From Ellen

Dear All,

Last week some of you wrote in comments. Please continue writing in. This week we go on with Janie's story posted below during a particularly hard time when her life got away from her as she tried to hold onto it. The question for me as I listened to Janie's story was when have I felt knocked over by life? How did I respond? What might I learn from Janie's story for the future when life knocks me over again?

Hope to hear from you.
Contact me at: Ellen@berkeleyfamilytherapy.com

Losing her way

Janie #4

Janie’s belief in the social myths of her circle led her to fall in love at sixteen with a handsome and irresponsible young man from her set. No one around her thought that they made good match, but no one said anything either, when they married young and started a family. Janie’s husband Bob, although from a well-situated Irish family, lost sight of himself and like many others in their community turned to alcohol.

Bob and Janie shared a romantic notion of love that kept them married well past the time when he was available to love her and their children. Janie told me their sad love story:

“Bob and I met in eighth grade. We went to the same church, St. Peters, and they had a CYC (Catholic Youth Camp) where we both went during summers growing up. I also saw him at Sunset Hills Country Club at the swimming pool.

“Bob was my boyfriend, but I had a lot of boyfriends, but he was the most persistent. He was the one who said ‘Our marriage is inevitable.’ the kind of things that I believed. Just before Bob left for the army, we walked together around the Tidal Basin. We didn’t really say that we would marry, but then we wrote to each other for almost three years. He left early in 1942 and he didn’t come back until November of 1944.

“No one thought that Bob was the right one for me. He had a reputation when we were in high school. Some people thought that he was wonderful, while other people said, ‘watch out.’ One time in high school, I came down the steps at Visitation and saw my mother with the principal, Sister Ann Marie, in her office. I eavesdropped and heard them saying something about Bob and a girl that he was involved with who had left school. No one in our class knows what became of her. She sort of just disappeared. We all keep track of one another, but she is the one in our class who we think is still alive, but don’t know where she is and what happened to her. I’ve always wondered if it had something to do with her and Bob.

“When Bob came back from the war he called me immediately. I didn’t listen to anyone. I was terribly attracted to him. We were married the next November. I was one month from twenty-one. I think Bob won me over because he was so persuasive in writing, speaking, and touching. We didn’t have sex before we married or anything like that, but it got kind of scary with him. I thought, I guess I’ll have to marry him because he touched my breast.”

Janie started laughing. “Back in the 40’s you thought things like that. I might have imagined that I could get pregnant just by his touch. I really didn’t know much about anything.

“Our romance lasted until 1950. We had three children then -- first Michael, then Kevin and Stephen. It was the year that Stephen was born that we ended up kaput. Bob had insurance jobs and sometimes he worked for his father or sell tires out of a filling station in East St Louis, but he wasn’t steady.

“The last time we tried one more time was in 1952. I always tell my daughter Mary that she should be thankful for Maureen O’Hara in the movie, “The Quiet Man.” I’ve given Mary a picture of the little house from the movie called the “light of morn.”

“Bob came over one night and we watched “The Quiet Man” together. It was such a romantic story and then there was Mary. I am thankful for “The Quiet Man” because Mary is a delight in my life and without that movie she would never have been born. But Bob and I didn’t stay together.

“Finally, I got a divorce from him in 1957. At the time my children were eleven, nine, seven, and four. Bob went away and lived in California. We heard from him from time to time, but he never came and visited us.”

Janie struggled to feed and clothe her children, as well as provide them with the other things that they needed as they grappled with their father’s absence. Janie, the three boys, and her daughter lived in a small apartment over a store. She was gone from home, working much of the time, but she encouraged the boys to stay at home and to bring their friends there. She thought that they would be safer at home.

One night Janie came home and found not only beer cans, but also a condom under the couch. She announced that “This was it.” She rounded up the boys in the group and told them that they were going on a Catholic retreat at The Pius X Monastery by the Mississippi, near St. Louis. Janie thought it might save them from themselves and get them away from drinking and boredom. She piled them in her car and drove them down to the retreat center, turning them over to the monks. Her son Stephen and one of the other boys got up very early the next morning, snuck out, and floated down the Mississippi on a log. It was a magical moment for those boys, but it didn’t save them. They were both dead by their own hands within two years.

Stephen died in the summer of 1967. The following summer Janie and her teenage son Kevin, at his request, took an unhappy trip to San Francisco to visit Bob, Janie’s ex-husband and Kevin’s father. They had heard that he wasn’t doing well. Whatever Kevin had hoped for with that visit didn’t happen. Janie, Bob, and Kevin had little to say to one another. At the San Francisco airport, as Janie and Kevin were leaving to return to St. Louis, a sad Kevin asked Janie if he could fly to Woodstock to go to a concert instead of returning home with her. She said, “Yes,” thinking that at least he might get something out of the trip that he had wanted. However, she worried about him and hoped that he wouldn’t come to harm. He returned safely from that trip, but as with Stephen, Janie couldn’t keep Kevin safe forever. On October 3, 1969, Kevin was shot by the St. Louis police.

Janie told me about his death:
“Kevin was killed when he was twenty-one in 1969, two years after Stephen died. He and his special friend Claire were on their way to attend the anti-Veiled Prophet (VP) Ball. In St. Louis’ high society everyone attended the VP Ball and if you were anti-establishment you went to the anti-VP Ball. Kevin and Claire painted their shoes with day-glow and dressed up to go to the event. On their way to the dance, they went to a part of town that had lovely homes, but it was also a troubled area. Only a week before, a policeman had been shot by a druggy- type person, so the police were jittery. Claire told me that a young man came up to their car and told them first to get out of the car and then forced them back into the car. He had a gun and had just committed a robbery. The police came in to answer to the robbery, and this is where I blank out. I guess the police were suspicious when they saw Kevin, Claire, and the other man. They told them to get out of the car. The police assumed that the three of them had robbed the house together, and somehow in whatever followed they shot Kevin in the back -- five bullet holes in the back. They arrested the other young man.

“I never did anything about how the police shot Kevin. It wouldn’t have brought him back, and after Stephen and Kevin died, I didn’t know if I could go through this kind of trial. I had always told the children that the police were there to keep them safe and bring them home if they got lost. I had believed in them. You know it was 1969 and the 60’s were awful. I knew that Kevin was in trouble. I suspected that he was drinking and drugging too, although we didn’t find anything in his things.

“I first learned about Kevin’s death when two detectives arrived at my door. They wanted to take me downtown to identify his body. I got numb all over: it was so close to Stephen’s death. But I told the police that I could do this, and I went with them to the morgue. Kevin was on a big wide metal table and I touched him. I was in such shock. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. His eyes were open, and I wasn’t brave enough to close his eyes.

“Much later when I saw Midnight Cowboy, when Dustin Hoffman died on the bus and Jon Voight closed his eyes, I …” Janie started weeping. “I really wished I had done it, closed his eyes, but I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t do it then.” Through streaming tears, Janie said, “You learn it for another time or another person.”

Comment from N

Hey Ellen,

I really like the blog! Its nice to hear you speak so openly. I didn't understand your project before but I think I do now. I was thinking about the stories of life that you speak of. Joe may be right that the 'lost stories' is a US phenomenom because of how we live--apart and obsessed with satisfying the self, material aggrandizement etc. And by extension, I wonder if this reluctance to one's pain with others is also a cultural thing that keeps people cut off from sharing and learning. It always struck me odd that under certain circumstances, people who endure hardship reflect upon it with almost a fondness when they had others to experience it with (ie. growing up in povery or being in a horrible accident.) It is a strange gift.

For me the interesting question is what do you do when it doesn't work out and there is no rainbow. (Ha this is probably why I am a lawyer!) Put differently, why does it work out sometimes and not other? This phenomena has plagued my family. A relative of mine was slated to become matriach of the family and she married a man who came into the family. But things didn't work out and as I understand there was betrayal and the usual drama rama of a failed marriage. But her children as far as I can tell did not bond and did not grow into strong people with robust souls. One of my cousins seems still frozen, angry at his mother or just in general and still in many ways is a child despite having two kids of his own. There has always been the silent accusation within the family that had my aunt shouldhave held down the fort, and her kids would have been fine. But something makes me feel this in it of itself would not have been the magic bullet. I know some people strongly would disagree with me, and insist that the virtue of sticking it out despite its costs trumps all.

In Toni Morrison's book Jazz (I think) there is a character Pilate who is weird, really weird but she> stays. That to me is her main characteristic. She is one of the few that do--everyone else seems to leave to escape, to grow or leave for the sake of leaving but Pilate stays. And what is so extraodinary is that she seems to be able to stay true to herself--perhaps by leading a very unconventional life. As to your other point, whether I am plagued or not by doubts in my own abilities to endure is something else. I feel on one hand having watched my family struggle I do feel that strength or skillset has been passed on to me. Yet when I abstractly think about hardship, I feel a doubt that I would not be able endure with the same smile and laugh that iH ave now.

Dear N,

Thank you for telling me these stories. Like you I don't believe in magic bullets, and sometimes those of us looking in on someone else's story see thinga that they have missed. My sense is that you may see more in your aunt's family than others see.I also think that family stories often get stuck in how they are told. We tend to see the same parts of our family members that we've always seen and even when they change we can miss the change. I wonder if there are things in your cousins' lives that they haven't shared with you and although they may be stuck in their family-of-origin story which you sense when you are with them that in other settings they have gone on and made new life stories for themselves. I know for myself that I both hold to my family stories as I know them and realize that my sister who was there at the same time tells her stoires very differently. Perhaps many stories coexist side-by-side. I agree with you that in any case speaking of particularly our hardships, but also our celebrations make life more livable. I know that your stoires will encourage others to reflect on their lives, the questions that they have and the possbilities.

Comment

Hey Ellen,

I really like the blog! It’s nice to hear you speak so openly. I didn't understand your project before but I think I do now. I was thinking about the stories of life that you speak of. Joe may be right that the 'lost stories' is a US phenomenon because of how we live--apart and obsessed with satisfying the self, material aggrandizement etc. And by extension, I wonder if this reluctance to one's pain with others is also a cultural thing that keeps people cut off from sharing and learning.

It always struck me odd that under certain circumstances, people who endure hardship reflect uponit with almost a fondness when they had others to experience it with (i.e. growing up in poverty or being in a horrible accident.) It is a strange gift. For me the interesting question is what do you do when it doesn’t work out and there is no rainbow. (Ha this is probably why I am a lawyer!) Put differently, why does it work out sometimes and not other? This phenomenon has plagued my aunt's family. She was slated to become the family matriarch and married a man who came into the family. But things didn't work out and as I understand it there was betrayal and the usual drama- rama of a failed marriage. But her children as far as I can tell did not bond and did not grow into strong people with robust souls.

One of my cousins seems still frozen, angry at his mother or just in general and still in many ways is a child despite having two kids of his own.There has always been the silent accusation within the family that had my aunt held down the fort, her kids would have been fine. But something makes me feel this in it of itself would not have been the magic bullet. I know some people strongly would disagree with me, including my mom and insist on the virtue of sticking it out, despite its costs, trumps all.

In Toni Morrison's book Jazz (I think) there is a character Pilate who is weird, really weird but she stays. That to me is her main characteristic. She is one of the few that do--everyone else seems to leave to escape, to grow or leave for the sake of leaving but Pilate stays. And what is so extraordinary is that she seems to be able to stay true to herself--perhapsby leading a very unconventional life.

As to your other point, whether I am plagued or not by doubts in my own abilities to endure is something else. I feel on one hand having watched my mom struggle through isolation and adapting to a new life here, I do feel that a part of that strength or skill set has been passed on to me. Yet when I abstractly think about hardship, I feel a doubt that Iwould not be able endure with the same smile and laugh.

Ellen’s Response:

Dear Eri,

Thank you for telling me these stories. Like you I don't believe in magic bullets, and sometimes those of us looking in on someone else's story see things that they have missed. My sense is that you may see more in your aunt's family than others see.

I also think that family stories often get stuck in how they are told. We tend to see the same parts of our family members that we've always seen and even when they change we can miss the change. I wonder if there are things in your cousins' lives that they haven't shared with you and although they may be stuck in their family-of-origin story which you sense when you are with them that in other settings they have gone on and made new life stories for themselves.

I know for myself that I both hold to my family stories as I know them and realize that my sister who was there at the same time tells her stories very differently. Perhaps many life stories co-exist side-by-side. I agree with you that in any case speaking of our hardships, seems to make life more livable.

No time for stories

Comment

Deborah wrote:

Sounds good. I agree, but I am too busy working to write about me. Is that about me?

Ellen responds:

I think in some ways Deborah answers Joe's question. We are running through our lives. We don't sit down together to tell our stories. It is only when we are slammed by life are we forced to search for ways to navigate ourselves through unknown territory. My aim is to give us all a heads up and collect helpful stories along the way. What do the rest of you think?

Comment

Joseph Coffey said...
Thanks Ellen for sharing so generously with us. I don't have the time, courage, or perspective to write right now. But I was wondering: why do you think these stories aren't shared? It seems that you have a thesis that in order to confront hard times we need to have stories of those who have confronted them. Why don't we have them? Or, more properly, why don't we tell them?

Many of your story tellers have some sort of cultural backing whether it be American Indian, Catholic etc... This sort of backing is evaporating from the American conscience. Is this lack of stories a purely American affliction? Everyone's story is now isolated in small suburban homes?Do we not tell them because we just don't want to revisit the worst parts of our life? Because we don't really get over it, that there is always some left over which remains untransformed, and instead we just go on?
12/12/2006 1:48 PM

When Good Fortune Hampers Resilience

Ellen # 1

The stories on this blog are meant to help us think about ourselves in moments when we feel lost. The women I am writing about are open about their dilemmas, and they encourage us to be the same. In keeping with their advice and in response to a number of people who have written to ask me about my story I will digress here and tell you more about me.

I grew up in a bubble. Economic hardships for my family were well in the past, and although I knew about the early death of my great-grandfather and the financial strain that caused his family and my grandparents on my mother’s side of the family, these stories had receded into history. From the vantage point of our fourth-floor apartment in Jersey City where I lived with my mother, father, and older sister, I was unaware of any dangers in the outside world.

We were a middle-class secular Jewish family with all the necessities of life and a few of the luxuries. I had no fear. I roamed from apartment to apartment, biked the city streets, and played on building rooftops with other neighborhood children without fear. For me, Jersey City was a place in which I had everything I wanted, and I was free to do whatever I imagined possible.

In spite of what I believed during the day, I had night terrors as a child. I dreamed that my father died and that we had nowhere to go. I woke up screaming, and one of my parents came into my room and sleep with me for comfort. They assumed that it was their responsibility to soothe me. No one spoke to me about my fears, where they came from, or how I might face them.

Since life’s disasters had been kept hidden, after I married and had two children, I believed that I could make choices that would keep me and my family safe. I studied a psychology that taught me to believe in personal responsibility and free will. I had faith in human beings’ capacity to take care of one another and make changes when they had to. I took this belief forward into my life and into my work.

My life of good fortune ended when my husband Ron was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease), a progressive neurological disease with no known cause or treatment that paralyzes the muscles in the body and leads to death. Ron lived at home on a ventilator for seven years until he decided to turn the ventilator off and to die.
Ron was diagnosed with ALS in 1985 when he was forty-two years old. We had been married for twenty years, our daughters were twelve and sixteen, and, we had known a great deal of happiness. We both loved our work, I as a family therapist and Ron as an electrical engineer. We were blessed with close friends and family and spent much of our free time hiking in the mountains with our daughters.

Within a year of his diagnosis, Ron went into the emergency room of our local hospital in crisis, unable to breathe on his own. That night, he was put on a ventilator that kept him alive for seven years until he chose to have it turned off. He came home from the hospital to round-the-clock nurses, a stranger to me, to our daughters, and to himself.

For those years, I took charge, made do, ran the show, but I couldn’t keep up with Ron’s illness. As time went on, I saw the world filled with tragic forces beyond my understanding and my ability to adapt. I was humbled by how little I knew about myself and the universe. My belief in my capacity to manage and to choose well in any circumstance disappeared. I got through this period by what I now call my “white-knuckle approach.” I hold on, and then hold on some more, until either I die, or my life would go back to what it had been before; but of course it never did.

Although I continued to put one foot in front of the other and attend to the details of our life, I stumbled into despair. I railed against the fate that brought this terrible illness to us, and I didn’t know where to learn how to live under these new circumstances. I was filled with questions about how to keep going.

Years after Ron’s death when I had remarried and my life was once again stable, I still lacked confidence in my ability to face hardship. I remarried, but I tended to watch over my second husband as he slept, making sure that he was breathing, and to over-react when my adult children were out of contact for what seemed to me to be too long. I still lacked a story of resilience, and I was still bound by fear.

It wasn’t until I worked in Kosova, following the war there, that I became hopeful about our capacity to live through hard times. I was in Kosova as part of a U.S. team working with Kosovar mental health professionals developing their mental health system. Our team met many who had faced the horrors of the war, but one woman, Zepa Read Zepa's story on the blog -- October 12, 2006) stood out from all the rest. It was she who led me to want to know more about what it takes to stand up against fate.

I left Kosova impressed with Zepa’s resourcefulness. I had no opportunity to sit with her and find out more about what made it possible for her to move from grief to action on behalf of herself and her family in only three years. Language, distance, and time stood in our way. When I returned to the U.S, I wanted to learn how women like Zepa survived and thrived. I began my search by asking questions of a few women I already knew and admired who had endured suffering. I was curious about how they described their life situations, the resources that came to them from their family circumstances, and how they understood the dilemmas that they faced. Other women who had faced tragedy, whom I hadn’t known before, began to show up in my life. Perhaps it was coincidence, or perhaps I was just noticing because of my experience with Zepa.

I listened closely and recorded the women’s stories, hoping not to freeze in fear the next time I was dealt an overwhelming blow by fate. But I discovered that in order to learn from other’s stories, I had to re-examine my basic assumptions about life -- to challenge what I had always believed to be true. Only then would I able to see how their stories provided a guide for my new stories. My hope is these stories and the other stories that you post will be a guide for readers of this blog.

Keepers' Stories Continued

Janie #3

Grandmothers provide what others leave out

Dear Readers,

Before I go on with Janie’s story I want those of you reading this blog to think with me. Who in your life is a Keeper? What experiences have you had when traditions and knowledge of history sustained you. Over two hundred fifty people have read the blog. They are waiting to hear from you. Please write a comment by clicking on the word “comment” at the bottom of this post or send a story to me at: Ellen@Berkeleyfamilytherapy.com
and I will post it.

Now back to Janie:

Janie said:

“Growing up I counted on my two grandmothers, Aunty, my step-grandmother, and Meme, my mother’s mother along with Sadie. Aunty taught me about service, and Meme brought color into my life. On my seventh birthday, she bought me an orange dress thinking that it was about time that I wore more than only blue and white. Meme always had time for me. She was the one who really took care of me. When I was born she told my mother that she was so lucky to have daughters because, ‘They will sustain you’. My mother wasn’t so sure.

While Meme was bringing color in Janie’s life, Aunty, Janie’s step-grandmother, took Janie off to church to care for the altar and other responsibilities at church. Aunty was known in her community for doing service, and she frequently took Janie on her rounds. It is easy to imagine Janie as a tiny girl dressed in blue and white carefully placing the holy water on the altar.

As a Keeper, Janie holds her grandmothers close by telling their stories. She was especially close to Meme, and she told me her history as if it had just happened. In these stories, Janie keeps Meme alive so that when she needs courage, she vividly remembers her. Here is only a small part of the long story that Janie told me about Meme:

“Meme was born in Knoxville Tennessee. Her father was a doctor, a Dr. John Hudgings, and he married Miss Harriet Clark, Meme’s mother, who we always called Miss Harriet. Dr. Hudgings left, probably with another woman, though no one spoke about what really happened. We just knew that Meme’s father ran off from her mother, and Miss Harriet had to bring up Meme and her other children alone. Now Miss Harriet was a Clark and that gets us back to the Clarks of the original colonies who went from Massachusetts to Rhode Island, back to Massachusetts and then ended up in Georgia, which is where the southern influence came in. Meme’s sister Elizabeth took this very seriously and she became a member of both the Daughters of the American Republic and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. You know my sister and I could have become members of those groups too, but Meme never went that way and of course neither did we.

“Meme wanted to be independent from all that. “Meme’s husband died young and left her to raise her children on her own. After he died, she mostly stayed alone. She focused her attention on us children and on taking care of her son Bill who like his father had that personality of being on top of the world and then being low down in the depths.

“Because of the drinking in our house, there were offs and ons with Meme. Sometimes she
came and stayed with us because of financial necessity for a couple of months, then things would get bad in our house, and she moved on. Meme knew what was going on at our house, but she never spoke of it directly. She was one of the people in my life who was constant. I think of her now when I need to calm myself.

“I heard Meme’s voice when I was learning to think for myself, and to take care of my children when I had to make it on my own. I got many things from Meme, not the least of which is my sense of humor. Standing by the coffin of her son Bill who had caused the family a lot of trouble before he died young, Meme said to my husband Bob who wasn’t much better: ‘At least you’ll never have to lend him another suit.’ Uncle Bill was often in need of sprucing up for the weddings and the funerals.

“I admired Meme. She was my soul mate. I now try to do for my grandchildren what she did for me. She is always right here by me”