5. Mom gets a job

When I was about 6,  mom decided that she would have to go to work full time. She said that dad had abandoned us and that she was going to have to find a job to keep the wolf from the door and food on the table. It wasn’t until I was older that the truth came out and I realized that all the terrible things she had said about dad were wrong.

In 1956, working women were unheard of.  All the men came back from WWII  and demanded their old jobs back. During the war, with all the able bodied men overseas fighting the Huns, women lead the workforce in the US, building tanks, planes,  trucks,  jeeps, bullets and bombs.  Many women were very disappointed to learn that they would not be able to keep their jobs after the war.  Mom found a job at US Steel Southworks in south chicago working in the billing department. She chose the afternoon shift 3:00 to 11:00 pm Monday – Friday.  I think she that shift because it limited the time she had to spend around me. When I got home from school, she was going to work,  when I got up to go to school,  she was asleep and was NOT to be disturbed under any circumstances. So,  the only time we really saw each other was on the weekends. During the week, my grandmother and my aunt would get me off to school and look after me when I got home after school. Looking back, I think that this was probably about the time my mom gave up on me ever being a person she could be proud of. I became someone who was tolerated or ignored.  After mom had been working for awhile, she started reminding me how much I owed her. The roof over my head, the clothes on my back, the food in my belly, the air that I breathed. She constantly told me how much money I cost her. As I started to grow, she would complain to me about how fat I was, how tall I was and why couldn’t I just fit in regular boy’s clothes instead of the tall boys clothing? When I looked back at the pictures of me back then I just looked like any other kid…nothing special.  She began comparing me to dad and tell me how I wasn’t worth anything and that I wasn’t smart enough to do well in school.  I have searched my memories and my soul my whole life and I can’t remember mom ever telling me she loved me or that she was proud of me. All I ever wanted when I was growing up was to be worthy in her eyes. I just couldn’t make her happy no matter why I did. When I was in school she was always working whenever there was a school recital or event. I think she was too ashamed of me to be seen with me at a public event especially if she might run into someone she worked with “at the mill”. I began to feel that I didn’t belong anywhere or with “normal” people of children. Later in life, when I could talk about this stuff, I would always say I felt like I was on the outside looking in …

Whenever I did manage to make a friend, I was never allowed to bring them over to my house. No one was ever welcome. Mom had picked Gramp’s habit of nicknaming everyone by their nationality. She’s say “don’t hang around with that damn dago kid he’s trouble” or “Why do you have to hang around that pollack kid he’s a juvenile delinquent”. Being invited to my friend’s homes showed me a world that I had never seen before. Until that time, I thought everyone acted like my family did. Until that time, I thought it was normal for family members to scream at one another, swear at one another, treat each other terribly. Visiting my friends , I learned that families could love each other, support each other, care about each other. I didn’t understand why my family was so different, why we hated each other so much. Why did we never say to each other;  “I Love You, You’re Wonderful, You did a great job, you’re so special” .

It must be because of me. I knew they would be a lot happier if I wasn’t around…

That had to be it, right?