Songs my Mother Taught Me

[tamaranth]

My mother's maternal grandmother was Japanese. She married an English missionary and took ship with him for South Africa. They both died in an epidemic (cholera?) there in the first few years of the 20th century. My maternal grandmother was raised by nuns.

Maybe it's because of being orphaned so young, or growing up in a predominantly female environment, that my grandmother became the lover of a married man, a baker from Bracknell, and bore him two daughters. I'm not clear how they met: I presume it was in England, but what was she doing in England?

Maybe she was rebelling against the nuns' teachings, or against religion. Later in life she became a nun, and a nurse, in Cape Town. Her daughters grew up in Bracknell with their father and his wife, and their stepbrothers. My mother used to speak of her 'mother', meaning her stepmother, as a cruel woman: she locked my mother in the pantry for hours after some misdemeanour, beat her, made her work for her keep. More rarely, my mother would speak of her birth-mother. I couldn't make sense of the stories I heard about my grandmother, because I didn't realise she was two different women. I didn't know until after my mother's death that she was illegitimate: I didn't know until several years later that my great-grandmother was Japanese.

My mother's father died suddenly just before the outbreak of the Second World War. The elder daughter was sent away to boarding school, but the younger, who was only 13, continued to live with her father's family. She left school as soon as she could, worked in the NAAFI, had a lot of boyfriends; married a prison officer and bore him a daughter; eloped with a Frenchman she'd met down by the river at Strand-on-the-Green, leaving her 11-year-old daughter to deal with an unpleasant stepmother and the stepmother's children. Divorced the prison officer, married the Frenchman, moved to a house as quiet and isolated as they could find. I'm their daughter.

There's a lot of running away in this story. A lot of abandonment, on both sides. Three generations of girls feeling unwanted, surplus, outside: looking for love and perhaps finding that it wasn't enough. Four generations, now, perhaps battling with depression (which is said to be 50% genetic), perhaps acting out what their mothers taught them, perhaps wanting to be a better mother than their mother had been. Perhaps failing.

The chain, the story, the repetition stops here.

Comments

[adela-terrell.livejournal.com]

I am reading this thinking it would make a wonderful book, or an episode of "who do you think you are"

H

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

I'd love to find out more family history but it's a pricy and time-consuming business, and I don't have enough details ...

[geekmama.livejournal.com]

What an interesting, sometimes uncomfortable, history.

perhaps wanting to be a better mother than their mother had been. Perhaps failing.

That's nearly always true, of course. One can only keep trying.

Thank you for sharing this.

*hugs you lots*

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

I suspect everyone wants to be a better parent to their children (where applicable) than their parents were to them. I just wonder if there's some stuff -- especially unexamined stuff -- that one can't simply decide to leave out.

[ladymoonray.livejournal.com]

That's a very interesting pattern. With my psychologist hat on, I'd say there are fascinating longitudinal studies to be done. With my friend hat on, *hug*.

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

you will have to explain longitudinal studies to me: the phrase brings to mind Harrison's clocks ...

It's very interesting to be able to think about my mother as a person, the sum of her upbringing and experience, rather than simply as My Mother.

You will note an absence of male offspring in the above tale. I do wonder how different things would be if my mother hadn't miscarried the child that would have been my baby brother.

[ailbhe]

My family legacy is nonconformism, which is a painful trait to hand down in rural Ireland. And gradually improving care. We're also getting much better, generation by generation, at not marrying alcoholics and wife-beaters.

Good luck!

[avirr.livejournal.com]

I am, to my shame, a worse mother than my mom. I'm lazier, for one thing. But she was and is a wonderful mother and grandmother. We just spent five days in the mountains with her and were delighted she was there.