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by Breanna Ramsey
of the Pen Pal Continuum
It seems to me several of our little group have some issues with their parents and I have to say it kind of upsets me. I don't know what the problems are … well except for Ginanna's dislike of her name … so I can't say the feelings aren't justified, but I thought maybe I could provide a little perspective based on my own life.
I never met my parents; I was left at the emergency room entrance of a hospital when I was just a day or two old. I was named by a nurse at the hospital, at least that's what I was told, but I have no idea why she named me Kendall.
Really I was lucky; at least I wasn't left in a trash can or something. Florida didn't have a 'Safe Haven' law back then, so dropping me at a hospital was just as illegal as leaving me anywhere else. I was placed in a temporary foster home a few days later and that's where I got my last name.
I don't really remember the Greens, at least not from that time. I have met with them since to thank them for taking me in and caring for me during the first two years of my life. They're very sweet, but they were already well into their fifties when I came into their lives, and they just weren't able to raise me; as it was the two years I was with them went way beyond what was originally planned.
See, it's usually very easy to find a couple to adopt an infant; the statistics are something like 96% are adopted within a few months. Somehow I fell into that 4% that just don't make it. The couple I was placed with after the Greens planned to adopt me, but then the wife got very sick and so I ended up in my third foster home when I was almost four.
I had four more foster families over the next fourteen years. The last was the longest at four years and by far the worst. They weren't abusive or anything even remotely like that, just very strict. I'll admit that the problems were all pretty much my fault because by the time I came to live with them I had a huge attitude problem -- it sort of comes naturally when you realize no one wants you.
For a long time I really, really hated my birth mother. I couldn't understand how she could have abandoned me like that. Then I found out I was pregnant at sixteen and suddenly it was all so clear. Even though I have no real idea what her situation was, it's easy for me to imagine her like I was; scared to death at the thought of becoming a mother. I seriously considered giving Taylor up for adoption, and there were a lot of people; my high school counselor and my foster parents among them, who encouraged me to do just that. I couldn't do it though, especially not after I held him for the first time. I couldn't take the chance that he'd end up like me, lost in the system and bounced from one home to another.
So I let go of the anger and the hate, and I forgave the mother I never knew. I honestly hope she's happy and has a wonderful family of her own.
Anyway, like I said I just wanted to offer some perspective. Parents are people, and people aren't perfect. It's just when I hear someone complain about their parents it pains me, because I can't help but think how lucky they are. I would give almost anything to be able to introduce Taylor to his grandparents.
Kendall
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ICR: Ginanna
Kendall, Ginanna here
I think I’ve confused people. What I should have said is I hate my parents for what they did to shatter my faith in them. I love them still, they are my Mom and Dad, and it’s killing me but every time we speak I get so angry I …
It’s not the name per ce. The nasty nicknames hurt me a lot but that’s not why I am angry. I could laugh that off if it wasn’t for the betrayal. I believe I said in an earlier message that I was a twenty-fifth wedding present for my parents. Mom and Dad were in their forties when I was born and they treated me like a precious jewel. I wasn’t spoiled rotten or anything like that, I simply felt loved and appreciated. It made the hurt of the nicknames bearable, almost a badge of honor. They were ex-hippies and into every liberal cause imaginable, liberal in the good sense, the caring sense like social justice, living a simple life, actively supporting environmental issues, recycling and that sort of thing. We, I mean they still have a garden to die for and it’s organic.
I met great aunt Agatha a few times. She was well off but didn’t live in a mansion or anything ostentatious. She was always nice to me and interested in what I did. She even helped me with my homework; she was real good at math. She told me she wanted to become a scientist but women graduating high school in the thirties -- that itself was uncommon enough – were expected to get married and have kids. Teaching, nursing or maybe secretarial/bookkeeping was the limit of work *suitable for the weaker sex.*
She played the game but would have ‘none of that crap’, she told me before she died, I was about fifteen at the time and it was the last time I saw her. She put herself through college waitressing and tutoring students, telling her parents it was, ‘to catch a better class of man,’ the going to college, that is. In some ways she reminds me of myself in that she had skipped several grades and had her bachelors degree before she was twenty. It wasn’t in the sciences, it was in business, a compromise of sorts but it worked to her favor in later life.
She caught her ‘better class of man’ too; a nice man who had the guts to support her need for higher education. They had a son six months after they married, not premature by the way, Auntie Agatha was not ashamed in the least to tell me that. Sadly I never met either, the dad died at Okinawa in World War II and the son in Viet Nam. I remember her crying as she told me. You’re wondering how we are related? My Dad’s mom was her older sister Ruth, the sister who bought into the fairytale of stay-at-home-mom whole-heartedly and was happy with it her entire life.
Agatha got her masters in finance while her husband was in the armed services, how they let a mother back in college I’ll never know. I suspect her husband had powerful friends but I’m not sure. She made a nice living investing for her husband and child and a select group of friends, no way would a brokerage house have a *woman* soil its floors, but they’d take her money right enough. That’s why I’m confused and angry, my aunt was this early woman’s liber, but in her quiet way, and from what I remember of her few visits she was liberal minded like my parents. She was passionate about equal rights and things like that. So why did she keep those big investments in defense contractors?
After her death I was given many of her personal possessions as I was her favorite niece, so she said in her will. I was shocked when I SAW her photos from after she was widowed. She was a tall and attractive woman, even more so after she’d become a mother. I think having to support her child alone made her even more determined than before and she knew her looks were an asset to be honed and used.
From her scrapbooks, photo albums and letters she kept I learned she’d been very popular but the people she dated, WOW! I won’t mention them specifically but several were or later became the CEOs of major corporations. She dated a number of top Hollywood stars, of both sexes, and even politicians. There was this skinny one, MY GOD, he was later the President, of the US of A. This was before Jackie. Like I say, Agatha was a looker.
I’m not condemning her for her liaisons. A woman is entitled to reach for happiness and if her relationships made her happy, fine. I don’t even object all that much to her owning stocks in defense contractors, I wish she hadn’t but so be it, it was her choice. She did what she had to do for her child and herself. What I object to is it all being a mother ******g sham; she bought my love or was it my parents bought her love, take your pick. They … The bastards! I can’t speak of it now, I’m getting too angry. Excuse me while I go scream in my bathroom and calm down.
…
I dumped my crap on you again and it isn’t fair but then if you need to, I won’t mind. I need to think of something happier. I’ve got it!
All-rightie buckaroos … I confessed my dark, guilty secret, to you all the other day, namely, ‘I LOVE Cheetos, the fried kind. Give me a large bag and I’ll do ANYTHING!’ So when are the rest of you going to fess up? Ginanna needs some quid pro quo here. I feel like I’m standing naked in the middle of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
Ginanna Agatha Sachs
John in Wauwatosa
ICR : From George
It sounds like you have a very mature outlook Kendall, earned the hard way. More mature than I was in my teens and 20s that's for sure. I was blessed to have both parents growing up, though at the time, well Fathers and Sons it's an old story. My dad expected me to be the first in our family to go to college, but the way he went about encouraging me to do that was almost guaranteed to make me do the opposite. I wanted to prove I could be successful on my own terms, and despite some early disasters I managed to do this to a modest extent. There were a difference in outlooks between us that were never going to be solved unless one of us was flexible but neither of us were. My last conversation with him was an argument. I regret that now, as well as just a lot of how I dealt with my father, and how my Ma was caught in the middle. As a parent myself or even before I came to appreciate them, their sacrafices for my sake. Anyway, I'm glad you kept your son. Nothing like it is there?
George
Well shit, I guess it really CAN happen here..,
.