The Past Lives On

Maybe it's a sign of aging, but I find myself thinking of the past and reviewing how I got from there to here. Sometimes good - sometimes bad.

One of the things I was thinking of this morning was my adolescence. I always said I'd never want to relive those years - given a choice. But I've not delved very much into why.

So recently I've been thinking a lot about my past - my birth in Berlin, my toddler years in an English household, and my growing up years on the farm in England.

But now, I come to those other years and I feel a painful reluctance to go there.
The truth is my adolesence was made much more difficult by the fact that my Dad died - a long lingering painful death - when I was 14.

Shortly after he died, my uncle (the patriarch of the family) decided that Mom need a husband and saw a matchmaker and set her up with this German guy with the intention of them getting married. Hans Winter was a jerk. He had nothing to commend him other than a paying job. And my Mother accepted it. She married him.

I was aghast. I begged and pleaded with her to think this over - Dad had been gone about a year and she was still mourning him. She seemed almost zombie like and accepted my Uncle's decree that she marry.

It lasted about a year. Mr. Winter wanted a housekeeper. He wanted his meals on time, his laundry clean and ironed, his house (actually our house since he moved in with us) neat. My Mom worked all day in the garment industry in a sweat shop and came home exhausted. I "started" dinner - meaning I peeled and boiled potatoes and anything she had pre-cooked I put in the oven. But he sat and waited to be waited on. Me too. I was supposed to wait on him. Once he asked my Mom to make him a "prune whip". Something she had never made before. So after a long day's work and preparing him dinner and doing the dishes (well, I did the dishes), she looked through her cook books, found that recipe and made a long tedious evening's work of preparing him his prune whip. I thought - Never, Never, Never.

I didn't take kindly to it. One day I threw a knife at hime and that probably precipitated the end. After that, he told Mom I had to move out when I was 16 - I was an adult by his standards. He should have known better. Mom woke from her trance and told him if there was a choice, he'd be the one to leave. I was her witness in court. I was terrified, but they were nice to me and it was all over quickly.

After that, Mom was more independant. She started dating a guy that my Uncle and Aunt disapproved of. Dave Rotner was loud, aggressive, energetic and dynamic. I hated him. Mom didn't seem to mind being bossed around, but I took to it like a match to dynamite. As a teen I was pushing to be independant and not at all liking being told what to do by someone who wasn't even my Father.

Mom and Dave were an "item" for about a year. They went off for weekend trips together; he ate most dinners at our house and seemed to take up a lot of space there. My Aunt and Uncle detested him and manipulated me into arguments with my Mom and with Dave. Looking back I can see how they whipped me up, and picked my brain for information about the relationship. But then, I didn't realize what was happening.

My Mom finally broke up with Dave, but I think she was always sad about it. My Aunt and Uncle, and I had prevailed.

It was hard on me because my Mom was pretty and attracted a lot of male attention - at a time in my life when I wanted to be the one who attracted the male attention.
She liked domineering men - I didn't. The secret was that although she liked men like that, she fought back tooth and nail against being dominated. I always said she was the velvet glove with the iron fist. But they didn't know that - they loved the velvet glove.

Mom also could not be alone. When there was no man in her life, I shared her bed.
I was her best girl friend. We went to the movies together, we went to dinner. We traveled as a pair. Much, I guess as she and her sister, Toni, had done. But I got pretty tired of being dumped - back to my own bedroom and with no social life - when she had a boy friend.

Then she met Moish. A nice guy who had been single all his life, but loved the ladies and they loved him back. Mom, however, got him to marry her. Moish loved her - he was proud of her, took her places to show her off, bought her jewelry (on time, that she paid off) but she loved the idea of his loving her - who wouldn't?

Wherever they went, she told me, women approached her and told her they had slept with Moish and she was lucky to have "caught" him. She told me he was good in bed, and I believe it. He couldn't turn off the flirting - with anyone, including me.
He loved Mom, but he flirted with everyone and tried it on with everyone.

Years later, my sisters-in-law told me that when they had him work for them (he was a housepainter) he tried it on with them.

When I married Morey, we had a big family party with all Morey's cousins etc. and one of his cousins had slept with my stepfather - she told us so. So, it was all in the family.

Moish was concerned for me - genuinely, I think. He thought I should get out and meet Jewish guys which wasn't going to happen with me living way out in a Christian, blue color neighborhood. He joined me up at the Jewish Center - miles away - and drove me back and forth for meetings and parties. He taught me how to drive and saw to it that I got a car - a tank, as he wanted me to be safe.

I met Morey because of him - Moish - and Moish gave us a lovely Jewish wedding on short notice because he knew how to do these things. My Mom was sort of naive - some part of her had never left the schetl in Poland and she knew it. But Moish, he may have been born in Estonia, but he had come to New York as a teenager and had reveled in all things American.

He was also a really good grandfather - coming to visit with bags of food, toys and goodies. He cared about my kids as though he really was their blood grandfather. Meanwhile my Aunt and Uncle were really pissed that Mom had married without their stamp of approval (although they came to Las Vegas with us and witnessed the marriage). Moish didn't get into a power struggle with my Uncle, he just ignored him.

My Aunt and Uncle gradually became more and more alienated from the family. They disapproved of Mom's multiple marriages (and she wasn't through yet). And they wanted to be the old fashioned kind of family where the oldest brother runs the show.
My Dad had kind of accepted that - rebelling in his own way. Hans Winter had been beholden to them but Dave Rotner was totally out of their control and so was Moish, but in a much kinder way.

People said he had a heart of gold and it was true. But his life was cut short by an accident on the job - he was thrown from the back of a truck and had a head injury. He wasn't the same after that and then he had a stroke and died. This would have been about 1969.

By then, I was married, and had three little kids. Mom - always a social butterfly - had lunch most days in Farmer's Market in Los Angeles, Fairfax district (the Jewish neighbohood). She and MOish had bought a duplex in the area and fixed it up so that she was in a much better neighborhood for her when he died. She had social networks at the senior center and in the Jewish community and the Farmer's Market was the nexus.

She told me that one very nice looking older man was prowling around her group and he finally found a mutual friend to introduce him. They dated for a while and then married about 1972. Charles Nelson was a widower, he had money, he had a good income from Germany (reparations) and he had a house in a nice area of Hollywood which he sold to move in with Mom.

He was also very jealous of her past husbands and destroyed all the pictures he could of them. He wanted me to do the same, but I refused. They - especially Moish - were a part of my life too and I had no intention of indulging his jealousy.

Every summer he and Mom went to Germany. They went to the various "baden" - resorts where there were hot springs or healthy bathing in sulfur springs etc. She had a good life with him and he with her. He did try to seperate her from me and the grandchildren - but he was smarter than Hans Winter and soon realized that if it came to a choice he'd lose. So he graciously accepted the inevitable - and Mom did try to back off somewhat from her weekly visits so that he wouldn't be so threatened.

Then in 1979 - I was still working nights - I got a call at work that Charles had died. I got off work and ran over and Mom was just sitting there with his dead body and not knowing what to do next. We got her mobilized and made the arrangements with her. But it was a shock and a great loss to her.

After Charles died, Mom often got propositioned by men. She still had this charm and magnetism which drew them in - but she had been burned and did not want to get close to anyone again. From that time on, she spent her time with her lady friends
and visiting us. She told me she missed being married but found she liked being her own person too. She ate when she wanted, what she wanted and could come and go as she pleased. She made a good adjustment to widowhood. She made a pretty good life for herself - and of coure, having Charles money helped. He had no children or family except a brother or pre-deceased him. So it all came to her. And it took care of her in later years..a gift she deserved.

So looking back at what I've written, I discover that it's about Mom, not much about me. But trust me, it was an emotional yo you in those early years and I needed all the therapy we could afford when we first got married. I was very close with my Mom maybe too close. I also resented by shoved this way and that whenever a new man came into her life - but I can sort of understand it - at least intellectually.

My Uncle had promised to send me to college, but when I graduated High School and approached him, it was like the married son in Sense and Sensibility - he kept hedging and negotiating for cheaper ways for me to get educated. He decided I should become a Real Estate woman - I wanted to be a doctor. I probably would have done well in real estate, but I was angry so I took my savings and went to secretarial school and ended up working at the Edison company. I started night school at the Junior college but I was also dating Morey at this point so love triumphed over education.

Much later, I did go to the Junior college and slowly accumulated the classes I needed - but that's another story.