Unsettled and Embarrassed, Happy and Glad in Everyday Ramblings

Hydrangeas are the symbol that signifies the Fourth of July for me, this odd holiday that is not my favorite. But I can think about honoring the memory of my mother who was born a whopping 105 years ago. I often think of what her life was like growing up in a small town in Kansas.

She was the one that got away but not in any normal straight-line route. The third of four sisters, she was born to a German mother and father that were displaced to Russia and then came to the United States and started farming. Apparently her birth father was not a kind man, a hard man…somewhere between my mother’s birth and just after her younger sister’s he divorced his wife and remarried.

They put the three oldest girls in an orphanage. My mom’s birth mom kept the baby and made a life for herself as a tough hard working single mother in a nearby small town. My mother never saw her again.

The two older girls were fostered out for a time and in the end returned to a life in town with their mother and baby sister.

My mother was adopted by a well-heeled couple in yet another small Kansas town. Soon after her adoption her adopted mother died. Her father was a banker and adored her as well as his oldest biological daughter who had already left home and was trendy and forward and had Flapper tendencies and lived in New York.

These are the stories I have heard. The truth to some of them may be questionable. I know that my mother was stylish, lovely in countenance, ambitious creatively and smart. And she carried a strain of deep melancholy all through her adult life.

And I forgive her, although I don’t think she forgave herself for marrying my father, just as she was coming into her 30’s. He was from Ohio. But she met him in Washington D.C. where my mother went after completing secretarial school. They met during the war.

My oldest sister when she was born had one serious illness after another. It had to have been an extremely difficult time for her, my father away working, my mother with two small children, one of them who ended up with polio on top of everything else.

When my brother and I were old enough for the polio vaccine I swear we must have been first on the list.

My mother, father, and oldest sister are gone now. I learned so much from them all. But my middle sister is still here (as well as my brother) and I am spending the day with her today. All my mother’s sisters are gone too. We found the youngest, my oldest sister found her about 10 years ago. She, amazingly enough, had our mother’s baptismal certificate in her basement. Both my sisters flew to Kansas and rented a car and drove to the small town on the prairie she lived in to meet her.

This is how we know about the genetic disposition to hearing loss. Our amazing Aunt Alice was almost completely deaf living on her own in her later 90’s with help from her church and niece and nephew. I have a single picture of her they took. She wrote me a card after the meeting and I was so touched.

I have been told that other than my coloring, which is a little lighter, that I look, or at least when I was younger, look the most like our mother than anyone else in the family.

Tonight I will be home with the cats with all the windows closed avoiding to the best of my ability the local fireworks and the national one’s co-opted by the grifter con artist that is our President and his odious offspring.

I am embarrassed by him and ashamed and am glad the my mother is not here to experience this challenging time in a country her parents dreamed powerful dreams about coming to and worked hard and sacrificed so much to get to and live freely in.