I have not been able to escape the awful karmic retribution that comes with motherhood. Yes, somewhere out or up there, my parents are laughing hysterically in the company of millions as we make our feeble attempts to pilot our children through adolescence.
Because let the truth be told--I was a rotten teenager. Well, I was a rotten teenager after I turned sixteen. Before that I was a pimply faced scholastic nerd; after I was a pimply faced juvenile delinquent scholastic nerd. I developed a taste for the kind of boys you didn't bring home to Mom and the kind of party favors Mom and Dad didn't need to know about. There wasn't a curfew I wouldn't break or a rule I wouldn't defy. My mother warned me that someday I'd regret it, but since she was wrong about so much else, I had confidently expected that motherhood would spare me the pangs Mom had suffered.
Ha, ha.
Our elder son has had tough sledding, suffering as he does from attention deficit and the co-morbidity of an anxiety disorder. In fact, the anxiety disorder forced us to pull him out of school at the beginning of the year, so that now he's finishing high school online. I should amend that--we're finishing school online. I have to involve myself, or he will not work on this stuff at all. You want to know the real truth? I don't like teaching. I never wanted to teach. I was a piss-poor teaching assistant. It has never been a struggle for me to write or spell, but the fact is that I cannot explain how I do it.
But there is no one else. There is nowhere to go from here. I have had to take some share of the responsibility.
What's currently pissing me off is that my son isn't taking his share of it. Have I tried to get him to assume it? Hell, yes. In Edna St. Vincent Millay's words, I have "sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs." I have begged, pleaded, stormed, raged, bribed and grounded my little heart out, as has Himself.
I am just plain out of ideas. Bothered, bewildered, plumb tuckered out.
Monday, December 11, 2006
A Most Excellent Christmas Gift
+Bennett.jpg)
No, Himself did not bring me home scanty underthings from Victoria's Secret or its sleazier cousins. Instead, a distant relative, previously unknown to me, rang me up from Cleveland, saying that she had seen my research at the Ashtabula County Genealogical Society and wanted to introduce herself because she is fruitlessly pursuing the same line. As it develops, she is descended from my 2x great-grandfather Bennett's brother Zalman. We commented on observed family facial similarities--the long oval face, prominent blue gray eyes and sloped nose. (I consider myself fortunate to have escaped the nose.) See photo above. We have exchanged some information. Huzzah! I see legions of bricks tumbling out of a stubborn wall.
This is not the only line of my laggard and secretive ancestors currently under scrutiny; I am on the hunt for the Crouch family, also spelled Croutch. They apparently disembarked in Connecticut and followed the well-worn path from Connecticut to Vermont to New York to Pennsylvania and points west. Much like the Bennetts, in fact, except that the Bennetts crossed the border into eastern Ohio...and then criss-crossed it for the rest of their lives. The furtive fellow I'm searching for is Henry (Harry) Crouch, last heard of in 1850 in Monroe, Wisconsin. When did he die? Why? When did wife #1 die? Of what? Where are they buried (not that they probably had headstones to start off with, or if they did, that they still exist now)? I don't ask much; I don't ask for yellowing diaries in spidery script that will tell all about their ox-cart journey from Pennsylvania. At the moment, I will settle for dates and places and hope to fill in the rest later.
What all of my research tells me is that I am the end product of a pre-Civil War invasion of the Midwest by Northeastern blue-eyed devils. No second or third wave immigrants in this family, a fact of which some older members of the tribe were embarrassingly proud. Hell, one of my great-grandfathers disdained the Irish, let alone the Germans, and the first one of my cousins to marry a Catholic caused the earth to quake under Grandpa's feet. Looking back at these people as through the wrong end of a telescope is endlessly fascinating, but often incomprehensible.
I Don't Act, I Re-Act
Quite frankly, having this blog exceeds my expectations. I thought I was signing up with Blogger only so that I could have a posting persona for the Chumps of Chance Pynchon discussion group. But here I am, not for the only time with more than I bargained for. Let's see what I make of it.
Who am I? After running up a lifetime of blind alleys in pursuit of that question, I have come to the following conclusion: I don't know, and I'm not sure I care any more. There are facts, however. I was born in Wisconsin in the year that Ike took office and grew up on Shady Lane Farm, where we raised Guernsey cows, sheep, and pigs until an ersypelas (sic?) plague took the pigs. I grew up with a border collie/collie mix dog for company, and later spent time and eventually teeth riding horseback. I also grew up with books, books, books and a lamentable taste for TV: Paladin and Mighty Mouse were my earliest heroes, although I admit to preferring Oil Can Harry over Mighty Mouse as a more interesting character (foreshadowing my reaction to Paradise Lost, no doubt).
I lived in our brick farmhouse with my parents, one brother and two sisters (twins, and the most photographed babies of 1945 in our parochial neck of the woods). All of us, with the exception of my mother, matriculated at the local two-room school, where we got quite a good education, actually. I can thank my stretch at Kirby State Graded School for my knowledge of geography in particular.
Fate had it that I was a teenagerwith disputatious parents and a depression problem in the late Sixties and early Seventies, so I suppose that self-medication was inevitable. I enthusiastically self-medicated for several years until I became aware that the cure cost me more than the disease. In recent years, I have limited self-indulgence to the occasional wine thing with neighbors.
I graduated from the local high school, then went to a small liberal arts college which was mostly dedicated to wealthy Easterners who couldn't make the Ivy League. I didn't like it there, so I quit and went back home to work and party. I emerged from a festive haze long enough to realize that I didn't want to work as a janitor for the rest of my life, and decided to go to the closest state-system college. I managed to graduate summa cum laude there, although I'm not quite sure how I maintained it the last couple of years: I had senioritis as a sophomore. From there, to a teaching assistantship and graduate school in Kansas, of all places. The liquor laws there pretty much forced me to dry out, there not being a bar on every corner. After a year there, I married and returned to America's Dairyland. Never did finish grad school, nor did I finish law school. Long history of ambitious projects ne'er completed, isn't it?
More later on how karma worked its magic on me. (blogger lifts eyebrow).
Who am I? After running up a lifetime of blind alleys in pursuit of that question, I have come to the following conclusion: I don't know, and I'm not sure I care any more. There are facts, however. I was born in Wisconsin in the year that Ike took office and grew up on Shady Lane Farm, where we raised Guernsey cows, sheep, and pigs until an ersypelas (sic?) plague took the pigs. I grew up with a border collie/collie mix dog for company, and later spent time and eventually teeth riding horseback. I also grew up with books, books, books and a lamentable taste for TV: Paladin and Mighty Mouse were my earliest heroes, although I admit to preferring Oil Can Harry over Mighty Mouse as a more interesting character (foreshadowing my reaction to Paradise Lost, no doubt).
I lived in our brick farmhouse with my parents, one brother and two sisters (twins, and the most photographed babies of 1945 in our parochial neck of the woods). All of us, with the exception of my mother, matriculated at the local two-room school, where we got quite a good education, actually. I can thank my stretch at Kirby State Graded School for my knowledge of geography in particular.
Fate had it that I was a teenagerwith disputatious parents and a depression problem in the late Sixties and early Seventies, so I suppose that self-medication was inevitable. I enthusiastically self-medicated for several years until I became aware that the cure cost me more than the disease. In recent years, I have limited self-indulgence to the occasional wine thing with neighbors.
I graduated from the local high school, then went to a small liberal arts college which was mostly dedicated to wealthy Easterners who couldn't make the Ivy League. I didn't like it there, so I quit and went back home to work and party. I emerged from a festive haze long enough to realize that I didn't want to work as a janitor for the rest of my life, and decided to go to the closest state-system college. I managed to graduate summa cum laude there, although I'm not quite sure how I maintained it the last couple of years: I had senioritis as a sophomore. From there, to a teaching assistantship and graduate school in Kansas, of all places. The liquor laws there pretty much forced me to dry out, there not being a bar on every corner. After a year there, I married and returned to America's Dairyland. Never did finish grad school, nor did I finish law school. Long history of ambitious projects ne'er completed, isn't it?
More later on how karma worked its magic on me. (blogger lifts eyebrow).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)