Parents: YMMV

 

 

Dad holding me at an early age

This month we’re talking about parents...As we saw them growing up and how we’ve seen them in our work and that of others. Is this a challenge, or an opportunity? How about being similar to handing an unstable person a live hand grenade?

I grew up on a Maine poultry farm with two younger sisters. We roamed freely on our 187 acre farm, spending a lot of time swimming in Sennebec Lake. We had chores from an early age and mine included weeding the vegetable garden and cleaning/grading eggs in out musty dirt floor cellar.

There were a lot of mysterious emotional undercurrents swirling around Sennebec Hill Farm as I was growing up. For a time church (the Methodist, not the Nazarene)was mandatory every Sunday until a new minister angered my mother for reasons I can’t remember. All of a sudden, I no longer had to go and I was far from heartbroken. I learned early on the there was friction, not only between my parents, but between them and my grandparents, but little, if anything was said when we kids could hear.

I realized early on after starting school that I didn’t fit in, but wasn’t able to figure out or articulate why. I liked to isolate either out in the woods, or in my bedroom with a book. Meanwhile, sisters Kate and Sara were in 4-H and other groups. I lasted one meeting as a boy scout.

My father was gay, something I and my sisters didn’t learn until we were adults. He and Mom were also alcoholics. Mom got sober, Dad died indirectly from the disease. When Mom realized that there was no way in hell Dad’s income from raising laying hens would help put three kids through college, she went back to the University of Maine and finished her teaching degree. In order for her to do so, she rented a room in Orono where the university was located and only came home on weekends. She sat the three of us down and said in effect, that since Dad had to take care of 15,000 chickens, we needed to run the household. We quickly learned to cook, do dishes, laundry, and how to iron. It seemed terribly unfair at the time, but in hindsight helped all three of us become more independent at an early age.

Once she got her degree, she taught middle school language arts at the Thomaston Middle School until she retired. Mom also realized her ambition as a writer, first doing freelance articles for Farm Journal and similar magazines. Those led to her becoming a weekly columnist for the Camden Herald. Over a twenty-five year period, she served as their gardening expert as well as writing a column about life on Sennebec Hill Farm that was called From The Orange Mailbox. A collection of those columns was published in book format and won two national awards.

 My parents with Sara, my daughter and their first grandchild

Meanwhile, the chicken business went to hell and we ended up over a hundred thousand dollars in debt to the Farmers Home Administration, this in the mid 1960s when that was probably equivalent to three times that amount today. Dad’s initial reaction was to buy an organ on credit and sit at home for weeks, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and playing that damned organ while my sisters and I quietly freaked out, some nights not sleeping for fear we’d wake up and find out we’d soon be homeless.

Eventually Dad went to work at a fancy mail order greenhouse, then as a psychiatric aide at the Veterans Hospital here in Maine on the 3-11 shift.

One true gift Mom gave me was her willingness to stand up for herself, more so after she got sober in 1979. When the phone company refused to allow her to have her own name listed in the directory because such listings were only for old maids, not married women, she took her grievance to the Maine Public Utilities Commission. Surrounded by a cadre of other outraged women, she won her case. She later shamed the local blacksmith who was rude and misogynistic, at town meeting. His revenge, painting her mailbox lobster buoy orange, backfired as it became her trademark, recognized world wide. Her actions made me not only a supporter of women’s rights, but has affected how I write strong female characters and male characters who respect them.

Mom went on to publish a mystery, The Corpse In The Compost in addition to From The Orange Mailbox. After having a major stroke while in the process of writing another mystery, Mom worked her tail off to recover enough to return and live independently on Sennebec Hill Farm until another stroke ended her life. My sister, Kate Flora, worked diligently to complete and get The Maine Mulch Murder in honor of our mother.

While Dad and I had an extremely adversarial relationship for much of his life, He did teach me to hunt and fish, often letting me accompany him when he did so. Oddly enough, I ended up doing much of the hospice care when he was dying of pancreatic cancer and the experience allowed us to experience a valuable healing process.

How did my experiences like those I’ve share with you guide my writing of parents in books and stories? Firstly, I’ve incorporated many of my growing up experiences in my work, not only shaping my younger protagonists, but their parents. Those experiences have also served as benchmarks when I read and review young adult fiction. Parents are seldom perfect, often pulled in directions by work, political circumstances, job stresses, or lasting effects of their own childhood.

It’s amazing that anyone survivors childhood, particularly in recent times. Hope you get something out of this lengthy piece.

 

 The famous Orange mailbox.