Month: March 2024

Posted in Uncategorized

No one said it to my face.

Posted on by debthumanblog

No, grandma. They said it to my face.

Thirty years of my life is an elaborate, crude lie. The lie wasn’t for my benefit. It was for my mother’s benefit. I was born on the wrong side of the blanket. A bastard. That’s what New York State called me until 1993 when people like me were finally referred to as non-marital children.

My grandmother told everyone that my mother was indeed married but she wasn’t getting along with her husband so they weren’t living together. And you expected people to believe that? No one believed it. No one said it to her face.

They said it to my face.

When I found out the truth, my grandmother blamed the clerk at vital statistics and said he had no business telling me I was adopted. Really? Then how the hell would I ever have gotten a copy of my birth certificate? It wasn’t in Buffalo where it belonged. I was asked if I ever had a birth certificate and was it green. It was. Then my birth certificate is in Albany. What’s it doing there? You’re adopted. I felt as if someone smashed me into a brick wall. Every part of the front of me hurt. I remember thinking that even my toes hurt.

When I talked to The Drunk about being adopted, he said he knew he wasn’t my real father. I tried to tell him he was indeed my real father. He argued with me and insisted he wasn’t my real father. I wasn’t his real daughter. That’s why he gave my siblings an allowance but didn’t give me one until I begged for an allowance. That’s why cousins on The Drunk’s side of that family that I had grown up with wouldn’t invite me to their weddings although my siblings – his real children – were invited. I wasn’t real. That’s why a dress The Drunk’s sister had made for me as a confirmation gift was several sizes too big. I wasn’t real. I was too small. I was so much smaller than my cousin who was the same age although The Drunk’s sister insisted my cousin and I were the same size.

At an uncle’s funeral, one ill-mannered person walked up, announced she was Peggy (never did figure out who she was and where she fit into the over abundant Thumans), and asked if I were Donna’s daughter. By that time, I knew that question wasn’t driven by curiosity. That question really meant was I the bastard. At a funeral. I got asked that a funeral. It was the second funeral in two days and I wasn’t thinking all that fast. I said yes. She walked away. What I wish I had said was I’m someone who is incredibly glad I’m not related to you.

One day, a deputy followed me out of the courthouse and asked if I lived on North Forest Road. That wasn’t curiosity, either. He was asking if I was the bastard.

Another deputy wasn’t as smooth. He said he looked at the list, knew the defendant was represented by a Thuman, but he didn’t know which one. “That would be me.” Ha, ha. Got you. You didn’t get to find out an ugly truth.

Jim was golfing with the son of our bowling partners one day. Is Deb Donna’s daughter? Yes. I thought so. I knew she had a couple kids before she got married. That happened because the jerk’s mother couldn’t get the answer she was looking for when she asked if my father got married late in life.

I moved two time zones away to a place where there were no Thumans. There was no one who knew I was an embarrassing secret. It was a relief. For a while. Then I discovered there was a Thumann in Germany who was a nazi war criminal. The British hunted him down, tried him and hanged him. He’s from the same part of Germany the Thumans in The Drunk’s family are from. He’s distantly related to them. Fortunately, he’s not my relative. The Drunk was stationed in Germany during the occupation. He bragged about using a cow for target practice and for driving a jeep down “Jew Alley” to knock over all the tables and watch the Jews scatter. The Drunk and the nazi war criminal would have been great friends had they known each other.

And so I go through life signing a fake name, the name of a nazi war criminal, to the bottom of checks.

No one called my grandmother a liar. They called me one.

Posted in Depression, Emotions, Memories, PTSD, Unwanted Children

Depressed

Posted on by debthumanblog

That’s how I feel and it’s getting worse by the minute. I have two bad days a year: April 1 and June 24. April 1 was my youngest sister’s birthday. June 24 was the anniversary of her death. Melanoma killed her. She was 35.

I’ve been plagued by memories – none of them happy. My mother went into labor on a Sunday morning. When we got home from church, The Drunk told us we had a sister. My brother, a few months shy of 5, burst into tears. “You promised me a brother!” Way to go Drunk!

When I was 11 and Tina, my youngest sister, was 13 months old, she played with oven cleaner. My mother watcher her do it. After cleaning my sister off, she put the oven cleaner soaked sneakers back on my sister. My sister spent the next four hours crying. My mother spent the next four hours yelling, literally, at my sister telling her to stop crying. Eventually, Tina’s diaper needed changing. That’s when my mother noticed Tina had second and third degree chemical burns from the waist down. Off they went to the emergency room. Because they were Caucasian and had enough income to afford health insurance, no one at the hospital bothered to call child protective services.

Many years ago, the Olympic event featuring skiers doing tricks and turns was called hot dogging. Tina and her friends went skiing. It was a miserable day with freezing rain. Tina said the weather was so bad she did the last run with her eyes closed. When she got to the bottom of the hill, her friends asked her where she learned to do all that hot dogging. Tina responded that she didn’t know how to ski. That may sound like resilience, but it wasn’t. It was the legacy of child abuse. You didn’t ask for help in my house. You figured out how to do it yourself or face the wrath of two drunks.

When my sister had her first period. She didn’t tell anyone. She knew there was always an assortment of feminine hygiene products under the bathroom sink, so she grabbed a pad, pinned it in her pants, and went to school. That wasn’t resilience either. When I had my first period, I didn’t want to say anything to my mother because I was sure she would bitch at me. The next morning, there was more blood in my panties and I was stuck telling my mother. To my shock, she didn’t bitch at me.

The last week, I’ve had a cascade of miserable memories. Tina died in 1997. A friend saw the death notice and called to ask how I was. That’s when my friend discovered I had no idea my sister died. I didn’t even know she was ill. After I hung up the phone, I heard keening for the first time. It’s the most blood curdling sound you can imagine, and it came out of me.

My mother had decreed I wasn’t to know Tina was sick or that she had died. To tell me meant getting cut out of the will. My surviving sister, hereinafter The Fruitcake, told me the reason no one told me Tina was sick was because I’m a horrible person. I never asked my mother and The Drunk for money, I put myself through college, I put myself through law school, I’ve only been married once, and I’ve never had an abortion. Clearly I’m every mother’s worst nightmare.

The universe gave me revenge. My mother spent the last years of her life in a nursing home and there was nothing left for my greedy siblings to inherit. Even so, they refused to tell me our mother had died. I only knew because I got a notice from Legacy.com. I had to crash the funeral. My remaining siblings were shocked to see me.

All these years later, I still can’t get past April 1 without major depression. I’ll do something special for me tomorrow. I might take Brady and go on an adventure. I’m considering going to Mesilla (where Billy The Kid hung out) and doing some photography. I’d like to have lunch someplace, but I’m not sure where I want to go. I’d suggest going to Albuquerque, but there’s nothing much I want to do there and the Albuquerque Fiber Arts Fiesta is in two weeks. I don’t feel like making two major trips that close together.

Listening to Roger Daltry sing Behind Blue Eyes isn’t helping although it does explain how I feel. Sort of.

I hate my mother. I don’t apologize for that. She was a violent, drunken narcissist who had four kids she didn’t want and made very sure we knew she never wanted us.

Please make it stop hurting.

No one can make it stop hurting.

This is how it felt from my fourth birthday in 1956 until the day I got married in 1972. It never stopped hurting. It was never happy.

Posted in Judiasm

Where I come from. I think.

Posted on by debthumanblog

I’m reading Seamstresses of Auschwitz. It’s about women who stayed alive in Auschwitz by sewing garments for Nazi wives. This is a factual account; I can’t bring myself to read Holocaust fiction. I hold the accounts written by survivors to be sacred. The only exception was a fiction story a classmate wrote for a writing class I took. It was an incredible story and the classmate is an incredible writer. As we talked about the story in class, another classmate asked if Elie Wiesel’s Night was fiction. It’s his account of his time in Auschwitz.

Reading about the Holocaust makes me want to know more about where my family came from. According to citizenship papers, which I found in the basement of the Erie County Courthouse, my maternal grandmother’s maternal grandparents were from East Prussia. More digging and I learned they were from Dittersdorf, East Prussia. I’ve never been able to find Dittersdorf on a map. The name translates to small village. Although the family story was they were Lutherans and came from Germany and spoke Hoch Duetsch, the reality is far different. They spoke Yiddish. And who spoke Yiddish in East Prussia in 1888? Not German Lutherans. My grandmother and her siblings were taught to respect all religions but never do anything to make people think they were Jewish. My grandmother was horrified when she found out I ate a bagel in public. Years later, when I had a Jewish psychologist and explained I was brought up Catholic, he asked me who taught me to be Jewish. I certainly didn’t learn it from my mother. Must have picked up Jewish from my grandmother. She cleaned the house on Friday. No other day of the week would do. Cleaning could only be done on Friday. A Jewish custom is to clean on Friday so the house would be clean for Shabbat. We always had candles on the table for holiday dinners. Two candles and the candles were always lit. I now have the candlesticks my grandmother used for holidays. Jim’s family, who came from a region of Poland more or less near where my family came from, almost never had candles. When they did have candles, they weren’t lit. A Jewish custom is to have two candles on the table for Shabbat and other Jewish holidays.

My grandmother is one of six children. In birth order, Sydney, Benjamin, Esther, Harold, Alfreda, Naomi. My grandmother once said their names made them sound as if they were Jewish. My grandmother told me about how her grandmother had a huge wedding certificate hanging on the wall because that’s the way they did it in the old country. A Jewish marriage ceremony contains a ketuba, a marriage contract. Many are incredibly beautiful and are hung on the wall. My grandmother was English only so she had no idea if the marriage certificate was in German or Hebrew. My grandmother said it was okay for her mother to speak German because she was born in Germany. The family story was her mother was two when she arrived in New York. No, she was 10 months old when she arrived. Either way, where would she have learned to speak? Certainly not in Germany. Her siblings, all born in the United States, spoke German – or what my grandmother was told was German. They were speaking Yiddish. This was so the kids – my grandmother’s generation – wouldn’t know what the grown ups were talking about.

Oddly, when my grandmother’s maternal grandparents came to Buffalo, NY, they didn’t settle in the vast German neighborhood on the East Side. They settled in the Central Park neighborhood in North Buffalo. So many mysteries. So few clues. So many questions to which there aren’t any answers.

Who am I? A Jewish remnant of a family so terrified they hid their Jewishness from their children? A Jew who got it all wrong about the family history? I don’t know the answer.

Posted in Brady, Dyeing, Fiber, Judiasm

Happy Birthday Brady

Posted on by debthumanblog

Brady, the world’s cutest labradoodle, will be celebrating her third birthday on Tuesday.

Brady is learning to be my service dog, and we had a service dog group session yesterday. To celebrate her birthday, I made 20 hand-dyed dog bandanas. The humans for the four other dogs in the service dog group picked out bandanas for their dogs.

Rather than doing tie dye with string, I used binder clips to make a resist.

We’re having a critique in my painting class on Tuesday. I thought I was done with three self-portraits, but I saw a fourth in my head and it demanded to be painted.

The word on the yellow painting is the Hebrew word for life.

The words on the green painting are the Hebrew for “I am,” and “I will be.”

I still have no voice on campus, but I will not be silent.

Posted in Uncategorized

Is Éireannach mé

Posted on by debthumanblog

Today is Hibernian Heritage Day, popularly known as St. Patrick’s Day. Jews don’t have saints, so I celebrate Hibernian Heritage Day. There are a couple thousand Jews in Ireland none of whom are related to me.

I used to think St. Patrick’s Day was a great day if you were Irish, and just an excuse to get drunk if you weren’t. I grew up thinking I was German Catholic. Then, one day, knowing I’d learn The Truth if I got a copy of my birth certificate, I went to City Hall in Buffalo, NY and asked for a copy of my birth certificate. They could’t find it. Finally, I was asked if I ever had a birth certificate. Yes, and I lost it. I was asked if it was green. Yes. I was told my birth certificate was in Albany. Why would it be there if I was born in Buffalo? “You’re adopted.”

I felt as if someone had slammed me into a brick wall. I remember thinking that even my toes hurt. When I was able to move again, I walked the three blocks to the library, asked for microfilm of the Buffalo News from August and September 1952 and began searching. Eventually, I saw that a baby girl was born to Mr. & Mrs. Donald G. Harmon and lived at my grandmother’s address. My father wasn’t the drunk who terrorized me. My father was Donald Harmon whose middle name was Lee rather than anything starting with G. My mother made it up as she went along.

It took five months, but I found my father in Houston, Texas. He was Scott-Irish which explained why so many people asked me if I were Irish.

After I learned my father’s heritage, I celebrated my first St. Patrick’s Day as a Hibernian. It was wonderful. I was right. St. Patrick’s Day is a wonderful day if you are Irish. I ate corned beef and cabbage and washed it down with a plastic cup filled with Guinness.

Eventually, I worked on a family history and discovered my maternal grandmother’s family weren’t German Lutherans. (My mother had married a Catholic so I ended up Catholic for a while.) They were from Dittersdorf, East Prussia. On his citizenship papers, her grandfather renounced loyalty to the king of Prussia. My grandmother told mer her grandmother spoke Hoch Duetsch. She would tell me what her grandmother would say and announce it was Hoch Duetsch. Five semesters of German in college taught me that what my grandmother said was absolutely not Hoch Duetsch. Eventually, I discovered it was Yiddish. Who spoke Yiddish in East Prussia in 1888? Not German Lutherans. I am a Polish Jew on my mother’s side. I am a Jew by both heritage and choice. For several years, I had a Jewish psychologist. He asked me who taught me to be Jewish and I asked him what he was talking about. Turns out, my grandmother, who insisted she was Lutheran, taught me how to be Jewish.

Celebrating Hibernian Heritage Day in southern New Mexico is difficult. No one serves corned beef and cabbage although I probably could find some bar that serves green beer if that sort of thing appealed to me. There’s no parade. Mercifully, there are no green bagels. Sadly, there are no decent bagels. I may make Irish scones later today. I have no Guinness or Harp so no beer today.

Is Éireannach mé. It means I’m Irish.