Family Foliage (rough draft)

Pity the man who has a character to support - it is worse than a large family - he is silent poor indeed. - Thoreau

"Ma" was the oldest of five children growing up in Canada.  One day, when she was but nine years old, her mother got out of bed one morning and dropped dead of a heart attack, leaving her and her siblings without a mother and her father without a wife.  Her father had a job with a large Canadian paper mill.  His job was to go off into the woods and survey timber and estimate the yield that would be harvested.  They would cut the trees and float the logs down the river to the mill.  This would frequently take him away from home for lengthy periods of time.  At first he put the children with whomever could and would take them - relatives and friends.  Eventually this became impractical and he put them in Catholic boarding schools.  Mom was essentially raised by nuns with strict discipline.  Understandably, she rebelled.  She would shake her little fist at them and declare, "You're not my mother.  You can't tell me what to do."  After graduating, she went to secretarial school and got a job as a secretary for a Canadian water and power company.  She found a place to live in the attic of a rooming house.

The net effects were that she grew up with no sense of family and became a hoarding, control freak - we literally couldn't cut a fart in the house without her running in and saying, "What was that?  What happened?  What did you do?"  God forbid if we touched any of the hoarded junk in the house - she would notice it and there would be Hell to pay.  She would stay in bed depressed with rosary beads under her pillow.  She would frequently visit older women and treated them like a mother.  She would also bring in neighborhood children and " mother" them.

Her father became a chain-smoking alcoholic, eventually remarried and developed Parkinson's disease.  He would sit in his leather recliner, shaking with his cigarettes, ashtray and bottle.  When I was young, she would take us on trips to visit him in Canada.  It was clear to me, even at a young age, that she was seeking the love of a parent but my grandfather had grown cold and aloof.  She would literally trip over herself in a futile attempt to please him with this or that.  Alas it was never to be.

"Dad" was the fourth of eight children of Italian immigrants.  His father worked for the prison system in Italy.  His job would frequently take him from Sicily to the mainland.  There, he would frequent a family diner where my future grandmother worked.  My grandfather took a liking to her and wanted to marry her.  Her parents thought that she was too young to marry at a mere fifteen years of age and she had no formal education.  But my grandfather told them that everything would be fine, he would take care of her and teach her everything that she needed to know.

So they married and started having children.  They eventually emigrated to the U.S. at the urging of other relatives who had already come - a move that he would regret for the rest of his life.  Here in the states, he always struggled to find decent work but it was never to be.  He worked in the cloth and shoe manufacturing sweat-shops of an industrial city and smoked stogies.  He would sometimes be laid-off and struggled to take care of the family financially.  There just never seemed to be enough with all of those mouths to feed.  He became diabetic and my father would give him insulin shots.  My father would go to school with old clothes that didn't fit and no money for lunch.  His mother was a housewife who looked after the children, cooked, cleaned  and had more children.  They would occasionally all sit under a grapevine for "Sunday dinner" of homemade Italian pasta with tomato sauce, meatballs/sausage and bread with salad.  They spoke their native Italian and broken English.  Neither of them ever learned the language.

My parents met at a beach in New Hampshire.  My mother had driven down from Canada with two of her girlfriends and my father had gone there for the day with two of his friends.  The six of them paired up and my future mother and father were together.  They say that opposites attract.  My father grew up poor with a strong sense of family and mother with none.  They really did love each other and were put together for a reason that only God knows.  Their anger and frustration with an unfair life carried over into their marriage.  It is also said that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

"Dad" turned into a perfectionist and nothing was ever good enough or right.  We grew up in severe dysfunction eventually getting to the point where they were just two people living under the same roof.  They literally could not be in the same room.  If one of them went into the kitchen, the other would go to the living room or bedroom to get away from the other.  Being "old-school", divorce was not an option.  I would stay in my room as much as possible listening to music through my headphones to drown them out.  This is how I developed a strong love for music despite the way that we lived with hoarding, anger, coldness and frequent arguments.  Love can be an evasive thing amidst the clutter of a hard life.  I guess all we can do is play the cards we're dealt the best that we can.  We must learn to forgive and forget but those aren't easy things to do, especially when life has you feeling black and blue ...

Author's Note

"We have built for this world a family mansion, and the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten." - Thoreau