What About Mom?
By: Ronda Tamerlane
Tags: Memoir, Aging, Family, Mental Health, Grief

Photo by sydney Rae on Unsplash

An inner drive has pushed me to write a memoir. My father was often the focus of my early life. He was loud, mean, and controlling. Most of my previous attempts with writing focused on him as the prevailing force in my life. Something was missing from my story and that was my mother.

I’m 72, the same age that my mother died, I know so little about her. She was shy and quiet and didn’t talk about herself much. She told me much more about my dad’s life growing up than she did about herself. She shared that she was raised in a Mennonite Community until she was a teen and her father moved his family to Iowa when he became a minister in a Christian Church. Being the daughter of a minister was more restrictive than living in the Mennonite community.

She went away to one semester of bible college and left because she was homesick. Her dad moved to different churches to build up the memberships. She told me once she didn’t trust a man with a beard. She said that being shunned was a method of ostracizing someone in the Mennonite tradition and was hurtful. That’s it, most of what I knew about her growing up.

She married my dad when she was 25 and was considered an old maid. Tragedy struck one day when their sons about 3 & 5 were playing in the garage and the 5 year old drank ant poison and died. I was conceived within the year to bring my mother out of her depression. It didn’t work and my memories of mom were never ones of her being joyful. She became anxious and over-protective to me as I grew up.

Growing up in grief and anxiety marked my life. Feels like the first 18 years of my life was dark and negative. The next 54 years were devoted to recovering.

The year after my mom died I wrote my aunt and asked for memories of her as a child. Her reply was handwritten with the first line reading: “I didn’t know if I should send this or leave it to be sent after my death. I’m sending it now. “

She went on to tell me that my mom was a “wild teenager” who had a baby girl out of wedlock and gave her up for adoption. That was why her family left the Mennonite community and why her father had to transfer to different churches.

At first I was shocked to think my frighten, shy, and moral mother had that in her history. Then I felt a deep sadness that she held such a secret for so long. If she had shared that with me when I was an adult, I would have comforted her. To understand the pain she felt when her son died, after giving up her daughter so many years before, I’m overwhelmed with grief for her. She must of felt that God was punishing her for having a baby before marriage. That explains so much about her.

Now I have more questions than ever, both mother’s sister and brother died within the next few years of her death. I wonder about that remark my mom once made about not trusting men with beards. In Mennonite traditions a man grows a beard after he marries. Was it a man she knew? Is that why she left bible college after only one semester? Was it someone in the family she stayed with while there? Did she willingly have sex? or was she manipulated or forced? The comment about shunning, was she and her family shunned? I wonder did dad ever know?

We know so little about the important people in our lives, I have some questions about my father too. Those answer are lost in time and were buried with him and his family.

Some of the puzzle pieces of my life are missing. Aren’t they for everyone?