My mother was a very admirable woman. In her long and rich life she made strengths out of her weaknesses. Against incredible odds, she survived the loss of her mother, a crippled father, the Depression, and deafness. Not only did she survive, she made a comfortable life for herself and her children. She had an amazing ability to cope and she did it better than anyone could have ever imagined.
My mother was born February 3, 1918 in Flatriver, Missouri, now called Park Hills. Her mother, Lorraine Jackson died a day or two after she was born, maybe from the Spanish Influenza which was particularly devastating to young adults at that time or maybe just childbirth. Her father, Munroe Lashley, was crippled about the same time by polio.
My mother was raised by her grandmother, Malissa Jane Firebaugh Lashley, who still had four or five of her own children at home. I think my great grandmother also took care of some other grandchildren left by one of her sons. My great grandmother had at least 8 children of her own and my mother had two older brothers, Tommy and Charlie. As a child she had the mumps which left her so deaf she couldn’t continue on with school. She was called a dummy and her formal education stopped at the age of 9 in the 3rd grade.
When she was 14 she went to live in St. Louis with one of her uncles, Walter, and his wife. Forty years later she still hated both of them. She never talked about it. I only knew about it because on a visit to Missouri I met them. They were very friendly and nice to me. I told her about them and she dismissed them with a bitter remark. It seems Walter’s wife treated her as a servant. As a young woman, 18 or so she worked in a candy factory in St. Louis and her best friend was Pat. They kept in contact for the rest of their lives. .
In St. Louis sometime after she left Walter and his wife she remade herself from an impoverished orphan into an attractive woman, a transformation that included having all of her teeth pulled and false teeth made to replace them. She was raised Hard Shell Baptist. I don’t think anyone in her family was particularly religious. One of her aunts who lived near us in California was Foursquare Gospel, but she didn’t have any respect for that and always talked disparagingly of holly rollers.
At the end of 1939 she met my father, got pregnant, and converted to Catholicism. They got married and moved to Glendale, California. My father got a job at Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank. In 1942, my father went back to St. Louis and enlisted in the Army Air Corps. After a short time my mother left her two children with my father’s mother and joined my father. She went with him to San Angelo, Texas and Lake Charles, Louisiana. When my father went overseas she went back to live with my grandparents in St. Louis. She adored my grandfather and at his urging went to work in an aircraft factory in St. Louis, probably McDonnell Aircraft. The company provided training and my mother had a real talent in math.
A story I have heard but don’t know the facts of is that my father returned from the War and was in St. Louis some time. I have no idea how long, before he returned to his wife and two children.
I was born in 1946 and my younger sister was born in 1950. After my younger sister was born we moved from the Barracks to a rented house near the railroad tracks and my mother was working for Weber Aircraft in Burbank. Weber made seats for aircraft. I remember she was laid off at one time and collected unemployment. I remember at the Barracks my mother used to do laundry with a wash tub and wringer affair, but on Ash Street she had a washer. After that she always had a washer. She never used a dryer. I remember her hanging clothes on a clothesline in the back yard.
At this time I felt protected and cared for by my mother. I liked being around her.
My mother was always trying to get me to wear what I thought were outrageously colored clothes. Both my parents had grown up in the Depression and my mother was particularly aware of the cost of things and the importance of making do. I think some of the clothes must have been on sale because they couldn’t sell otherwise. My mother was an extrovert and I was an introvert particularly as a child. My mother was always trying to convert me. I think we both thought of it as a moral question and not just a personality trait. I preferred quiet and out of the way. My mother thought that was something she could change in me.
In 1952 my father got a job with Stainless Steel Products, a new metal fabricating company. He worked there another 30 years. My father earned most of the money, but she took care of it. My mother began looking for a house to buy in Burbank. My father had very little to do with these things and took his allowance from my mother each week and left everything else to her. We moved to 817 East Magnolia Boulevard in Burbank above downtown on the slope up to the Verdugo Hills. We called it living in the hills and it was a wonderful neighborhood.
My mother stopped working and took care of us and the house. In 1954 we visited Missouri and saw her father and brothers and my father’s parents and relatives.
My mother smoked Herbert Tareyton cigarettes and called them Hoppies. She used Sen Sen to freshen her breath and shared the Sen Sen with us. I don’t remember my mother particularly drinking. If there was a party or some event it was common that my mother got drunk. She would come home apologetic, defensive and aggressive. She told us all how much she loved us, and we’d never know how much she loved us and how hard her life was. She’d grab us and hold on tight. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I didn’t want to be there.
After her conversion my mother was a devout Catholic. She sent us all to St. Robert Bellarmine Grammar School the local parish on our side of town.
My mother took care of all the money in the household and made sure we knew she had grown up in the Depression. She seemed to be particularly shaken by the recessions in the 1950s, though my father never lost his job our household standard of living went up and down with the aircraft industry and space effort. Around 1958, 1959 she went to work at the Disney commissary and brought us giveaways and stories from the Zorro Television series. My father apparently didn’t like her working and she quit that job after awhile.
I remember other than those rare episodes when she was drunk or in one of her self pity moods, which usually went together, I enjoyed being around my mother. When I became an adolescent she seemed to change. She was more aggressive toward me. I think she drank a little more and often had wine in the afternoon. She was very discouraging of any relationship with girls I might have. That seemed a major theme for her and my elder sister that I should be protected from the inclinations of the male sex, sent to an all boys school, protected from females.
After grammar school she enrolled me at St. Francis of Assisi High School an all boys school in La Canada. La Canada is a wealthy neighborhood in Los Angeles at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains between Pasadena and La Crescenta. My mother was very concerned that the boys who went there from rich homes shouldn’t know I didn’t have more clothes. I had to wear white shirts so they wouldn’t know how many I had. I’m not sure what that was all about. I had plenty of white shirts which I wore for four years of high school.
My mother served me my first glass of wine when I was 13 or 14. We drank wine together in the afternoon, initially just a small glass, but I could have as much as I wanted. It was a rough red wine she bought by the case of gallon jugs. My father drank red wine with his meals. My mother drank it during the day.
She found my cigarettes sometime around then. I started smoking when I was 14 after my freshman year. My sister Joan came home from college smoking and that summer I started. My mother had stopped smoking Tareytons and started smoking Salems before I was in high school. In my senior year I began smoking openly at home. I bummed Salems from her.
The whole time growing up my mother never belonged to any sort of organization, parents’ clubs, Cub Ccouts, card groups or anything else. I think it had a lot to do with her hearing. My mother couldn’t hear people in groups. The way she lived was largely shaped by her hearing problems.
During the 1950s my mother was referred to Doctor Howard House, an ear surgeon, who was pioneering surgical techniques to repair some types of hearing loss. My mother was operated on in 1952 and her hearing was partially restored. She had additional surgeries after that and while my mother was still hard of hearing it was not what my sisters remembered from before. She could hear one or two people in a conversation as long as we spoke clearly and one at a time. Of course, long before that she had learned to compensate for her hearing by dominating any conversation that she was part of. If she controlled the conversation, she could hear better. She still wasn’t good in a group and she avoided them.
At that time it seemed like my mother began to drink more. Whenever there was a party or some event she went to we would expect that she would get quite drunk and maudlin, how much she loved everybody and how no one appreciated her. When my eldest sister went off to the convent in 1959 my mother became particularly maudlin and protested how much she missed Ellen and how devastated she was by her loss. These episodes became more and more frequent.
When Ellen came home for visits, my mother clutched at her and tried to control her every moment and cried when she wasn’t there. At first Ellen would visit and stay in the convent but eventually she stayed at home on her visits where she was a virtual prisoner of my mother.
I graduated from high school in 1964 and my mother and I went to my graduation. I don’t know where my father was, probably working that Saturday. I went off to the seminary that summer. My mother seemed very pleased to have a future priest in addition to the nun she already had.
After six months I returned and got a job at the Phone Company and my mother was supportive. I lived at home. She still wasn’t fond of the girls I dated but that seemed to be normal.
In September, 1965 I went off to college. My mother paid many of my expenses the first year. I paid my tuition from my employment at the Phone Company and the next year she paid my tuition. I met my future wife, Cathy, in my second year at Loyola. My mother really disliked her. She only became tolerant of her after our first son was born.
When I returned to Los Angeles my mother helped out financially while I went to UCLA. She gave me odd jobs to do and paid me well. We struggled through the year on the GI Bill and those extra few dollars helped.
As I write this, I’m struck by how supportive my mother was and how until I was 14 or 15, I had thought of her as my best friend. There were moments when she was particularly hard to deal with, particularly her drunken tirades of despair and protests that no one appreciated her, but overall she was there when I needed her. My father was a distant figure.
When I had a family, my mother talked this wonderful support and love for her grandkids but she was destructive around my kids, feeding them candy and sugar treats, promising them things that she didn’t deliver and demanding that they visit but not really paying any attention to them when they were there. We had thought she might babysit the kids, but we left them with her once and it was a terrible experience for everyone. She complained about it for weeks afterwards and said we were taking advantage of her.
When I got sober my mother repeatedly tried to convince me to have just one beer with her. "One beer won’t hurt," she said. I couldn’t believe she was undermining what was obviously an improvement that I desperately needed. When we left home my mother began complaining of my father’s alcoholism, but never talked about her own. My sobriety starting in 1983 seemed to offend her. When my father got sober in 1991 she tried to convince my father that AA was stupid and he could still drink, he just needed to drink less. She wasn’t successful. He stopped going to meetings but he didn't drink again.
Sometime in the 60’s my mother and father had become very active alcoholics going from what was probably Stage II to Stage III alcoholics or even Stage IV1. They bought their vodka by the case. As alcoholism does, it got worse until my father’s recovery in 1991. My mother continued to drink until she died.
So what was it that made my father OK at the end, a loving and loved parent and my mother not? By the end of her life, I avoided my mother completely. I found her destructive, mean, and venomous. It wasn’t just the alcoholism. My father had been an alcoholic and even during his worst days, there were warm moments when he was sober.
My mother was an extraordinarily strong character. Her survival alone was a testament to that. And she had gone from extreme poverty in the 1920s to a middle class life in the 1950s where her children were able to go on to college. It was all through my mother’s efforts. My father contributed a paycheck and even that was at the urging and nagging of my mother. I don’t think my father would have been employed fulltime without her taking care of everything for him.
Somehow my mother was living a lie. There were so many lies we didn’t know what the truth was. The first lie that she never admitted was that Ellen was born in October when in fact she was born in August, only 6 months after my parents were married. She also made such a deal of how much she loved and was loved by my father, when it was obvious growing up that most of the time there was little love or respect between them at all. My father had as little to do with my mother as possible, was normally very sarcastic to her and the only time it seemed like he loved her, was if any of us were disrespectful to her and he would attack us viciously for it.
She never thought any of us loved her enough. I don’t think she liked the men in her life. When I began acting like a young man my mother attacked me and accused me of being like her father, someone I barely knew, that I didn’t appreciate her and no one got to treat her that way.
When I had my own family, she demanded that we come and visit and when we did she complained that we didn’t do it enough or she complained about my sisters and how seldom they visited. Holidays she demanded that we spend time with them, and my sister from Chicago went along with her and thought our duty was to make my parents holidays what they wanted. After a few years, we stopped going. There was no room for us and our family in the holiday and I felt my children had a right to a normal Christmas.
My mother certainly gave birth to me, but in the end, I didn’t want to have anything to do with her. In writing the facts of my mother’s life, it‘s hard to explain the animosity and coldness I felt toward her. It doesn’t seem fair or reasonable, but those of us who knew my mother knew that it was necessary to fight for your life when you were near my mother, to keep her at bay, to erect a wall against her. She had nearly destroyed my eldest sister and Ellen stayed as far away from her as she could. My youngest sister had left home at 18 and had nothing to do with my mother and father or any us until this day. She is still hiding from us.
My mother died alone. Maybe my sister was there. Maybe she wasn’t. If she was, it was only because she had to be. It was our mother, and mothers should be loved and respected. I mean no mother is perfect and you hear people complain about their mothers all the time but in the end, no matter how bad they were, they were our mothers, right?
My mother’s strength of character is something I hope I have inherited. I am a survivor. I’m persistent and I work hard. My children have strength of character and their children do as well. Maybe that’s my mother’s legacy. She gave our family backbone and some good math genes. We're all her beneficiaries. I’m sorry she didn’t know how to bend a little. I think her children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren have an ability to hear that she didn’t. I hope we have learned to listen and with our strong characters to bend a little.
1. Stage I alcoholism is when drinking is fun most of the time.
Stage II alcoholism is when drinking is fun but sometimes it’s a problem.
Stage III alcoholism is when drinking is a problem but sometimes it’s fun.
Stage IV alcoholism is when drinking is always a problem and it’s never fun. The alcoholic has to drink to survive.
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