Where I come from

Both my mother and father descended from families who lived in grinding poverty for generations, long before the Great Depression came along. My mother came from people who had a biochemical predisposition to depression, alcoholism, and various forms of mental illness. On my father's side are family patterns of mean-spirited, cynical attitudes and brutal behavior, toward each other and the world in general. One person with whom I recently shared some of my father's family stories said they sounded "barbaric."

What I see in my mother's ancestry are people who were most likely sensitive, aware of the subtle dimensions of life and interpersonal relationships, but who did not have the means or support to either understand or know how to use these characteristics in a constructive manner. In another time and place, some of them could have been gifted artists or visionaries. In the poor, rural, uneducated, religious fundamentalist, and inbred environment in which they lived, they instead turned in on themselves.

My mother's father's father killed himself in 1929 by drinking arsenic. At the time, he was living with my mother's parents; my mother was then two years old. After his death, his wife -- my great-grandmother, 13 years older than he was, having been born in the year 1858 --  basically shut down; the family story is that for the last twenty years of her life she sat in a chair and did not speak. My research into mental illness suggests that she may have had a less-common type of schizophrenia referred to as "catatonic". I get the impression she had been a difficult person to be around, to begin with. When I asked my father why my great-grandfather would have committed suicide, he said (only partly jokingly), "to get away from his wife."

My mother's father was an alcoholic who appears to have had a difficult time making his way in life; he had trouble holding jobs and was unstable, unreliable, and probably verbally abusive. His wife, my grandmother, had a very hard life, exacerbated by chronic depression. Her own mother died in childbirth when my grandmother was 16 years old, leaving seven children. As the oldest daughter, it was left to my grandmother to raise her siblings. A couple of years later, she married my grandfather, who, as I've discovered from genealogical research, was already married to someone else.

From what I have been able to determine, my maternal grandmother gave birth to at least 8 children, perhaps more, of whom only four lived to reach adulthood. Two of those surviving children were alcoholics, one committed suicide at the age of 54, and one -- my mother -- has severe mental illness (schizophrenic psychosis requiring permanent institutionalization.) They all displayed verbal abusiveness, personality disorders, and difficulty in being able to function well socially.

By comparison, my father's side of the family knew how to "make their way in life". They knew persistence in the face of great hardship; you just put your head down and work until you drop, then you whip yourself until you get up and go on some more. You're born, you work your butt off, and then you die. You do what you have to do to survive. Of course, living each day at survival level, emotions and feelings are pretty much irrelevant, and perhaps even dangerous. Showing sensitivity is viewed as lazy and weak and is worthy of contempt.

I now understand where I get my persistence and strong will from. They are indeed wonderful gifts, if you know how to apply them effectively, and if you also have the capacity to envision life beyond mere survival and believe that you can -- and have the right to -- follow those dreams. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, my father's family seems to have lost its soul. (I am referring to the family ethos, of course, not to every single family member.)

My father tells me that during his childhood in the Great Depression, his parents moved around a lot, within the confines of the geographical area where their own parents lived -- northeast Texas and southern Arkansas. They'd live in a certain place for a year or two or three, and then something would happen: the job would end, or the kind of farming they were doing would dry up, or whatever. So they would pack up their few possessions and their nine children on the horse-drawn wagon, and move on. They did what they had to do to take care of their family. They did pretty well, considering that they were basically uneducated and had very limited means; all nine of their children not only survived to adulthood, but lived into their 80s and 90s. While my mother's parents reacted to the circumstances of life with despair and depression, my father's family responded by using their will to keep pushing on, taking the next step and then the next.

For a while during the 1930s, my father's parents made their living and fed their numerous children by sharecropping on land owned by my grandmother's oldest brother, who was named Riley. Riley appears to have been a bit of a wheeler-dealer. He was also the apple of their mother's eye (their mother being Granny Williams). Uncle Riley was married to a woman who apparently was not quite right mentally, and they only had one child.

At a certain point, Riley decided that he could make more money from his land than what my grandparents were paying him, so he informed his younger sister and her husband, who were the parents of 9 children in the midst of the Great Depression, that from then on, they would have to give him one-half of everything they farmed on his property. Of course they could not do that and continue to feed their children, so they packed up and moved on.

When my father told me about this, I asked him, "Granny just let this happen? Didn't anyone in the family see anything wrong with this and say something?"  Apparently not.

Within this kind of family culture, taking care of yourself meant using force, cunning, intimidation, and/or manipulation. The concept of asking for help, and actually having help given to you -- not to mention caring enough to offer help, or at least not make things worse for someone else, especially someone you presumably loved -- did not exist.

Of my father and his eight siblings, nearly all of them married spouses who were at the very least domineering, and at the worst alcoholic and/or violent. Two of them married people who turned out to be mentally ill, characterized by abusive, controlling, and bizarre behavior.

After my father's mother developed health problems late in life (her husband of 60 years was deceased by then), she eventually had to go into a nursing facility. From what her daughters say, during her last days, she lay in her bed in the nursing home and cried "help me! help me! help me!", over and over again, until she was hoarse.

By that time, of course, it was far too late for anyone to be able to help her.

Comments

[marlaine]

i don't know much about my great grandparents
it's so interesting that you have gathered this type of information
i read it and was quite sad
how difficult it must have been years ago to be depressed and have no therapists or medication to assist you
it's quite amazing how the genes come together to finally make 'us'...how much are we a combination of them
thanks for sharing this
xo

[Kitty]

Marlaine, in a very short comment you've just about summed it up. :)