Finding My Mother
“She frequently walked the streets alone.” That one sentence jumped from the page and dove into my heart. I had walked those same streets alone. I thumbed through the rest of the photocopied pages and decided that I had better read each page in the order I had received them.
My sister had sent these things. I wanted to gobble them all up as a child devours a stocking full of candy but my adult self, with the wisdom of 68 years, knew that I should savor each page that had been gathered and sorted by a distant, caring hand. Self-restraint would allow me to absorb the full flavor of this discovery.
My sister and I had gone back to California in search of our history. We had grown up not knowing anything about our parents. We were orphaned at the ages of two and four. I was four. Two old women now, searching for threads to knit together the pieces of our broken childhood.
Our search had produced very little beyond some disjointed stories and a few faded photographs. Not even a marriage certificate at the time. We could not find a paper trail of any kind.
An ancient cousin understood our quest and added a few tidbits of information, mostly old stories but little of our father and nothing of our mother. Little that would help us with the picture we were trying to paint of our family.
My mother had grown up before the Great Depression. During that time people did not have money for unnecessary travel and phone calls. A long-distance telephone call was beyond the finances of people who were living a hand-to-mouth existence.
By 1930 the country was in a deep depression with long food lines and few jobs. Survival was on the minds of most people so they wrote occasional letters to keep in touch with far-off families.
Because of this, our older cousin, Marianna, could tell us very little about the cousin who was our father. And she knew nothing of our mother.
My Mother. The subject of all the pages I now held in my hands. What a surprise! No forewarning. Just a packet of pages arriving in the mail, proof of my Mother’s existence. This then was actual substantiation that I was connected to a family, a tribe. I belonged somewhere. These were tiny windows through which I could catch glimpses of the girl who became my mother.
My dear sister had sent these things to me. Thankfully Renda had thought to contact the Salvation Army in Long Beach, California which had sheltered and helped a frightened, pregnant girl in 1930. Eighty-four years ago and they still had the paperwork! A paper trail which had accumulated as Mom went through their system; provided for, counseled, and protected.
And now I had the tiny threads to knit together a tapestry of a small portion of her life. As I read the letters and reports she became a person. Records from the Los Angeles Booth Memorial Home traced the path of a young, pregnant, lonely girl.
The kind case worker had included pictures of the home. I wonder if she knew how much it would mean to be able to visualize our mother in that Booth Memorial Home.
Through these pages, she emerged as a real person to me.
An internet search revealed a blurry photo of a smiling five-year-old in her ruffled dress, posing for a dance recital picture. It must have been a happy time, A more prosperous time for her. Headline Dallas, Texas.
From that photo caption, I knew that her parents were together. I learned from these papers in my hand that she went to school in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Then her mother divorced and remarried. They all moved to California. No wonder we could find no history of her!
Times were harder, then. Although her stepfather was noted in this sheaf of papers as being “kind to her”, she was now the stepchild and living in a family with stepsisters and a stepbrother. Her siblings were grown and on their own. She must have felt isolated.
She finally graduated 8th grade at the age of 17. It would seem that the family had moved enough to hinder her education.
I never knew her. Or at least I did not have any memories of her. The trauma of losing my parents shattered not only my life but my memory.
I now had copies of letters written about our mother. An unwed teen, she had sought shelter with the Salvation Army and Mother’s Home. My sister, God bless her, had contacted the Home, hoping to discover some dot of information that would help tie her life to ours.
Our mother had always seemed one-dimensional to me. The single photo I had carried told me nothing about her hopes and dreams, her fears, sorrows, or disappointments.
Renda and I grew up without connections. It made us strong because we had no one to lean on but each other as we were shuttled from home to home. It made us stubborn and tenacious.
Renda told me that she felt like the little duck who asked everyone “Are you my mother?” I just thought of myself as an orphan..
At least now we knew that at one time we had a Mother. A real human, feeling being.
I am sure she loved us. Now we could love her back. I didn’t realize until we got the Salvation Army papers, how much that would mean to us.
