Just A Small Town Girl

Before I met my oldest brother, I had no idea that anything was missing from my life. I didn't feel any holes, any missing pieces.

The story of my mom's first child, adopted by his wonderful forever parents, wasn't part of the story I knew of my life, of my mom's life.

Since he found us, though, so much in my past, and my mom's past, makes more sense. Looking at things with the lens of added knowledge, there's so much more clarity.

For instance, Mom never expressed any overt hostility toward her hometown. She shared positive memories. There was no, "I hated every moment, and I couldn't wait to get out." Still, she never wanted to go back. She left at 19, and died at 83. She went back to her hometown exactly twice in those years, and one of those times was to deal with my grandmother's move out of her home and into a nursing facility.

When she got high school reunion invitations, I'd say, "Don't you want to go?"

"No," she'd say. "There's nobody that I need to see. I don't even know what we'd talk about."

Still, she's an introvert, very happy being alone, miserable in crowds, so that was fairly expected.

Mom hated crowds and noise, so it goes without saying that she disliked large cities; it would never have been her choice to live in one. She didn't even like to visit large cities. So, it was a tiny bit puzzling when she was also vocal about not wanting to live in small towns. "Small towns are terrible," she'd tell me. "Everyone knows your business, and everyone's in your business."

"I don't care," I'd say, especially as a child. (I wanted to live in a town that went beyond "small" and into "tiny.") My personality veers more toward TMI than it does toward close mouthedness, so having people know my business didn't seem like too big a drawback. Also, I'm very good at brushing off people who want to make my decisions for me. They annoy me, but I can ignore them.

That was viewing things through my lens. Through Mom's, things look different. I cannot begin to comprehend what it felt like to be an unmarried pregnant teen in the 1940s, in a small town in the Midwest.

My family probably already looked pretty scandalous to those with wagging tongues. My grandparents were divorced. My aunt was about to get a divorce. Mom was pregnant out of wedlock.

I can imagine the force of all of those well meaning advice givers and all of those judgement passers mostly from Mom and Aunt Jeanette's reactions - move 2000 miles away, and never come back. She never, ever spoke of it to me, my siblings, my cousins, but I don't have to hear the details; I see the results.

And, I can't count the number of times Mom told me that small towns were gossipy and judgemental. I chalked that up to her experiences during her divorce. In the picture perfect 1950s, she left a handsome husband and a pretty house to marry a never before married bachelor 20 years her senior - and he and her first husband worked together in a small town fire department. "Grandma," my daughter told her decades later, "you were scandalous!" She humphed, and smiled a small, amused smile. Now I know that, by then, she was a pro at navigating societal disapproval.

(In the turbulent, "free love" 1960s and 1970s, she was a faithful wife and mother. Whether she did it intentionally or not, I'm tickled that she swam upstream, against prevailing currents.)

How Mom described us now carries more meaning for me, as well. When someone asked how many children she had, my mother would say, "My husband and I have four at home," and, as the older kids were no longer at home, "My husband and I have four." It was invariably "we," not "I." If she said "I," it was usually with details about one or another of us - "I have one who's turning 30 this year." I always looked at it as her way of looping my dad in - two of us were children of her first husband, not my dad (her second husband). Still, he raised them, so I always liked that she always phrased it as "we have" four children, not "I have 2, and my husband has 2."

I'm still certain that was part of the intent. Mom presented us as a unit, because she saw us as a unit.

Now, though, I know that there was a second, unspoken part to that statement. "My husband and I have four" was accompanied in her head by, "And I have an older son." He was always in her head, always in her heart, just as the rest of us were.

So much of her life was colored by her first child, by this brother that I didn't meet until I was in my 50s. And now, I get to love him, too. And I love the way his life touched my mother's. I enjoy understanding her better. She was an outstanding mother, friend, aunt, sister just because of her own personality, but her experiences with her firstborn made her a better one. Having my brother had a huge impact on the kind of person she was, and the rest of us siblings (and our friends) reaped the benefit.

I understand so much more - and I am glad.