A Girl Called Karen - A true story of sex abuse and resilience. Karen McConnell
been bad enough if that had been the end of it. But my nightmare continued. There was so much I didn’t know – much that I had to learn. As I thought about it all night long, I got more confused, more terrified. Maybe that was the way people got babies, I thought. Was I going to have a baby and be the shame of the whole neighborhood? I prayed I wouldn’t get a baby. I prayed I wouldn’t shame the neighborhood.
I loved my neighborhood. It was the best place, and my house was the best place, and I was the most important child in our home because I was the oldest and the best at taking care of my five young brothers and sisters. Everybody knew that.
Until that Awful Night, I thought my family was about like all the others on our street. True, our house was more rambunctious, bigger, shabbier, livelier, noisier; more alive with tears and laughter and songs and chatter and rivalries and squabbles. It was seldom empty – mostly full of people, very young people. When my mother’s roses were in bloom, our yard was a riot of sensuous color, and they were the pride of our community. Otherwise our yard was the biggest mess in the neighborhood.
True, we had special perks. Even though Toledo was a long way from darkest Africa, because our father was the veterinarian for the zoo, our fun and games included free rides just about whenever we wanted them on a scruffy dusty camel or a gentle gray elephant called Toots. Those unusual privileges made us the envy of the neighborhood kids.
Our family was the largest on Algonquin Parkway. That’s because my mother became pregnant eight times and gave birth to six babies in eleven years. Keeping track of that heroic record, our priest gave joyful praise after every birth, and my Grandpa John (my father’s father) snorted “no self-control” every time his son sent word that another one had arrived.
Whether my father was astonished or perturbed at such fecundity was never clear. He loved us kids very much, there was no question of that, and he worked endlessly with only a few interruptions to support the lively brood that he and Sally made.
I was proud of my family, I was proud of my neighborhood, and I was proud of my ancestors, too. My mother’s family came to this country at the turn of the twentieth century. Her family was from somewhere in Eastern Europe, and they continued to speak to each other in the language of the old country.
Grandpa was from Poland. He died before I was born so I never knew him, and my information about him is very sketchy. I can tell you that he worked in the coal mines of Pennsylvania. There in the coal country, he met and married my grandmother. They moved to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and my grandfather acquired a lumber mill. Apparently he became fluent in English, worked extremely hard, did very well in business, and grew quite wealthy. In addition, he was active and influential in local politics. He fathered five children, one of whom was my mother, Sally.
He has been described as driven and intense. When the Great Depression drove him into bankruptcy and destroyed him financially, he committed suicide. I know only that he went into the woods and hanged himself from the branch of a sturdy tree. He had built his fortune from the forests, and that’s where he ended his time on earth.
My mother told me very little of this tragedy, even though his disastrous end totally changed her life.
My grandmother never acknowledged it to me.
I loved my Little Grandma very much, but the language barrier made it difficult for us to communicate. When I was a young married woman, I brought Grandma to my home in Toledo for a visit. I invited a friend from my workplace who spoke Polish to talk to my grandmother and act as our translator. That’s when I learned that, although my Polish grandfather spoke his native tongue fluently, my grandmother could not speak it at all. My friend said that Mary could mix some Polish in with English, but neither was her birth language. I tried to find out where she came from. I learned nothing conclusive, but I believe her family came from Hungary, and her native language was Hungarian. Obviously, my grandparents met and married without sharing a common language.
Parenthetically, I believe my grandmother’s lack of language and sophistication disturbed my mother when she was a young woman. As a child, I had observed the relationship between my mother and her mother. It was for my mother a mixture of love and frustration. For Little Grandma, it was a source of unstinting pride.
When my mother died, my grandmother’s grief was inconsolable. This was the one child who’d stayed connected to her, and now she was gone. But that loss came years after grandpa’s suicide abandoned Mary to the life of a poverty-stricken widow.
After grandfather’s death, Grandma Mary continued to live in Iron Mountain, Michigan. It was a remote little place, and her children gradually left town. Finally, she was left with Alex, her youngest. There was speculation in my father’s family that this child, who came much later than her first four children, might actually have been an illegitimate offspring of my mother Sally. I asked my grandmother about this, and she exploded. She never had learned much English, but there was no doubt that she was screaming that Alex was her baby and people had lied about her baby.
Alex was severely mentally retarded. When he was in his teens, he was taken from her custody by the authorities and placed in an institution a long way from home. According to eyewitnesses, she wailed and cried and struggled so hard to keep her baby, who was then about sixteen years old, that the police came close to locking her up. Finally she was forced to accept her loss, but she didn’t forget Alex, and for years, she never failed to take the bus each month to visit him in the institution where he was confined.
Whether that heartbreaking experience served society well, I really don’t know, but it took a cruel toll on my Grandma Mary. From then on, folks in Iron Mountain considered her a bit strange.
The whole town of Iron Mountain knew her as “Little Mary.” She lived above a bar and restaurant. She had one room of her own and supported herself by cleaning rooms for all the elderly men who lived there. She never really learned to count, but she was very careful with her money. She scrimped and saved enough to pay for her funeral and burial arrangements when she died.
I visited Little Grandma when I was a teenager, and I became acutely aware of her unusual status in the town. For example, the cloistered convent allowed Mary access – a most extraordinary circumstance.
Several years before Mary’s death, I was in the midst of major life changes and had moved to another address when it became evident to the townspeople that Mary would have to go to a home for old folks.
I didn’t hear about it. No one in Iron Mountain knew how to reach me. Had I known, I would have done my best to rescue her, but, limited as my time and resources were in those days, I might have been unable to do as well as she and her friends did when they placed her in the home.
It was nothing fancy, that home, but fancy wasn’t what she needed. It was an old house, and it boasted a staff of compassionate people. They let her clean the stairs and certain rooms. It was satisfying labor for her. She knew there was hard and useful work to be done, and it was her job to keep on contributing. She had to work because that is what people need to do.
Eventually I learned what had happened to her, and I went to see her in Iron Mountain. When I visited, she was proud to show me her room, but she was even prouder that her chores were important. She was a productive, contributing citizen even at her advanced age. (I never knew how old she was, nor did she. Based on my mother’s age, I estimate she died in her mid-eighties.) I believe that she lived the balance of her life in comparative peace. Very likely, it was the best place for her to live out her days.
When she died, my Aunt Catherine and I received her few worldly possessions. I was amazed to see that gifts I had given her had been carefully preserved and had never been worn. What was even more disconcerting was finding gifts to my grandma from my mother, who by that time had been dead for more than twenty years.
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