These Are

These Are
    by Weeping Willy Reimer

Very important stories, the ones that made my mother sad, the ones that disabled her, the events that took her quiet and replaced it with unquiet. These stories made her and then made me, since the life the mother lives causes the life the child lives, as surely as the froginess of a frog foretells the froginess of its offspring.  Not presuming to know my mother’s sorrow, I am able still to rake together a few of the incidents that produced it and that willy nilly became my sorrow (as if, true to the rules that govern the maternal, she conceived it, gestated it and bore it). This sorrow, my own sorrow, I am able to know. 
    First (after her mother's death) among those events that left their scars on her, that constituted her being smacked about by history, was her father’s precipitous remarriage. Picture this. Mother is ten. She has just lost her mom and is left with only her father and eight siblings. She is the second oldest girl and now, instead of having to help her mother with some of the housework, she must not only plan but do all of it. The mother who loved her, who gave her that wonderful warmth of protection from all uncanny things suddenly gives way to a needy father whom duty requires her to nurture and love a father who in no way knows how to take over the duties of child-protection. A father preoccupied with the throbbing of his own losses. He soon remarries and takes to wife a woman who brings with her six more children and then quickly “enriches” the recreated family with four more. The original children (Mary/mom among them) experience only the new mom’s practicality. No motherly love. No, “There, there, Mary. Everything will be all right again and, you know,  you will always feel your mother’s love from where she is looking down at us in heaven.” Insead, in a blur of time, twenty bodies crowd around their mealtime table, a table of strangers she has to help feed. Oh! the resentment! Oh! the “Why me!” Way too young for such a load of responsibilities, she takes over the duties of caring for a huge family that a short time before she had simply to belong to. No belonging now, just duties. What was benign is now malignant.
    Then, the most terrible thing happens to her. For reasons that she never made clear to me, she is chosen among all of the eighteen children to be the one who has to leave home to go far away to work for another family as a scullery maid. 
     This she told me, she resented being selected to leave home and hearth. She resented it so much that she repeated over and over the fact of her abandonment. Why me, why not Tina, why does it have to be me that they chose? I hated working for that family. They treated me like dirt. If something went wrong in the family, something like, for instance, a broken dish or a burnt shirt from ironing, I was always blamed. It might've been one of the other girls that did it, but I was blamed. I was never good enough for that mother. She disliked me, she made her own girls feel important, but they were lazy. They did none of the hard work around the house. I had to do all the washing up of clothes and dishes, I had to make meals, I had to milk the cows and shovel manure, and on and on. Then, to make matters worse, there was a hired man who would come into the barn when I was milking cows and he would try to do things to me. I won't tell you what, but I couldn't do anything to stop him. The mom and dad wouldn't believe me even when I told them. They blamed it on me as if I wanted his attention. And I became so bitter that I had to be the one working away from home and the others could happily be at home together sharing the workload. I was so very sad inside. And I had no one to comfort me, nobody to listen to me cry and I cried and cried and cried.
    This is the context of my own life, this, these first three traumas that hurt my mother in her childhood. But there were more than three. A few more factors contributing to my mother’s early heaurtache and thus to my longings will occupy some of the writings to come