My Grandmother's Story

~
My grandmother, Helen Story (Readio) Lowe, was born in Northhampton, MA in
1890.  Her family were of Old New England Old Middle Class background, but
I think her father was not well to do; I thought he owned a mill, my
cousin Joe Dehais, who reinvents reality to suit himself, and has a
problem with our parents' forebears having amounted to anything, says he
was a janitor or something like that. But his mother has the same odd
denial that our quite highly respectable old New England ancestors ever
amounted to anything, ie, none of the graduated from college, none of them
were prominent (they are entire group of town and state level politicians,
clergy, doctors and lawyers among other things).  Put this together with
the mothers of both of my maternal grandparents were seriously mentally
ill, and the family staunchly denies that mental illness in reality
exists, and concealed this history, from my brother, me and our doctors,
who needed it, and my mother had depression that was never recognized or
treated, and you come up with a family running in headlong terror from its
entire past.

My grandmother's Readio maternal grandfather was born in Yorkshire and I
think worked at a bank in some capacity in Canada for a time.  He married
in Rhode Island a member of the Vermont, Connecticut and Massachusetts
Allen family, and ended up in Florence and then Northhampton, MA.  My
grandmother's father and his brothers had some sort of singing quartet and
performed at family gatherings of all sorts "all up and down the
Connecticut Valley" (I don't know what or where the Connecticut Valley
is). 

The family must have had atleast some means as well as middle class
identification, since a picture of my grandmother as a small child shows
her dressed in the middle class manner in white lacy clothes, with a
rocking horse (what poor child could have had one), she said that some
large book was always on the parlor table, and she attended nursery
school, where she seems to have gotten quite a head start.  Apparently it
was quite a good nursery school.  Among the things she learned there were
basic geometric shapes.  C.A. 1894 it certainly wasn't the old sort that
drilled children in phonics!  (My father's mother's prosperous but working
class family had pictures taken of the small children, too - in plain
checkered gingham clothes, in front of a cheap department store photo
prop.) 

As to learning to read, my grandmother already knew how to do that when
she WENT to nursery school.  She said she had no memory of learning to
read, but could read well by the time she was four.  She used to pick up
that book on the table in the parlor and read.  Extremely high
intelligence ran in the Raymond family.  None of her descendants have an
IQ under the very bright category and typically score around 700 on
college and graduate school aptitude tests.  My cousin Joe belongs to
Mensa (a national club for which you must qualify by passing an IQ test to
prove your a genius), and my grandmother had a Raymond uncle, who was
killed in an accident as a teenager, everyone said was a genius, too.
From the things she consistently did, I think my grandmother was a genius
and noone ever realized it.  What kind of a child teaches herself to read
before she is four?  We're talking Doogie Howserville.  

It is important to realize, though, that genius and also the history of
learning to read at age three, learning multiple languages at age three,
etc., is extremely characteristic of people with manic depression and of
family members of people with manic depression.  And possibly of other
serious mental disorders as well.  Einstein's sons both had schizophrenia,
and he came up with the theory of relativity by daydreaming that he was a
particle of matter moving at light speed, what did everything relative to
him LOOK like?  And if Joe is a genius, he plainly carries the gene,
whatever the gene is, and he is also a bit strange; he has something
mildly but definitely wrong with him.  He is egomaniacal, though
ordinarily kind his feelings toward people can switch on a dime and a
mood, his entire social life seems awfully centered around bars and
drinking, and his ideal relationship is a bartender in Switzerland
remembers him from last year!  And he is characteristically a bit out of
it; for a genius, the man cannot put together his own stereo, and he once
slept through much of his building burning down in a fire. 

My grandmother's mother was seriously mentally ill.  It was not diagnosed
at that point.  She spent my grandmother's entire childhood behind locked
doors and windows continually afraid someone dangerous was outside trying
to break in, and I gather this simply set the TONE of my grandmother's
childhood.  Two other tidbits I have, from a set of published
autobiographical essays by my aunt, are that my aunt, who has a severe
phobia of mental illness, is hardly quick to acknowledge it, doesn't
recognize it when it bites her, and concealed this family history from my
brother and me and our doctors, wrote that the woman was manic depressive
and paranoid, I don't know if that is her characterization or the
doctor's, and that she didn't go to my grandmother's high school
graduation or her wedding, both within walking distance of her house, not
specified if it was a mood or she was afraid to leave her house. She died
at Northampton State Psychiatric Hospital at about age 65 of her breast
cancer. So her serious mental illness was eventually diagnosed, and I am
working on getting those records.  I have learned from my numerous distant
cousins on the INternet that serious mental illness and genius both ran in
her family, and in several lines that fed into it before her immediately
ancestral chain of first cousin marriages. 

More likely because she inherited the neurochemical problem than because
of her rough childhood, my grandmother never had much stamina; my sister
and I don't, either.  My grandmother was an incredibly spirited and
strong-willed child. Her mother tried to keep her locked up, too, but when
my grandmother was fairly small, she said, no, there is noone dangerous
out there, see, there are no footsteps in the snow. If anyone had been
tehre, there would be footsteps in the snow.  And she went outside, and
she went outside from then on.

And she seemingly led almost a wild childhood!  They never got into any
trouble, but she belonged to a group of friends, who just ran freely all
over the place and got into all kinds of adventures.  And did things to
the adults one wonders how they got away with it!  Like the time an adult
decided they needed a chaperone.  Ha, ha, ha.  I don't remember exactly
what they did to her, but... 

She went to Smith College, I think by winning a scholarship.  She
originally wanted to study medicine, and took premed courses.  This was in
ca 1900, you understand, simply setting such a goal took a remarkable sort
of a girl. But she did not have the stamina for medical school, so she
switched to English.  She completed a year of graduate school but had
trouble with her masters' thesis on account of needing access to some
material that the jealous person in charge of it didn't want to give her
access to, and the department, knowing that woman well, offered her a
second year, but my grandmother said that though she had had a wonderful
time and enjoyed herself thoroughly she just got VERY tired.  It sounded
as if she got tired, indeed.  LIke almost tired into a daze!  That doesn't
sound quite like tired.  Something else was wrong.  So she decided not to
return. 

One thing that concerns me about my sister Helen is that she shares this
tendency to tire extremely easily at times, and again, it sounds like
something is wrong.  For one thing, at such times my sister, quiet and
shy, and formally gracious in the way that keeps people at arms' length
like her mother before her and our grandmother before her, and never one
for LIKING large groups of people, often also avoids groups of people. 
"THere's too many people there" she once said when explaining why she
literally ran in the opposite direction from a chance to meet her then
boyfriend's parents, who were holding a family get-together of some kind.

She returned to her home, and got a letter from someone to whom she had
been referred by one of her teachers.  Her mother predictably said, you
don't know who this man is!  He may not be who he says he is!  My
grandmother said, well, if he wasn't who he says he is, ___ would never
have given him my name, and I'm going.  And he wrote that he'd been told
that my grandmother could be relied to just go into a community and do
what needed to be done, "and she won't ask you how to do it."  So my
grandmother embarked on quite an interesting career in social work.  I've
known little about it, but my aunt writes in her biographical essays that
"she went to New York City, lived and worked at College Settlement [I
understand from my cousin Joe, at settlement houses], then worked with
juvenile delinquents in Rockland County." 

Then she went as an Episcopalian missionary to North Carolina, and took
part in the movement to bring the people of the Appalachian mountains into
the 20th century, civilize them, etc., etc.  It's a movement anyone frowns
on, today.  And it didn't take my grandmother long to become suspicious of
the snobs involved in this movement. She spoke of, in one place, they had
two sets of towels for people to wipe their hands on; nice ones for staff,
and poor rough ones for those people that they served. Though at the time
I had no idea of the length and breadth of her activities; that could
conceivably have happened in New York City!  It sounded like it happened
in Appalachia, though. And, according to my aunt, after Appalachia came
stints in Ossining, NY, and Ansonia, Connecticut!

But she was soon sent off by herself to an extremely, and long, isolated
mountain community, so far from anywhere that she said the trees were many
feet thick and hundreds of years old.  The houses were very far apart, and
to get from one house to another you had to go down one mountain and up
another or cross difficult bridges, and stuff like that.  The people had
had no clergyman in generations.  At this time a clergyman came through
once or twice a month on a rotating basis, and one of my grandmother's
jobs was to hold Sunday prayer meetings.  It was Episcopal, which turned
out to be nothing new to the people.  Someone had been around many years
before.  "We is Episcopals", they told her.  

My grandmother had more adventures there; unfortunately though a very well
educated clergyman friend who kept her together and looked after her in
her last years, after relations with her children broke down immediately
over how she would be cared for, actually of serious problems in their
relationships with her all along, as she was nearly as difficult a parent
as my mother, gave her a tape recorder with which to occupy herself, and
she was supposed to be recording these wonderful stories. She could keep
her two good friends, another woman I boarded with who sometimes enjoyed
visiting her, and me entertained with for hours. We never tired of them no
matter how many times we heard them, how many versions of them we heard,
etc.  But she actually spent ALL her time rambling about her educational
ideas, as she was putting together ideas for a "book".  My grandmother was
probably of uncertain mental health all of her life, and in those last
years she both developed severe cerebral athlerosclerosis, yyfor which
noone could get her to a doctor even when she had small strokes, because I
AM NOT SENILE! and she partially lost her mind.  She was articulate, and
intelligent, and mentally quite lively, she had some trouble with short
term memory, for instance, she often lost or misplaced things and accused
whoever had been around, no matter who it was, of theft, and could become
disoriented, but otherwise had no trouble with memory, and she never
displayed the outright no clue on an emotional level what is going on, or
inappropriate affect of someone with Alzheimers'; she simply was not quite
in touch with reality.  The opinion of mental health professionals at the
church counselling center (she wouldn't go to any of those "secular
people") was that she was nuts, but not commitable, which describes most
mentally ill people.  This friend of hers sent me her tapes, and not one
of her stories is on them.  Only ramblings that are supposed to be
dictation for her book. 

My grandmother's functions in the Appalaachian community where she was
aassigned included teaching school, filling in as a public health nurse,
and helping the people of the community with any number of problems as
they arose. 

Some of her stories told about filling in as a public health nurse.
My grandmother had a good background in science,and she could improvise.
There was an epidemic of pinkeye.  At the time it was believed if pink eye
wasn't treated properly and thoroughly one would go blind.  I have no idea
what kind of pink eye she was actually dealing with.  I had pink eye
regularly as a child and always had to stay home and touch nothing as the
condition is highly contagious, and take eye drops; now I understand taht
the condition is considered to be usually viral and not serious, nothing
to be done but clean away any crusts with warm water, and people just come
to work with it all of the time.  Well, my grandmother thought that if she
didn't kill the germs taht were causing this infection the people would
all go blind, and she had no proper antiseptic for the purpose.  So she
took some witch hazel, and poured it in everyone's eyes, and this worked!
She always announced proudly, and noone went blind!  

The next occasion was more hairy.  People in that community made moonshine
on the side.  It was a strictly secret activity that was defended at
gunpoint.  I think the men of the community all carried guns.  And the
people all had a tremendous amount of respect for my grandmother, and
noone ever did anything improper in front of "Miss Helen".  One night a
couple of young men came by quite drunk, and they were hustled off. "We're
sorry, Miss Helen."  My grandmother wasn't supposed to know about the
moonshine, and she conscientiously pretended she didn't.

One night in a storm, my grandmother was taken through a number of those
deep heavily forested valleys that separated homes from one another, up
one mountain and down another, as she would tell it, to the home of a man
who was extremely ill with a very high fever.  She found him wheezing in
bed, and "I recognized pneumonia".  Nothing to treat the pneumonia with,
it brings to mind the time my mother as a small child in 1936 was brought
back from the brink of death from scarlet fever by an experimental new
drug her doctor hesitantly decided to try called penicillin!  In those
days, one simply treated the fever.  Nothing to treat the fever with. No
ice. No rubbing alcohol.  My grandmother stood up straight, turned to the
men, and said, I don't remember the first part, "but I know what I know",
and to save this man's life, what I need "is some good
old-fashioned moonshine!"  
"And every man's hands tightened on his gun."  But then a man went out,
and from the time he was gone, she knew he couldn't have gone further than
the next cabin, and returned with some moonshine. Anyone knows that
moonshine has a higher alcohol content than rubbing alcohol!  My
grandmother rubbed the man down with the moonshine.  His fever broke, and
he lived.  

There were also day-to-day technological problems.  They ran out of ice
and needed to cool their food.  That my grandmother would have thought of
her solution to this supports the notion that she is a genius.  She
remembered capillary action from science class!  She reinvented the
refrigerator.  I don't even know if the refrigerator was invented yet. 
She hung towels so that they dipped in cold spring water, and hungover the
place where they put the food to stay cool.  Water soaked up through the
towels, by capillary action, and then evaporated, a process that absorbs
heat, thus cooling the food.  I have since heard that this method isn't
effective for cooling food, but I guess it worked alot better than
nothing.  The food stayed cool enough. One can imagine that probably in
the bottom of some deep woods hollow where teh spring was it was already
fairly cool, and so was the spring water. 

And my grandmother was also supposed to help the people move into the
twentieth century.  None of the adults in that community could read or
write.  The men all needed to open bank accounts.  But they needed to
be able to sign their names.  So they came to my grandmother.  "Miss
Lowe, can you teach us to write our names."  So one night, my
grandmother gathered them all in the schoolhouse, and she went around
and wrote out each man's name for him, and they practiced until they
could sign their names.

I have two versions of my grandparents' marriage and early married life; 
one from my cousin Joe, and the other from my aunt's published series of
biographical essays.  These versions differ substantially and at times
contradict each other in dates and details.  The most important and I
think key difference is that my aunt's published account, which never
expands on the difficult family circumstances she felt she need to
establish an identity apart from, omits nearly ALL of the negative and
black sheep stories in Joe's account, and further outright rewrites
substantial chunks of family history in a way that avoids them.  Whole
chunks of time are filled in with contradictory stories.  Since my aunt
characteristically conceals negative family history and also
characteristically lies about it, and I don't think my cousin made the
stories he told me up; they carry the ring of truth, would be hard to
invent, describe real people and to some degree events I've confirmed
existed, and at times explain much, and, further, my aunt and outher
cousin Connie both in her essays and explicitly to me fail to care enough
about family history to have been motivated to be accurate, such that my
aunt's advanaced age and family history of cerebral athlerosclerosis alone
would lead to inaccuracies and inconsistencies, I think that where the two
stories contradict each other, it is Joe's version that is the truth.

According to my own understanding from my grandmother, and Joe, when my
grandmother got home from Appalachia, she hadn't been there long when a
young man she knew from school came to call on her.  He was a little over
thirty, a year or two older than my grandmother, and, an extremely capable
and bright young engineer, he had been away starting his career and making
a good bit of money. He had been discussing marriage with a former
teacher.  He said that he supposed all of the girls were married, but yes,
there is jsut one girl I have thought of that I would like to marry - but
I'm sure she's married.  The teacher said, no she isn't.  So he called on
my grandmother.  He asked humbly enough, Miss Lowe, there is something I
would like to ask you.  And she accepted. 

Allen Lowe was a self-taught but bright and promising young engineer, and
had already made a good deal of money.  My cousin Joe with his background
of having attended Princeton feels that, educated at Smith as she was, my
grandmother expected to marry someone well-off, which engineers often were
in those days, and live well for the rest of her life.  It was quite a
dream for this girl who went to college on scholarship, and a proposal
from Allen Lowe was quite an offer.  She accepted.  They married in 1920. 

At first, my grandfather was in business with Allen Lowe's Cauthers first
cousin, Murray Williams.  I don't know for how long they had been
together.  The business prospered indeed, and they were well off.
Nice home. Everything.  They lived in Canaada and had a
small child.  Then Murray Williams embezzled all the money and ran off, and
the Lowe family was left ruined. This must have happened around 1923,
as my grandfather's fathers letters dated then answer his implicit
question have you heard from Murray Williams, I haven't heard from
Murray Williams since he lived with us in ....(a long time ago).  

ONe gets the idea something was ALWAYS very wrong with Murray Williams. 
 See Cauthers page  I don't know if he was
simply a skunk, or he was unstable, or seriously troubled.  I don't know
for a fact that he didn't spend or misappropriate money he shouldn't have
and then wasn't able to pay it back, and ran away. There must also be an
explanation for why he was living with Joseph Lowe and whichever of his
family in Canada way back when.  His entire family seems to have been
troubled, though I know nothing about Murray's parents specifically.  My
grandfather's parents divorced when he was a child, his mother was
decidedly peculiar and died in a psychiatric institution, his father wrote
pornography and allegedly was run out of Ireland as a young man for being
a Mason, certainly not the whole story, and they married in a Unitarian
church where his mother was christened. 

My aunt tells a completely different version of the preceding four or so
paragraphs.  By 1920, when my grandparents married, my grandfather was
working in a paper mill in Quebec, Canada.  Sometime between 1914 and
1917, he told his mother, who in temperament seems to have beat my mother,
who had a long history of very strange and extreme behavior as well as
moodiness and a violent temper, with terrifying tantrums (like my
mother's), that he wanted to enlist in the army.  I do know for a fact
that he served in the army during World War I, and he had to have gotten
rich fairly quickly between the end of World War I in l918 and 1920 if
that is what happened, though he could presumably have done that in
enginerring at the time if he managed things right and got lucky.  A
picture of my grandfather in his army uniform always hung on
my grandparents' livingroom wall. (His appearance did not change between
that time and old age, and my cousin, who has seen many pictures of him,
says his appearance never changed much at all.)  

His mother reacted to this by throwing one of her better tantrums. So he
changed his mind. When the U.S. joined World War I, which happened in 1914
and not between 1914 and 1917, he SNUCK off to the army without telling
his mother, OR "his fiancee".  Notice how he had a fiancee in 1914 to 1917
before he joined the army, at which time he was "working in a paper mill",
contradicts he came back from around already wealthy from an independent
business, was re-united with and proposed to my grandmother, and they were
married soon thereafter.  And my aunt has the entire engagement to my
grandmother managing to occur from Quebec where my grandfather
allegedlylived and worked at the time.  No airplanes in those times. My
grandfather according to my aunt did not even know how to drive a car!
My aunt's account omits both all mention of Murray Williams, and my
grandfather ever having his own business.  She outright contradicts my
grandfather ever had his own business.  After he married and they had my
aunt in 1921, my grandfather was still working in the paper mill in
Quebec.  There follows an entire history of my grandmother's and
grandfather's involvement with the company that ran the mill, union
troubles, a company newspaper, all sorts of stuff.  And his position was
"Superintendent". 

My aunt was born in either Canada or the U.S. in 1921.  Her birth
certificate was lost and either she couldn't prove who her parents were,
or she couldn't prove she was born in the U.S. and subsequently the family
lived for a time in Canada, and when she was a married woman with children
in Glens Falls.  According to her essays, she was born in Quebec.
Immigration came after her! They moved to the U.S. if not to Glens Falls
when she was four, and my mother was born in Glens Falls when she was
twelve in May of 1932. I understand that they came to Glens Falls because
my grandfather worked for International Paper as an engineer there, and
that they first, while he worked for International Paper, spent some time
travelling all over Canada.  So all of this with Murray Williams and the
job change must have happened within a five-year period at the end of
which the family were in Glens Falls.  Of course, I also understand that
my grandmother's reason for not having my aunt baptized until my mother
was when my aunt was twelve was she didn't get on with the minister at
their church where they lived, so perhaps they were in Canada much longer. 

I understand my grandmother rose to the occasion and went to work at a
fruit stand.  She was spirited and strong willed, and no coward. Her
husband evenually found work again as an engineer for INternational Paper,
and ended up in Glens Falls, and they were comfortably well off, lived in
a modest two story three bedroom house, and raised two happy and
comfortable girls who both married well by Old Middle Class standards.  A
rising bank manager became bank executive, and an Episcopal clergyman. And
my mother studied classical music and piano, and German, the former at
college. 

My aunt's version of this is a little different, but one gets the idea she
may be deliberately glossing over my grandfather's activities during this
time.  "After a couple of years of that" that would have been about 1921
or 1922, "Daddy decided he wanted to try something else, so Mother found
herself in Oak Park, Illinois for two years, hating it.  Next Daddy
decided on a little different direction and we moved to Lakewood, Ohio."
where my grandmother and my aunt greatly enjoyed their life during the
three years when they lived there.  My grandmother joined the PTA, and
took my aunt to all sorts of museums and children's concerts, etc.  Notice
that this is a degree of involvement with my autn that she never had with
my mother; she was first ill for a long time and then far too busy with
her tutoring.  "Next [my grandmother] found herself in Glens Falls and for
the first year things were good and she found interesting things to do.
Then the Depression caught up with us and the next secreal years were
spent having child number two and finding ways to balance an extremely
slim budget".  That is consistent with something happened to my
grandfather's livlihood. My cousin's tail about my grandmother had to move
fromone house up on somethign street to the one they ended up in on
William Street, and she ended up selling fruit from a roadside stand,
really very much sounded like this entire story happened when they lived
in Glens Falls.  Incidentally, my mother was born in 1932, after any part
of this could have happened, and my grandmother wasn't out selling fruit
when my mother was a baby; she was desperately ill for several years with
rheumatoid arthritis, and then she went right into her tutoring business.
And it waas in 1923 that my grandfather asked his father in a letter to
him, have you seen or heard from Murray Williams, like the man had
disappeared and he was looking for him.  

My cousin questions if my grandmother ever realized that they were
no longer bordering on wealthy.  It seems she had expected that they
would share a wealthy old age reading books to each other; touching,
but not what happened. My grandfather died only in his sixties or early
seventies of a heart attack probably brought on by his type II diabetes
of which he took not the best care, and she was left with a widow's
pension and social security.  My grandfather may not have been able to
bear to tell her they weren't wealthy and didn't face a secure old age.
He loved her dearly, and just gave her money for what she wanted - 
which was books and her tutoring operation, nothing grandiose.  In old
age she ran up $300 phone bills she expected her children to pay, 
demanded a maid and a gardener to keep up her house, and received
subscriptions to New Yorker and Atlantic though legally blind from
glaucoma and cataracts and dependent on talking books! 

In Glens Falls, my grandmother had my mother, at age 42, and quickly
followed that by developing severe rheumatoid arthritis, which kept her
crippled and bedridden for a few years.  My grandmother may never have
been an inordinately affectionate woman, any more than my mother, but my
aunt said that one reason why she and my mother turned out so differently
is taht my aunt at least had a mother.  My mother virtually never did. 
When my grandmother recovered, she started her own enterprise as a tutor
for children having educational problems.  In theory it was a business,
actually my grandmother never cared if she made money and lost more tahn
she made.  She never realized this, her husband, who thought the world of
her when he proposed to her and adored her, jsut fed her money.  My
grandmother always thought he was considerably richer than he was.  They
filed separate tax returns, and the IRS went crazy with suspicion. 

My grandmother was an extremely good tutor.  She combined a
characteristically dogmatic insistence on teaching good old fashioned
phonetics with an amazing ability to get to the bottom of whatever problem
any particular child had.  She didn't believe in learning disabilities.
The thing is, many genuine learning disabilities respond well to the kind
of patient, systematic old-fashioned teaching that she did, and she got an
awful lot of children from the local school system who were simply the
victims of a mediocre school system.  She became reknowned in the city for
her ability to work with children with educational problems. And when she
died a good fifteen years after she tutored her last child, the city
remembered her.  

As a parent, my grandmother left much to be desired.  As a grandparent she
was almost perfect!  Only occasionally did I get treated to the
steamroller "WHY DON'T YOU DO WHAT YOU ARE TOLD" because I went ahead and
took the tags off the new sweater or something when I'd been told not to.
But there was much in my grandmother's personality taht exactly resembles
Queen Elizabeth's; in fact, they have common old feudal warlord ancestry.
My aunt says she was distant and cold toward my mother.  NOt she didn't
love or appreicate her, she told ME all about it, but she didn't tell my
mother.  She was not at all a demonstrative parent.  Her strategy for
discipline seems to have been basically sound, but it was extremely
one-sided.  No praise, warmth, encouragement.  And because of her tutoring
as well as the fact that she was a clone of Queen Elizabeth, my mother
wasn't allowed to act in the way normal children act.  My aunt, trying to
explain her version of my mother to me years ago, said that in that
household, strict rules prevailed, the house was run around and strictly
scheduled around my grandmother's tutoring, during which my mother was not
allowed to run around or make noise, "the household marched to her beat at
all times."  My aunt said that she lived more normally as a child before
my grandmother's illness and her tutoring operation.  My aunt felt that
this explains why my mother was cold and distant, extremely rigid, and
literally expected her children to behave like dolls. 

And one clue that my grandmother inherited her mother's tendency to
anxiety disorders and depression (along with twenty or so odd phobias of
everything from sesame seeds to enclosed spaces) was a thin skin. My
grandmother had trouble admitting to being wrong, and trouble taking
criticism, and could read insults into things that were hardly meant that
way.  And that is exactly what kind of a person and a parent my mother
grew into.  SHE was always right.  And everyone had to do things her way. 
All of the time. Both my grandmother and my mother would become violently
angry at someone simply not doing things their way, because they saw it as
a deliberate personal affront. 

My mother and my grandmother both inherited full-fledged feudal warlord
temperaments.  Both have/had the ability to become very violently angry
very fast and stay that way forever over a minor disagreement or minor or
outright imagined slight. My mother was just full of imagined slights; the
last time we ever talked (I picked this moment to give up on her), she
exploded violently, fortunately on the phone, because I had the temerity
to call some distant cousins for genealogical information without her
permission!  Rigid to the last, transparently out of extreme general
anxiety, my mother spent the entire intervening nine years telling my
brother (my sister avoided her parents AND the subject) that I had messed
up her carefully worked out arrangements with these cousins - whatever
these were, and gotten them angry, to the effect that she and my father
never heard from them again!  Now, I spent the nine years doing exactly
what my parents both actually did; retreated completely into my corner.
My mother dropped this, interestingly enough, when she learned I was
checking with the relatives to see what had actually happened!  By then,
it allegedly extended to ALL of my father's relatives!  I learned ALL of
it was figments of my parents' imagination.  And because it was my brother
who finally confronted me with the list of charges of terrible things I
supposedly did to my parents, they have since blamed him for stirring
things up!  

My aunt commented on the same tendency in my grandmother, and her
inability to ever drop something. "There was a thread of blaming SOMEONE
for the unpleasant things which happened to her and which she applied to
events throughout her life. I doubt she ever understood people who say
"That's life.  Let's move on."  ..."Daddy...knew there were bad guys as
well as good guys in the world, but they weren't lurking everywhere."   

Another thing my sister has in common with my mother is a life-long
struggle with poor self-esteem. OUr father systematically emotionally tore
every one of us apart as children - and also thoroughly taught us his
intense, too serious and all-or-nothing approach to self-worth. My sister
would tell me, half crying in shame, that minor and common childhood
faults meant she was an absolutely bad person!  For instance, she suffered
from severe constipation.  She simply inherited a tendency to irritable
bowel from my father and me.  This common now known to be neurological
problem tends to run along with obsessive compulsive disorder, and is a
very similar problem; nerves that signal abnormally. She blamed herself,
because like any child she didn't always go running for the toilet when
she got the urge! In exactly what context could that have seemed so
important, and not only because she had a problem with constipation!  

Yet another piece of bipolar temperament that my sister appears to have 
inherited is that since she 
has married, I have been finding that she is never wrong.  Her husband
says he finds it as difficult as I do (well, maybe ALMOST as difficult) to
"convince Helen of anything".   Unlike with my mother, one can often straighten
out a conflict or a problem with my sister at a later time, but at the time when
it matters it often is impossible.   She unfortunately combines this with 
being at times half out of it, and something that should have been done or she
thought had been done or even such a simple matter as clear communication often
simply doesn't happen.  With my own background, I often think at the time
that she did it on purpose.   

My father actually never knew anyone he thought was worth a damn, and that
included himself.  But chronic poor self-esteem is of the most ubiquitous
symptoms of any mental illness however minor. My father is far too serious
and intense, has been far too serious and quiet, and almost completely
withdrawn, all of his life, has been treated for his clear generalized
anxiety disorder, and may have obsessive compulsive disorder as well. When
we were children, and when I was eighteen, he literally wouldn't let any
of his children out of the house unless he was with us, obsessed with
overwhelming and often vague fears of something awful or other happening! 
My father as a child was too serious and quiet to play, he came from a
whole line of Quakers just like him, and he couldn't be dragged from his
corner and his books either to play with his brother and cousin, or to
join his family for dinner!  Eventually he would get himself a bowl of
cereal for dinner and go to bed.  And my entire family are somewhat like
that.

And Helen, my mother and my grandmother all have in common the fact that
you can't joke with them or about them to their faces.  They have a
perfectly amazing, and perfectly consistent, propensity to take ANYTHING
you say to them the wrong way.  As my aunt put it in her essays, "Daddy
had a sense of humor about himself.  He and I recognized that Mother could
not be kidded, though we both tried from time to time.  We kidded ABOUT
her, gently and certainly not in her hearing."  This kind of
hyper-defensiveness comes from poor self-esteem. 

My aunt also comments in her biographical essays on my grandmother's
rigidity.  "The household marched to her beat at all times".  She had
her work and home lives organized into a firm schedule.  At one time,
according to my aunt, incredible as it seems, she was tutoring from 8 AM
to 11 PM, six days a week (where did she find the pupils to come to her at
these times?) "with an hour out each for lunch and dinner - both proper
home-cooked meals." 

One problem with getting my sister to see that something is wrong is that
by the time she reached her teenaged years my mother had pulled out of the
bout of depression she had for most of my childhood, and was a fairly
normal parent; my sister doesn't even remember the nightmare of a mother I
had; but my father hadn't changed one iota, and for six straight years it
was my mother and my sister against my father.  My sister perceives my
father to bully my mother, and doesn't see the behavior of my mother's
that bothers my father as abnormal.  

Another clue is that the stress of visiting her daughter's family in
Maine (nothing remarkable about the family, it was the simple change
in routine) was enough to set off future bouts of her rheumatoid
arthritis.  My mother also found simple visits by family friends to
our house more stress than she could handle.

The book editor, and teacher who led the workshop my aunt participated in,
said OF my aunt ,"...Barbara Dehais..., feel that they had to forge
identities separate from difficult family situations."  My aunt doesn't
expound on this theme in the essays in this book.  If her teacher knew
enough to form this notion, there may be more in an apparently separate
autobiography she wrote for her children.  I can just see something of
this nature having driven my total marshmellow as well as homebody,
classical and very happy at it housewife, of my aunt, on her youthful
venture first to college and then to work as a secretary in Washington, DC
for a time before she returned home and married! My aunt is the sort of
person who never says no, and never speaks plainly or straightforwardly,
to anyone unless in explosive rage.  

From whta I do know, though, my grandmother was the sort of parent who
when not in her right mind when old could call up my aunt at 4 AM and say,
I can't find my wedding ring, you get over here and find it right now -
because she always HAD been able to get her daughters to obey her to that
degree like that!  THey literally couldn't say no to her.  My mother
certainly didn't not KNOW HOW to say no, the woman is nearly as strong
willed as her mother, as am I. But she simply couldn't get the word no in
edgewise, her mother got violently angry.  Just the way mine did for
instance over me at age thirty-two calling up a relative without my
mother's permission!  Both were impossible relationships.  And while my
aunt did what her mother demanded while internally falling apart, my
mother and her mother got into a contest of wills about how she was going
to live and be cared for.  My mother, also, always insists that other
people do things her way, and look out if you don't do it!  My
grandmother's best friends talked her out of going along with a plan my
mother had convinced her after hard work to agree to to go into an
extended care facility. Her friends realized she could stay at home with
some outside support as she desperately wanted to do and in fact she was
far happier blind and half there in her home in her last years then she
could EVER have been any place else. It was EXTREMELY important to her. 
And her daughters both left, my mother in a rage she never got over.  The
temerity!  Her mother didn't do what she told her to!  And as for her
mother's friends, why that demon...  And the thing is, with her daughters
she had been accustomed to take advantage of and afraid of losing control
to out of the way, my grandmother settled right down, as elderly people
often do once one clears up a power struggle like that.  She NEVER made
the kinds of ridiculous demands or took advantage of her friends the way
she had her daughters.  She was always unfailingly gracious and nice to
them.  Not even any more thinking someone was going to hire her a gardener
and a maid!  Her house deteriorated around her, she wasn't physically as
well kept as she might have been, but my grandmother was happy, because
being in her own home and having some friends were the two things that wre
most important to her. 

My grandmother once told me that one thing she really valued in me is my
independent spirit.  She said, "You always did have a spirit about you." 
She then related that one day when I was six or seven, I was sitting in
her dining room with her and my mother, and I had a Sunday School paper
that I wanted to read.  My mother said, no, Dora, you can't read that,
it's too difficult for you.  According to my grandmother I said, "Yes, I
can", and proceeded to read it out loud!  From my own very hazy memory of
that incident, the one thing I remember is I wasn't that sure I could read
it.  I THOUGHT I could.  I didn't often stand up to my mother, this wasn't
SAFE, my grandmother's presence must have encouraged me. And plainly I
either was going to prove I could read it or I wasn't.  My grandmother saw
in me herself at my age, telling her mother, there are no footprints in
the snow, there is noone dangerous out there, and walking out of her
house.  She was well aware not all of her descendants shared my
independence, spirit and strength of will.  She could point out what she
did value in any of them.  But she let me know that my traits were ones
she valued and admired.  

Email me at tiggernut24@yahoo.com

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