A Girl Called Karen - A true story of sex abuse and resilience. Karen McConnell
future they don’t have, for golden years they won’t live to see. I hope grandma got pleasure keeping the trinkets we gave her.
Little Mary’s life offers vivid lessons. An illiterate girl whose family had grown up somewhere in Europe, married a Polish immigrant (whose language she didn’t know). He crossed half a continent and a mighty ocean to a country he had never seen where first he dug coal out of the ground and then owned a lumber mill and got rich and powerful until the Great Depression broke him and he killed himself. His widow had borne him five children, and (except for Alex) she raised them to adulthood.
Consider this: First, she had been poor, then rich, again poverty stricken, and finally ended her days as a cleaning woman who eked out enough from meager earnings to pay for her funeral and burial arrangements.
I learned a lot about resiliency from my Grandma Mary.
As contrasted with my mother’s parents, who were fairly new arrivals in this country, my father’s family had been here a long time. The ancestors of my paternal grandfather (Grandpa John) immigrated to this continent from Scotland and England in the mid-1600s, and the family of my maternal grandmother (Grandma Lucile) came here the following century from England and Germany. Many Midwestern farm families had similar backgrounds, and no one took any special pride in it. Mostly they laughed at the Daughters of the American Revolution and the “blue bloods” who paraded their ancestry.
Grandpa John was not much for bragging about his forebears, and he grumped about a genealogical search financed by his sister (Great-Aunt) May: “She wasted her good money for that nonsense! It doesn’t matter a hill of beans who your ancestors are. Just because you can trace them back a few hundred years doesn’t mean they amounted to anything. What you are now and what you do now, that’s what counts.”
Sometimes Grandpa sounded like he’d rather not be linked to his ancestors – especially not to his father. Once a year, he would take his youngsters to spend an hour with the “Old Cuss” at his farm. Totally estranged from his tightwad father, he would sit in his Model-A Ford staring through the windshield until the visit ended and his children came back to the car bearing or wearing bizarre gifts.
One time Aunt Eileen had draped over her seven-year-old body a golden fox fur half as big as she was. The Old Cuss had trapped the fox and skinned it, tanned and lined the fur, and saved it as a gift for her annual visit. Aside from allowing a snapshot of the child wearing this amazing luxury item, her mother said there was no appropriate occasion for its display, but for years, it was one of the little girl’s treasured possessions.
My father never mentioned the Old Cuss, and he didn’t talk to us about his family tree. Only in recent years has our genealogy been perfunctorily circulated among the younger family members, most of whom seem to agree with Grandpa John that lineage doesn’t matter a hoot.
In retrospect, though, I think the unsung family history helped shape my father’s life.
Back in this country’s early days, my father’s ancestors were Quakers, believers in peace and simplicity, opponents of rituals – alien to a religion featuring Low Mass and High Mass, rosaries and confessions, incense and sacramental wine, priests and nuns, and the Pope in Rome.
In more recent years, the family felt the strong influence of the Shakers. That was because Grandpa John’s mother, Grace, was an orphan who was raised by Shakers – a small sect that guaranteed its own demise by segregating the sexes and forbidding sexual intercourse. EVER. There were a few Shaker villages in the United States, but the unappealing Shaker program didn’t really get off the ground, and its failure saved the human race from extinction by abstinence.
The one taboo the Catholics and Shakers shared was birth control, though for very different reasons.
The Shakers got new members by raising orphans and persuading them to stay as adults in the Shaker community. They also got a few adult recruits – usually abused wives running from sadistic husbands. Their rigid, repressed society was not congenial to my orphaned great-grandmother, and she left the Shaker Village as soon as she could.
Even though the Shakers preached that all sex was sin, she opted for marriage and children. Unfortunately, she chose a mean, hard-working, stingy farmer, and the rocky marriage of the miser and the waif produced three excellent, though inhibited, children – John, May, and Ona. The parents divorced as soon as their kids were grown.
Grandpa John’s philosophy drew upon the sternest strictures of the Shakers and the Puritans of New England and forbade, with equal ferocity, sex, smoking, and drinking. With such a dark moral code, sacramental wine and tobacco and extramarital sex had to be the ultimate evils, and Grandpa’s taboos were so unrealistic that his children sought a different set of values. Sometimes they made awful mistakes.
I believe his only son (my father) was a troubled man with respect to his sexuality, beginning in his teens, most certainly continuing through marriage and fatherhood, and probably all his life.
Grandpa John was not alone in his struggle for appropriate sexual mores. The twentieth century moved from Calvin and Luther and the Popes to Freud and eugenics and planned parenthood and the pill and the sexual revolution. Maybe some day we’ll get it right, but I doubt it.
Along with its ban on sex, booze, and cigarettes, the family repressed emotionalism. Self-control was the rule. “Don’t complain. Never cry” was the unspoken good-behavior code. Aunt Eileen said that one time Grandpa John was jauntily whistling “Yankee Doodle” as he came into the house from the barnyard. Something was wrong she knew, and, sure enough, his thumb had been torn halfway off in a farm accident. She said any time his voice was that carefully controlled, you could be pretty sure he had suffered a physical injury or was in some sort of danger.
Grandpa John’s Quaker/Shaker heritage with its sexual taboos gathered fuel from his work. In addition to running a farm, he was a teacher and superintendent of country schools. It was almost as politically vulnerable an occupation as a rural minister’s. His children learned the hard way, “Control yourself. Don’t complain. Never cry.”
Even down to my generation, I was taught to stay silent and hide my feelings when disaster struck. I remember that when a marriage was going sour and I didn’t know why and I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t fight. I could only cling. And hurt.
Grandpa John and Grandma Lucile were strong, hard workers. As farmers and teachers, for many years, they worked at both occupations at the same time. Their work ethic was rock solid, and that’s how they raised their children. Grandpa was very strict and seemed scary to me. He expected hard work, and his rule was law. That’s what he had learned from the stingy old farmer and the industrious Shaker.
I remember my family’s visits to my grand-parents in Florida when I was a child. My father always spent a good part of our vacation working on the ranch, mending fences and burning fields. Grandpa was the boss, and my daddy, the successful professional, obeyed him.
I adored Grandma Lucile. I always felt that I was a very special person when I was with her. She would take me to Catholic Church even though she was a Protestant and didn’t like Catholicism very much. She enjoyed reading and respected my passion for books.
The last time I got to spend with her was during my fifteenth summer. We cooked and ate and played. She took me to the movies, and we saw The Roots of Heaven. The movie terrified me, and I couldn’t sleep. She heard me tossing and came to my room and made everything all right. Grandma Lucile’s loving, comforting words that night are among my fondest memories. Going back to a home where I didn’t really belong was so bleak a prospect and my loneliness and the need for her were so intense that I cried all through Florida and Georgia on my way home to Toledo.
It was the last time I ever saw her alive.
Grandma