Friday, October 13, 2023

Friday, October  13, 2023

 

   I often speak about all the traumas my mom suffered in her life. She had an unusually high number. There are people I know who had it worse. A cousin came home one day to discover her parents were gone. The neighbors told her the Nazis came and took them. Later, she was taken, too. Her parents died in Auschwitz; she survived Theresienstadt. But my mom's list is impressive. Each trauma has traumas within. For context, my mom was born on November 1, 1903, in Berlin, Germany.

1.    She was born with a benign tumor in her upper back. If it grew at the rate she did, it would have crushed her organs, and she would have died. It was 1903. The doctors improvised.

               a. Her mother took her to the hospital every other day. 

                 They injected some form of alcohol in and around the tumor.

               b. The site was infected. She couldn't lie on her back. She  

      was surely breastfed. How did her mother hold her? Burp 

                  her? How did she lie? It's unimaginable.

   

c. When she was six months old, they surgically removed the 

tumor was surgically removed in May of 1904. Nowadays, 

d. Her parents took her home that day. Possibly, the hospital 

            didn't have a pediatric ward, or my grandparents didn't have the money. 

She was driven home in a horse-drawn carriage over cobblestone streets. She screamed the whole way. Imagine the pain.

 

2. WWI broke out when she was eleven. 

a. Her father dutifully signed up and spent the next four years on the Russian front. 

b. Anticipating food shortage during the war, he put down my mother's beloved nine-year-old Doberman, Lord. This was difficult for everyone in the family. He didn't tell my mom he was going to do it. She didn't get a chance to say goodbye. She was sick for two weeks. My mother's grief was so profound that my sister and I carry it. I once told a therapy group my uncle was a dog. Everyone jumped on me until I explained he was a Doberman. Lord was a presence in our home.

c.     During the war, my mother and grandmother participated in a soup kitchen. People

donated their coupons and got nutritious food. The main starch was turnips. My mother never ate one again. I tasted one in college. 

d.    She once found a coupon for white bread. The owners were wealthy people. My mother dutifully returned it. A maid answered, snatched the coupon from the hungry girl, and shut the door in her face.

e.    When she was twelve, during the war, she lugged a heavy bucket of coal across town. She put it down to rest for a minute. She had trouble picking it up. A soldier in a dress uniform offered to help. The woman with him told him not to and looked at my mom with disgust.

f.      While we move a great deal these days, that wasn't true in those days. My grandfather returned to a different world than the one he had left. His vocation as a livery chauffeur, driving a horse-drawn carriage for a wealthy banker, was over. The banker drove his own car. Feeling responsible for my grandfather's well-being, he offered him two job opportunities. He would buy him a car, and he could become a cab driver or take a position as a janitor in his bank. That position came with an apartment. The apartment was in the basement. The loss of sunlit quarters affected my mother and grandmother for the rest of their lives.

3.    After twenty years of relative stability and peace, the Nazis took over Germany. My mother was in love with a Jew.

a.    My father was doing his law apprenticeship in the courts when the Nazis came and marched out all the Jews. My dad knew he couldn't stay in Germany. He asked my mom if she would come to America and marry him if he could find a way to support a family. ( She came over a year and a half after he left. The rest is history.)

b. While still in Berlin, she had a few disturbing moments.

(1) she saw at least one man dragged through the streets behind a motorcycle. It took me years to realize what that meant.

(2) The Nazis raided her parents' apartment for Communist material. My mother was on the periphery of that social group. My dad and she met at a New Year's Eve/engagement party of a man who edited a local communist newspaper. My parents were sympathizers, parlor pinks.

(3)  While my father was in America, his father met with my mother and told her she wasn't good enough for his son. My dad was a true Jewish prince, the oldest in his generation, and all the cousins were close. He was much admired. My grandfather sat in my mother's living room every day of the week for eleven years, as long as we lived near him. She never told my dad what he had done. My grandfather never apologized to my mom.

4. My mom immigrated to America at the age of 34. They couldn't live in an ethnic community. The Germans in Yorkville would have rejected my Jewish dad. The Jews in Washington Heights, where they lived, probably rejected my mom. She was so antisocial she didn't notice.

a.    My dad died after eighteen years of marriage, leaving my mom with a ten-year-old, a fifteen-year-old, and her mother to support. She did a magnificent job.

 

  I heard a lecture on self-compassion. It was one of the HPR Sunday morning shows on spirituality. In meditation, I came up with the need for self-forgiveness, not for a major or even anything that could be considered a minor sin. We all need to forgive ourselves for the smallest social faux pas. When I mentioned it to a friend, she asked why not radical self-acceptance. Self-forgiveness implies we've done something wrong. Self-acceptance assumes we did the best we could and we did nothing wrong. Unfortunately, our psyches are programmed to take responsibility, which is interpreted as blame accompanied by shame.

    I successfully attended the monthly 80s Club Zoom meeting with about a dozen others this month. I was surprised to see Fr. Joe Badding there. He is in Buffalo now. He used to spend his winters here on the Big Island and cover Masses in our church. What a lovely man. His health has him confined now with a regular caregiver. He recognized me immediately and made a comment about dinners on my lanai. I assured him those meals were a thing of the past. It was Mike who hosted them and did all the cooking.

   Sharing information about retirement communities was on the agenda. Two participants were already in such a community, one in the USA and another in Australia. Both loved it. The woman living in the USA talked about a lively community with many clubs, some organized by the employees for the residents, some by the residents. She had so many new friends she was neglecting her old ones. The man who lived in Australia was renting a house on the property. He and his wife also loved the living arrangement. They were making friends with their next-door neighbors.

  I told about my experience touring a retirement community in Kona. This one boasted independent living and assisted living apartments on the same floors. They didn't have a separate section for those needing assisted living. I see why that would be to the advantage of those in assisted living. It means they don't have to move when their need for support increases, and they don't feel isolated. However, I wondered if that arrangement contributed to the lack of social interaction between the residents I observed. It seemed everyone was locked in their own little world. I advised people to check the social nature of their community carefully and not just look at the facility and the staff. In this case, both of them were good.