mother money, even though she herself barely had enough to put food on the table, and my mother had betrayed her, disappeared without a trace, never saw her or the money again, even though she had even gone to court for her, testified against her own son to help her, she still had pictures of me but any picture of my mother she had ripped to shreds. The anger seemed shockingly fresh and vivid, despite the events having been so long ago.
The next day, I confessed to my mother that I’d been in contact with my paternal grandmother. She seemed a bit shaken by the news, but only said, "Oh, now you’ve opened up a can of worms..."
I did meet my grandmother that year, and my father as well, but no renewed family ties were ever created. My paternal grandmother was a hateful, spiteful woman, not merely Jew converted to Christianity, but rabidly anti-Semitic, and addicted to casino trips to Atlantic City. My biological father turned out to be an amiable enough codger, but we really had little in common beyond some genetic material. I had no need for a dad, and he no need for a son.
What I did learn, however, was that my mother’s youth was quite a bit more complicated. Here’s the story, as pieced together from my biological father and a couple of aunts.
It seems my mother had been married to someone before my father. An aunt described my mother’s first husband as "a sweet man, though something of a hypochondriac. I think that’s why your mother left him." Her search for romance led her to volunteer at a VA hospital in Delaware, where she would read and play games with the brave men convalescing there. That’s where she met my father. He was an ex-marine who’d been in a motorcycle accident and was in a body cast for seven months. She spent a lot of time with him, and although he was physically immobile, he won her with his devilish charm. She divorced her first husband, the hypochondriac, to marry this motorcycle-riding bad boy as soon as he was released from the hospital.
As my father related it: "Our marriage never had much of a chance. I got out of that hospital, all I wanted to do was run around. Oh man, did I get myself in trouble. I got another woman pregnant...I call you the slow-motion twins, born four months apart."
My father briefly married the other woman he’d gotten pregnant, but that didn’t last long. It was his next wife, his third, who urged him to undertake the custody battle for me.
Meanwhile, my mother remarried her first husband, who evidently still carried the torch for her. I suppose she did it to provide me with a father, but it didn’t last long. She also was soon going for her third divorce in as many years.
My aunt accompanied my mother by train to St. Augustine, Florida, for this third divorce. Evidently, St. Augustine was something of a quickie divorce mill back in those days. My mother was coached to say, in a phony southern accent, things like ‘he called me a bitch’ to establish verbal abuse. The depositions were tape recorded, reviewed by a judge overnight, and divorces handed out the next day.
I imagine her, hurt, angry, confused, suffering the approbation of family. The custody case must have almost seemed a godsend, a reason to run far away, leave this tangle behind and start a whole new life. California, in those days, held a very potent allure for those wanting to start a new life.
That’s as much as the story as I expect I’ll ever know. I never told my mother I learned about her first (and third) marriage, though I expect she knew I had learned the truth. It seemed to me that if she had kept it such a secret all these years, it was not my place to reopen it simply out of my own curiosity. I don’t even know if she ever told these things to my stepfather, to whom she was married for 24 years, before he died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 1989.
As for that last marriage, what I thought was her second but was actually her fourth, he was 12 years younger than her. She was in her early thirties, and he was just exiting his teens when they met. I myself remember his 21st birthday party, with a beer bottle sunk into the cake, a month before their wedding. He was a real California teen in those days, taking us to drag car races, using slang from Beach Boys songs. Perhaps my mother was still seeking that old excitement of her former life, and thought she’d found it with this young man so imbued with the zest of California culture.
However, my stepfather assumed the mantle of adulthood quickly. My twin brother and sister were born a year later, and he seemed to be perpetually working two and three jobs to support us. Although outwardly they seemed happy together, and loved my brother, sister and myself, in truth the marriage was a mystery to me. They seemed to have so little time together, with him always working. He seemed to become old very quickly.
My mother grew more and more dependent and timid as the years of her marriage went on. She suffered anxiety attacks. And yet this time, she soldiered on, professing happiness, hiding her history, giving no voice to what she might have been feeling inside.
After her husband’s death from Lou Gehrig’s disease (it was a rapid case, he was gone within a year of the first symptoms and diagnosis), my mother existed largely as a live-in nanny at various times for the children of my brother and sister. She never lived on her own again, and seemed to lead a very small and diminished life for her remaining years.
And now I leave it to you, if you’ve stayed with the story this far, to offer some suggestions as to what it all means. In many ways, it is a universal story of complicated romance, as lived and relived over the centuries. And yet, coming as it does against the backdrop of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, I find it very interesting. It’s almost as if my mother’s youthful yearnings, her sexual daring (and yes, her confused immaturity), were made for social changes that would occur during those latter two decades. But she’d been too early. She’d sought excitement and independence in an era when society was seeking to tamp down women’s independence in the post-war years. In the ensuing decades, when social mores opened up, it was too late for her. She seemed to feel trapped, burdened by her secrets, held back by fear and guilt.
I wish she could have been happy and free her entire life.