September 10, 2018
Among my most treasured books are five hard-cover volumes of The Wizard of Oz, by Frank Baum, that belonged to my father when he was a little boy. He gave them to my brother Jeffrey, and after he died, I inherited them. They are in excellent condition for books that are now at least eighty-six years old. My father loved and valued books, and he clearly did so already at an early age, for these volumes have only the wear and tear of an old book and were not mishandled or torn apart by my father, as so many children do to their books.
Jeffrey cherished even more so the Wizard of Oz books, knowing that they had been held in the small hands of our father, and remembering this brought Jeffrey closer to him. We most certainly could visualize him sitting and reading them in 1932 or 1933 and this made the books more fascinating to us. Imagining our parents as little children—something other than the monolithic, one-dimensional, and all-powerful beings that they often become to us in our childhood—was an enlightening mental exercise. I am reminded of what my mother said to me one day, after Jeffrey and I complained to her about mistakes she had made in our upbringing: “I’m just a woman who decided to have a couple of kids!” And indeed, that is what she was, along with millions of other mothers and fathers who never intended to do wrong by their children, or harm them in any way, but who inadvertently might have done so.
What truly intrigued both Jeff and me was a picture on the inside cover of the first volume, The Wizard of Oz. We know that my father had drawn it, because next to it he signed his name in the penmanship of what was clearly a five or six-year old child. The drawing is of a cross-eyed man, perhaps a robot, with small appendages sticking out of his arm. Above and below him are what I am guessing may be airplanes or rockets. He may have a cigarette in his mouth (my grandfather Marcus did smoke).
Jeff and I used to look at this drawing with wonder and we also thought it was funny. We felt that we could see a younger version of my father in it, that it was a precursor to what he had become, that it already showed the humorous side of my dad that we so loved. It humanized our father, gave him dimensions that we were unaware of. It was a small conduit into his child’s mind and universe. It made us consider him differently, in a state of innocent creativity, still unmarred by the hostile outer world.
Of course, we all know that our parents were all once children, all once infants, all once eggs in our grandmothers’ wombs! But how easy it is to forget this! And because we forget it, we expect more from them than we should, and we think that they should be superhuman, flawless caretakers. Our parents taught us compassion and generosity and forgiveness, and they showed us how human they were and how vulnerable they were. Otherwise, we ourselves would not have learned these traits, their compassion, their forgiveness. And yet, because they were there before us, because they picked us up as tiny babes, fed us, clothed us, directed us and protected us, it is hard to separate them from one-dimensional caretakers and to acknowledge them as just ordinary people with the same problems and concerns that we developed as adults. (This is in no way an apology for abusive parenting; that is a separate topic altogether).
This becomes easier as we get older, and yes, I fully acknowledge that my mom was “just a woman who decided to have a couple of kids.” It is easier to forgive and to understand your parents when you acknowledge their humanity and stop making them into gods.
My father was 29 when I was born, and my mother was 33. I wonder what messes I would have made in my children’s lives had I had babies in my thirties, a time when I was a busy graduate student trying to figure out who I was and where I was headed. Yes, I wanted to be a Professor of French, but I also longed for other things and dreamed of other goals and opportunities: moving to France, becoming a civil and human rights lawyer, like my Grandfather Marcus, or becoming a psychologist instead, or better yet, a chef, since I loved, and still love, to cook for my friends and family.
Recently, in the process of packing our house in preparation to move to Portland, Oregon, I found two tiny drawings by my maternal Grandmother Ingrid. How I wish I had known her longer! And as an adult, at which time I would have asked her countless questions about life as a child in Finland, before she came to the United States with her family. But she died when I was 12, and at that time, I asked few questions of her and my grandfather. I wasn’t yet interested in family history, though I was fascinated by my grandmother’s eternal Finnish accent, and how she pronounced my name as “Kaarin,” the double vowels drawing out the sound in Finnish, a distinct feature of the language.
One of her drawings is of a woman in a tight mini-skirt and a mass of hair, tall on her head. The caption reads: “Todays (sic) style. Ingrid” The other picture is of a woman in an old-fashioned wash tub. It is clearly my grandmother, as she did a very accurate copy of herself. She is pointing her leg straight up to the ceiling and flexing her foot. The caption reads: ”They tell me to take sit (sic) baths.” Grandma’s writing was lacy and flowing, quite pretty, and reminds me of her equally delicate crochet work sewn onto the edges of at least a dozen pillowcases that my mother owned, and are now mine. In her fifties, Ingrid developed a destructive case of rheumatoid arthritis that eventually killed her, as the inflammatory process spread to her internal organs. Long ago, sitz baths were among the few treatments that could be offered to relieve her pain, unlike today when there are more effective treatments.
Yet through it all—her gnarled and bumpy hands, her body misshapen by disease, her loss of height—my grandmother retained her sense of humor, and was able to draw herself—still pretty and flexible—in a washtub. I often wonder how much those baths relieved her pain.
Since I didn’t know my grandmother well, I cherish these little drawings, her lacy handwriting, and her subtle sense of humor coming out amidst her bewilderment at her predicament, having a disease, which in those days, more than 50 years ago, imposed a chronic pain sentence on its sufferers.
Like my father’s little drawing in The Wizard of Oz, Grandma Ingrid’s little drawings, done as an adult, offer me a glimpse into her private world that I knew almost nothing about.
These seemingly insignificant pictures will enter the “museum room” that I have created in our new home, as part of the history of who my father and grandmother were long before I knew them as towering loving figures.