on being genetically predisposed to strength
On 20 January, I marched with over three hundred thousand others in the Women’s March to the Polls in downtown Chicago. It was exhilarating, humbling, empowering, and fun.
I come from strong women. Women who were simply doing what they had to do to take care of their families. When young, I never viewed them as extraordinary; they were just my grandmas.
My great-grandmother Emma was the youngest of six children back in Dalarna County in central Sweden. She was the first to come to America and she came on her own. She married an older gentleman, a widower. Peter was a beat cop in the Andersonville neighbourhood on the northside of Chicago. He also sang in the Swedish Men’s Glee Club. Emma was a homemaker: a phenomenal cook, the best baker, and a Swedish pancake maker of world renown. Well, to my young mind. Emma and Peter had one child, my grandmother Myrle.
Myrle married a Dutchman and had one child, my mother, Joan. When my mother was a toddler, Her father, Emil, went to Detroit for a job interview and while there, my grandmother called him at his hotel. A woman answered the phone in his room saying she was Mrs. Van Straaten. Myrle responded that she was the real Mrs. Van Straaten and that could she please tell Mr. Van Straaten that his things would be packed when he returned home. True to her word, my grandmother packed up my grandfather's things and gave them to him. She filed for a divorce, long before it was fashionable, unless you were a Rockefeller or Carnegie. She took a job at Illinois Bell and worked her way up to supervisor. She never remarried. She was a single working mom far ahead of her time. She supported my mother and great-grandma, entertained with flair and always managed to look fabulous, when being properly dressed included girdles, hats, and gloves. She retired from Ma Bell after forty-three years, to take care of her mother who was starting to show signs of senility.
Lest you think she was a saint amongst women, she did fall in love with a married man. She loved him completely. They were together for twelve years before his plane went down while on a location shoot. And yes, I see the irony; I'm sure she did, too.
When she told me this, it only made me love her more. What an amazing woman. I do not condone infidelity, but sometimes these things happen and it certainly doesn’t make her a bad person. She simply followed her heart. And she had a huge one.
I think I take after her the most. She was also a talented seamstress, artist, ceramist, and poet, in addition to making killer glögg and spoiling me rotten.
My mother, Joan, always seemed to not be of these two women. She wasn’t much of a cook, she could not do anything in the way of “womanly” household skills, not with any confidence, and only wanted to sit and read. Now I realise she was probably suffering from depression, at the very least. I know she was terribly unhappy. But still she managed to leave her Air Force husband when he started “to come after you” as she told me many years after the fact. That’s as much as I could get out of her before she backtracked and tried to say he’d only been abusive to her. We lived with Myrle and Emma until she remarried.
My mother and I were not close. She allowed my stepfather to smack and kick my brothers, sexually molest me, and to emotionally abuse her. This is probably why I married so early… I had to get away from the toxicity.
When I finally got up the courage to confront my step-father about the incest, she was there, in the next room and said nothing. As she’d always done.
About a week later, the doorbell at our flat in Wicker Park (Chicago) rang and opening the door, my mom and stepdad were on the stoop and said they had to talk to me. I felt sure they were coming to talk about my incest confrontation. But what Don said was that they’d gotten a phone call and that Jason, my son, had killed himself. Pretty much just like that. I broke down completely. Of course. I was sitting on the loveseat with my mom and she couldn’t touch me, couldn’t embrace me. Nor could my stepfather. Both sat and watched me, helpless. Thank goodness my roommate was home and he ran out of his bedroom when he heard my screams. Simple human kindness.
The funeral was surreal. I was having an out of body experience for most of it. I was above myself, the limousine, the gravesite, feeling very badly for that very sad women that had lost her son.
At some point after Jason’s death, after he visited me to say goodbye in a dream, after the weeklong working trip to Southern California, after the reading with a spirit channeller in Santa Fe, and maybe before my first solo trip to New Orleans, where I fell immediately and completely in love with that city*, I made the decision to no longer participate in any family gatherings, holidays and birthdays included. Some friends couldn’t understand how I could do this. If they knew the story, they understood. If they didn’t know the story, I didn’t tell them unless I felt they were worthy of hearing it. I also never wanted to make anyone uncomfortable or make them choose. That may sound odd, but that’s how I roll. Maybe not the best for me, but thinking of others can’t ever be a bad thing.
When my stepfather died in Tucson, Arizona, where they were living, I did not go to the funeral. He still could not say, “I’m sorry.” When my mother died in Sarasota, Florida, where she had moved after his death to be close to my one brother and his wife, I did not go to the funeral. I would have felt I was being untrue to myself. Sometimes it is all about me.
All this being said, I never felt particularly strong. I was just taking care of my son: working, taking classes at night, being a Cub Scout den mother, going to soccer games, performing in my flute choir and string ensemble, just being me. Surviving. Living. Like Emma and Myrle before me. They always liked to joke about being stubborn Swedes. They might have been, but they were also the strongest women I knew. And I feel very fortunate that I have followed in their footsteps.
*Because of this, I know I’ve always had an emotional attachment to New Orleans, and that that coloured everything about my time there and perhaps gave me a romanticised view of life in that charming city.
I come from strong women. Women who were simply doing what they had to do to take care of their families. When young, I never viewed them as extraordinary; they were just my grandmas.
My great-grandmother Emma was the youngest of six children back in Dalarna County in central Sweden. She was the first to come to America and she came on her own. She married an older gentleman, a widower. Peter was a beat cop in the Andersonville neighbourhood on the northside of Chicago. He also sang in the Swedish Men’s Glee Club. Emma was a homemaker: a phenomenal cook, the best baker, and a Swedish pancake maker of world renown. Well, to my young mind. Emma and Peter had one child, my grandmother Myrle.
Myrle married a Dutchman and had one child, my mother, Joan. When my mother was a toddler, Her father, Emil, went to Detroit for a job interview and while there, my grandmother called him at his hotel. A woman answered the phone in his room saying she was Mrs. Van Straaten. Myrle responded that she was the real Mrs. Van Straaten and that could she please tell Mr. Van Straaten that his things would be packed when he returned home. True to her word, my grandmother packed up my grandfather's things and gave them to him. She filed for a divorce, long before it was fashionable, unless you were a Rockefeller or Carnegie. She took a job at Illinois Bell and worked her way up to supervisor. She never remarried. She was a single working mom far ahead of her time. She supported my mother and great-grandma, entertained with flair and always managed to look fabulous, when being properly dressed included girdles, hats, and gloves. She retired from Ma Bell after forty-three years, to take care of her mother who was starting to show signs of senility.
Lest you think she was a saint amongst women, she did fall in love with a married man. She loved him completely. They were together for twelve years before his plane went down while on a location shoot. And yes, I see the irony; I'm sure she did, too.
When she told me this, it only made me love her more. What an amazing woman. I do not condone infidelity, but sometimes these things happen and it certainly doesn’t make her a bad person. She simply followed her heart. And she had a huge one.
I think I take after her the most. She was also a talented seamstress, artist, ceramist, and poet, in addition to making killer glögg and spoiling me rotten.
My mother, Joan, always seemed to not be of these two women. She wasn’t much of a cook, she could not do anything in the way of “womanly” household skills, not with any confidence, and only wanted to sit and read. Now I realise she was probably suffering from depression, at the very least. I know she was terribly unhappy. But still she managed to leave her Air Force husband when he started “to come after you” as she told me many years after the fact. That’s as much as I could get out of her before she backtracked and tried to say he’d only been abusive to her. We lived with Myrle and Emma until she remarried.
My mother and I were not close. She allowed my stepfather to smack and kick my brothers, sexually molest me, and to emotionally abuse her. This is probably why I married so early… I had to get away from the toxicity.
When I finally got up the courage to confront my step-father about the incest, she was there, in the next room and said nothing. As she’d always done.
About a week later, the doorbell at our flat in Wicker Park (Chicago) rang and opening the door, my mom and stepdad were on the stoop and said they had to talk to me. I felt sure they were coming to talk about my incest confrontation. But what Don said was that they’d gotten a phone call and that Jason, my son, had killed himself. Pretty much just like that. I broke down completely. Of course. I was sitting on the loveseat with my mom and she couldn’t touch me, couldn’t embrace me. Nor could my stepfather. Both sat and watched me, helpless. Thank goodness my roommate was home and he ran out of his bedroom when he heard my screams. Simple human kindness.
The funeral was surreal. I was having an out of body experience for most of it. I was above myself, the limousine, the gravesite, feeling very badly for that very sad women that had lost her son.
At some point after Jason’s death, after he visited me to say goodbye in a dream, after the weeklong working trip to Southern California, after the reading with a spirit channeller in Santa Fe, and maybe before my first solo trip to New Orleans, where I fell immediately and completely in love with that city*, I made the decision to no longer participate in any family gatherings, holidays and birthdays included. Some friends couldn’t understand how I could do this. If they knew the story, they understood. If they didn’t know the story, I didn’t tell them unless I felt they were worthy of hearing it. I also never wanted to make anyone uncomfortable or make them choose. That may sound odd, but that’s how I roll. Maybe not the best for me, but thinking of others can’t ever be a bad thing.
When my stepfather died in Tucson, Arizona, where they were living, I did not go to the funeral. He still could not say, “I’m sorry.” When my mother died in Sarasota, Florida, where she had moved after his death to be close to my one brother and his wife, I did not go to the funeral. I would have felt I was being untrue to myself. Sometimes it is all about me.
All this being said, I never felt particularly strong. I was just taking care of my son: working, taking classes at night, being a Cub Scout den mother, going to soccer games, performing in my flute choir and string ensemble, just being me. Surviving. Living. Like Emma and Myrle before me. They always liked to joke about being stubborn Swedes. They might have been, but they were also the strongest women I knew. And I feel very fortunate that I have followed in their footsteps.
*Because of this, I know I’ve always had an emotional attachment to New Orleans, and that that coloured everything about my time there and perhaps gave me a romanticised view of life in that charming city.
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| Myrle Flapper Extraordinaire Circa 1925 © Trish Korous |
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| Emma and Peter Wedding Day Circa 1905 ©Trish Korous |
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| Joan Graduation or Confirmation Circa 1946 "For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me. -Amy Tan, Joy Luck Club |
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