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I want to understand why I have spent my entire life “getting” ready. Never there. Never ready. Never good enough. Never adequate.
My mother had a nervous breakdown when she was 22 years old. I wish I knew what happened, because I always identified with this nervous women. Everyone said: “You are exactly like your mother.” It was 1929, the year the stock market crashed. Maybe that was the bulk of it. Times were hard, and even farmers had a hard time feeding their large families. Have you ever seen the movie “The Grapes of Wrath” with Henry Fonda? That was exactly accurate. My family were farmers from very small towns in Nebraska.
The Dust Bowl, also known as “the Dirty Thirties,” started the very next year: 1930 and lasted for about a decade, but its long-term economic impacts on the region lingered much longer. Severe drought hit the Midwest and Southern Great Plains. Massive dust storms began in 1931. Life was devastating for the farmers. My mother worked at the local .05 and .10 store and saved $1,000. It must have been similar to the old country stores that sold almost everything. She was “Pennsylvania Dutch” properly "Deutsch", which is German: kind, generous, sweet, loyal, very hard working, capable, thrifty, moral, and would give you the shirt off her back. Her mother, a large old fashioned hausfrau, came west to Nebraska as a child in a covered wagon. I saw a picture of “her” mother (my great grandmother), coming west in the covered wagon, as the mother of this clan. She looked like a totally different kind of woman: small, with long pearls and lace. I instantly said: “That's the one I took after”. The family heritage was Mennonite, not as strict as the Amish. One of those salt of the earth, go to church on Sunday, women our country was built on. And nervous as hell.
As a suave, good looking young man, my dad had to leave his family's farm and work for other farmers to make his way in the world. Born in 1901 he was too young for World War 1 (at 16) and too old for World War II. He spoke of picking cotton, corn, and baling hay, with his hands bleeding. Having a very bad back, that runs in our family, it was particularly tough for him. Maybe even if times had been good, he probably couldn't have been a farmer with that bad back. He didn't get to marry the young woman he loved because he couldn't support her. Incidentally, this lovely young woman's sister got pregnant out of wedlock. My father and his two brothers were considered somewhat wild for that day and age. I suspect one particular brother may have done the deed because he left town for Chicago with the story he won a lot of money in a gambling game and was afraid for his life. Who knows, maybe he was gone before he knew of her predicament. At any rate, she didn't marry the man.
The father of these girls was a strong Christian. The pregnant sister was sent away, and her father prayed my dad's beloved would accept an offer of marriage from a rich young, upstanding man in town. When this lovely daughter broke her front teeth in a car accident, she too was sent away for her dental work and healing. My dad cried when told, but couldn't afford to support her. Her father got his prayers answered, since she eventually married the better one and had a happy life. I met her when she was 96, and as we walked around her house, she showed me a beautiful comb, brush, and mirror set my dad had given her. Her daughter (my contemporary and still in the small town) told me her mother and father NEVER once argued. She had a better life. I didn't tell her daughter my father (mildly?) molested me my adolescent years, repeatedly massaging my breasts: “Because a man wants a woman to look like a woman”. Obviously I didn't qualify. I couldn't convince him glands don't grow with massage. So I failed at that. My mother, that I often found crying in the closet all my growing up years, because he had hurt her feelings, was built the same way. Just a larger version of me. My mother never knew of our massage sessions.
After the Stock Market crash in 1929 (dad 28) and dust bowl starting in 1930, my dad worked for another farm growing potatoes, for a summer. He had absolutely nothing to eat except potatoes that whole summer. My father married my mother in 1933 when he was 32 and she was 26. She had a job, and MONEY. They had a used bed, mattress, quilt, and 2 pillows. Sounds like Fiddler on the Roof. My sister was born two years later. She was a particularly gorgeous child, became very spoiled, and dad was always afraid someone would steal her.
My father was English, did that make him a little snobby? He used to make fun of my mother being backwards because she was German. He called her Deutschy, but it never sounded like a pet name to me. She mispronounced a couple of words like wash, and library, and often dropped the pronoun I, when writing the many letters to her large family. Yes, he looked down on her, and repeated that he would rather lose her than his eyesight. Maybe everyone feels that way, but why bother saying it? She always carried herself well, so why didn't he treat her like she was treasured, if in fact she was. I never knew. I never saw them hug, cuddle, talk much, or kiss, other than a peck. Where was the affection? I am affectionate to my husband because that's the kind of person I am, and what I hope for. She had a high school education, he a sixth grade one. Yes, he was smarter and his family was better looking, but she was the better person. I'm proud to be like her, but what an inheritance I got in the nerves department! Have you heard of doubly recessive genes?
My dad bought a Standard Gas station in their little town, with my mother's money. What a disappointment that the main highway across the Midwest, that was suppose to run through this little town, in front of the gas station, was put in about 17 miles north. His back was giving him fits, and he decided to sell the gas station, and swore he would not spend another winter in Nebraska. They moved to Los Angeles about 1937 or so, after about 4 or 5 years of marriage.
I shared that my dad was out of work for a year after arriving in Los Angeles, due to his back. My mother wasn't ready to have another child, no wonder. They had to rent out the two bedrooms, to make ends meet. She did not work outside the home, and she never drove a car. I would feel insecure too if neither my husband nor I was working, and I had a child. She had been through the depression and dust bowl, and was always afraid for the future.
After dad started working at Lockeed Aircraft, her mother came to live with them for a year, so dad pushed her to go ahead and have a second child. The pressure must have been hard for her, with the whole family sleeping in the dining room. When she was 7 months along with me, she got a massive infection in her mouth and lost all her teeth. She never had a natural smile after that. My sister always blamed me for: "making mama sick." She (my sister) started hating me, right there. My mother didn't even want me to be born. She didn't feel up to handling a baby. Five weeks after I was born Pearl Harbor was bombed. That must have added to my mother's nervousness. There was talk that Los Angeles may be bombed.
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