Memoir about mom

[joyfinderhero]

So I made an off-hand comment in a previous segment posted for the memoir class, and of course everyone wants to know more. I should have expected that, since I mentioned in a single paragraph my mother's disastrous first marriage and my dead half-brother. But answering the question has been ... interesting.

I write what she told me when I was a very young kid -- say, elementary school age -- and she wanted to shut down kids gossiping.

I write what she told me when I was in high school ... and college.

I write the last story she told me -- the one with a major age difference between her and her husband, the likelihood that it was a forced marriage, the possibility that the child was conceived in rape.

I try to figure out when the child was actually born, and how old she actually was. Every time I do a piece of the math I get a new surprise.

That this is probably part of the memoir process, that in the process of writing a memoir one should expect to arrive at more clarity about life events ... doesn't seem to make the revelations easier.

The more I learn about Victorian morality (my grandmother was born in the late 1860s), the more I learn about New York Social Register restrictions, the more I learn about a girl being "ruined," the more I want to puke. No wonder my dad was so worried about the possibility that I might get pregnant. No wonder abortion was a well-known fact, if you knew the right people and had the right money, even though it was definitely illegal and doctors went to jail and lost their medical licenses if they were caught doing it.

So many lives blighted by forced marriages. So much destruction in the name of knowing for sure which children you might have fathered.