Mother’s Day

I have written about mothers before. I have written and will continue to write about my own mother. It is a primal bond, yet the relationship can be difficult, no matter what its origin story. I wrote yesterday about idealized motherhood as a special, sacred state. The day-to-day reality can be quite different and difficult. There are common themes in the universal experience of motherhood. Yet each mother’s story is unique. This is one of those unique stories.

Lala and Her Son

“The child was tightly wrapped in the threadbare blanket his mother had taken with her as they were leaving the camp. At the immigration center, she struggled to quell her nerves and quiet her baby. The baby had a cough. The cough needed to be suppressed.

If even a slight cough was detected by an immigration official, the whole family – dad, mom, sister, and baby – might have been diverted to quarantine for suspicion of TB. Getting out of the detention center and on with their lives in Canada could have taken them many more months. The family had already spent what seemed like an eternity in a European refugee camp. Lala wasn’t sure how much more they could survive.

Homemade cough medicine liberally laced with brandy and administered in quantity had quieted her fussy boy before they disembarked at Pier 19 in Halifax. It had been effective in putting him into a deep slumber. Still, Lala worried the effects would wear off and the baby would wake and delay their plans.

The baby’s conception and birth originated in a post-World War II European refugee camp. It was there Lala met her future husband. Both parents were suffering from the brutal treatment and losses imposed by World War II Nazis. The post-War effects of displacement and relocation only compounded the traumatic effects.

At the war’s end, they jumped at the chance to come to Canada to begin life over again. They made it through the customs inspection and boarded the train for Toronto, Ontario.

Thanks to friends and relatives in the similarly displaced post-War community, they were able to buy a house. Eventually, his mother opened a dress store on the ground floor.  The family lived upstairs.

That baby had grown into a bright and mischievous little boy. He remembered spying on naked women through the cracks in the changing room doors. The ladies paid him little attention as he was but a child but he reveled in the memories. He vividly recalled the pretty ladies.

A concern in this family was the little boy’s birth origins. The baby was now a boy. He was short in stature and tended to obesity. Food was comforting for him in a way his traumatized parents could not be. On top of the traumas of war, his father harbored deep fears that his son was not his own. He took out his anxiety on the child.

The story persisted that Lala had been raped by Russian soldiers in the camps and the story muddied the waters of the boy’s origins. His father feared that the boy was the product of that violent act and not his own biological son.

One of the results was that his father measured the boy regularly. He stood him up against a door jamb with a yardstick and pencil to mark his growth. The father made careful note of how tall the boy was.  The boy recalls standing on tippy toes to appear taller to avoid his father’s rage. If the boy’s measurements “came up short,” a physical beating might ensue from deep within the wells of his father’s anger and frustration.

The boy had an older sister whose origins were equally murky. She was not the product of rape. But Lals worried her daughter was the product of another displaced Jewish refugee in the camp. When the daughter discovered her alternate origin story, she flipped out.

She stole her parents’ credit card and flew to Israel to seek out the man she believed might have been her “real father.” Israel is purportedly where he went after the war. The sister had a complete breakdown and was hospitalized in a mental hospital for a time with depression and suicidal ideation.  Her brother was enraged and disdainful.

Her parents flew to Israel to find her and bring her back to Canada. The travel costs and the psychiatrists they paid to have her seen, were a burden on her family’s limited financial resources. Her brother saw all of her “acting out” as a “choice.” In his mind, she was a stupid and selfish brat.

As an academic years later, he would publish a paper called The Myth of Mental Illness. Although he didn’t mention his sister specifically, there is no doubt she was his intellectual inspiration. It is common for those who have grown up sublimating their distress to condemn as weak those who struggle.

Her brother was angry at the financial and emotional cost to his parents. They were not wealthy people and his sister had racked up a hefty credit card bill that his parents were forced to pay off. Her rebellion stirred up troubling memories of the war.

The boy sought comfort in food and his girth expanded in proportion to his loneliness and distress. His Ph.D. thesis explored the lengths that fat people go to appear “normal” in society. Those efforts to “cover” up their fat were a study in learned manipulation that Lala’s grown son transferred to other parts of his life. He would learn to hide his rage under layers of charm and intelligence that took him up the ladder of career success in fairly short order.

He was a product of the abusive background he came from and became a volatile and violent abuser himself. Survival skills bred in post-war European refugee camps and in his family home came in handy for a sad and angry little man-child. He was intent on making up for the miseries his parents suffered that caused him to suffer in kind.

Sadly and perhaps inevitably, he inflicted that suffering on others. Lala’s boy became as twisted as the Russian soldier (allegedly) responsible for his presence on the planet.”