To The Women Who Came Before Me

One of the trickiest things about writing this blog is being sure to protect the privacy and integrity of the people about whom I tell stories.

I would publish blog entries daily if I could somehow figure out how to do it anonymously (and if I had a live-in nanny and driver who could shave hours off my day for me.)

Because, on the daily, I experience emotions that are so intense, I want nothing more than to write about them and release them from my body—jealousy, rage, frustration, confusion, and exhaustion, to name some of the ugliest.

I want to write a post on how I wish so often my mom and I were the kind of mother and daughter who go shopping and to lunch together.

But we’re not.

I want to write about how I don’t understand why my sisters and I struggle to support each other unconditionally and why we are so critical of each other’s lifestyles and life choices and why, only now, have we started to try and allow grace to enter in to our relationships with each other.

But I can’t.

I want to write about how my friendships have changed and evolved and dissolved and how some of the people I am now closest to, I didn’t even know two years ago.

But I won’t.

I realize that sharing my story is a delicate dance between connecting with others and isolating those who are or have been close to me.

Which is why this particular post has been one I’ve been rolling around in my brain for quite some time.

I would never want to insult or offend any of these women who have so selflessly walked before me.

Clara and Jennie

My mom and sisters and I have a daily text thread that usually makes me feel manic at least twice or five times per day.

Most mornings, my mom will begin the day by texting something reminiscent of, “Good morning to my five beautiful blessings. I hope the Holy Spirit’s love and grace flow into your hearts today like a refreshing river. I’m going to mass and then to Kohl’s, to spend my Kohl’s cash and use my 30% off coupon. I’m going to get some nice undershirts for the clothing drive at church.”

The message will oddly feature the emoji wearing a cowboy hat at the end.

This damn person. 🤠.

And then my blood pressure starts to elevate because there’s something in me that can’t comprehend the Holy Spirit using Kohl’s cash. And I start to lean more towards maniac and further away from peaceful mother.

There is something about that cowboy that makes me want to throw things.

That cowboy isn’t using dry shampoo for the sixth day in a row.

That cowboy isn’t placing a Click List order because there just isn’t enough time to actually enter a grocery store.

That cowboy gets to go to Kohl’s while I have to teach an extra lesson to my class today because my prep was cancelled yet again.

Clara

One morning, in the daily daughters text thread, my mom wrote, “Today is my mom’s anniversary of death. She used to sit in the kitchen all day in her slip and babushka and cook for everyone. She never left that kitchen. And she never complained. She was such a beautiful soul.”

My mom’s mom is Clara.

She had ten children in fifteen years.

She lived in an upper flat in a house in Detroit where, at one point, some of her children were sleeping three to a bed because there were only two bedrooms for all those people.

I know very little about my Grandma Clara except for the fact that she had a typewriter, diabetes, and is revered by her ten children.

And when I say revered, I’m talking, my Uncle Phil, a bohemoth of a man with a mustache and truck driver’s hat, will sob when he hears the song Serdeczna Matko (Beloved Mother) sung at a funeral mass.

Grandma Clara died when I was 1. My mom had been a mother for a little over a year when her own mother died.

So when my mom sent that group text, I sent one on the side to my sister, Clare, (Clara’s namesake), and said, “Did anyone ever stop and ask Clara if she was miserable? Because I sure as hell would have been. God help her.”

All I could think of is how I wanted so badly to time travel and sit in that kitchen with my Grandma Clara and ask her, “How are you feeling today, beautiful Clara? Do you need time to take a walk? Do you want to go back to bed? Do you need the name of a physical therapist who can help you heal your aching body? Do you want someone to hold your baby for you or play with your toddler for you so you can take a shower in peace?”

In the moment that I received the text, I wanted to put a sign on Clara’s Kitchen which read, “Closed today. Make your own damn sandwich. Clara needs to recharge.”

Clara lived in the time where people never asked her about herself. Self-care wasn’t even a thing and mama support groups existed only informally under other pretenses.

My mom told me once that Clara belonged to a group called EmCroKnitSew—a group of women who gathered on the regular to embroider, crochet, knit, and sew.

Well. I sure as hell hope that those warrior women shared their internal dialogue while they made blankets. Because, from what I’ve been told, that group would have been my grandmother’s best bet for an outlet to say, “I’m exhausted and I don’t feel like making a stew today and my husband is driving me absolutely insane.”

I write for Clara. I write because Clara couldn’t.

Or rather, she could, but she couldn’t say, “Being a mother of young children is so overwhelming that it breaks you and puts you back together differently. And, at the same time that you’re being put back together, you’re trying to scream why it’s so difficult and it feels like your voice is gone.”

So I will say what I have to say for both of us.

Jennie

My paternal grandmother is a woman named Jennie, who was orphaned as a young teenager and sent to live with a maiden schoolteacher who functioned as her guardian.

Her three younger sisters were sent to different foster families and were not kept together in the aftermath of their parents’ deaths.

Which, if I remember correctly, were from influenza.

It has been 16 years since I breathed the same air as my Grandma Jennie. She died only a year after burying her son, my father.

She had already buried her oldest son fifteen years prior and her husband, two years after that.

Grandma Jennie had done some serious burying at that point.

Now that I try to conjure up a visual of her in my mind, I realize that Jennie’s eyes never smiled. She may have politely laughed here or there when something funny happened, but it’s as if she experienced so much hardship that her eyes refused to cave and follow suit.

On Sunday mornings, when we visited her after church at her home in Detroit, Grandma Jennie sat poised on the edge of her couch, legs crossed, cigarette in hand, her ashtray on an adjacent coffee table overflowing with ashes and discarded butts.

There was a glass cookie jar on her kitchen table which sometimes had stale windmill cookies with almond slivers in them.

For my birthday each year, the two best gifts always came from Grandma Jennie:

1. A garbage bag full of junk food. And good stuff, like Bugles and Cracker Jack, not just generic potato chips.

2. A perfumed potpourri container outlined in pearls which held all of the pennies she had collected that year.

She had a party line.

Please allow me to repeat.

This woman, this sweet angel who buried her parents as a child, raised four children of her own, didn’t have a driver’s license, and refused to buy herself clothes anywhere other than garage sales, had a party line.

Not only did she have a landline, but she had to share the damn line with someone she didn’t even know.

It breaks my heart that she didn’t have the need for her own landline.

That phone never, ever rang when we were there.

I also want to time travel, go find her, hand her a cell phone and say, “Text me, Grandma. Text me from your bed because you need someone to confide in and you need someone to unload your life burdens on. I can be that person for you.”

She didn’t have a Pinteresty sign in her kitchen which read, “What Happens At Nana’s Stays At Nana’s.”

In fact, we never once spent the night at my grandmother’s house.

It was an unspoken agreement that that would certainly be too much.

And, now that I am a mother myself, I can see why.

Being around young children and loving them requires a great deal of capacity in one’s heart, and, at that point, Jennie’s heart had been broken so many times. Entire compartments of her heart had closed.

From what I know, Jennie never attended grief support groups.

Imagining this tiny little woman, no taller than a third grader, carrying the deaths of the five people closest to her, brings me to tears instantly.

No one ever said to her, “How are you really, Jennie?” (That’s what we say at Honey, the wellness center for moms which I attend. It’s genius, because then no one feels the need to answer with the obligatory, “I’m good.”)

No one ever offered to listen to her share the difficulties of raising herself or of feeling unequal in her marriage or of overwhelming grief.

She didn’t have a mother who she could call for help when her babies were sick or a best friend to commiserate with or a doting aunt who begged to take her children for the weekend so she could refuel.

She didn’t have the opportunity to write a blog to provide community and connection for other mothers in her same life stage.

So, I write for Jennie. I write for Clara and I write for me and I write for Jennie because I was so young still when she died and had no idea how this responsibility of motherhood would change me. I could not even begin to understand how I would be so privileged to live in a time where I am valued as an individual and not always silenced when I try to speak.

For my sweet Clara and my precious Jennie. I vow to walk in the paths you have so beautifully worn for me and will create a legacy which always honors yours.