Everything normal is wrong

Life on Eagle Street was bewildering in many ways. Our Mom had her own way of viewing the world.  Under her watch, things that were normal and should not have been an issue became strange and questionable.

Take for instance, school and church:

Mom sent us youngest three kids to St Vincent's Catholic school for the full 8 years.  She told the Principal that we were Catholic even though were not.  She actually hated Catholicism, and this created a conflict for us kids.

In class, we were taught that a good Catholic must go to church every Sunday, but Mom wouldn't allow us to go to Mass.  Instead, she would select a random church and drop us off there to attend Sunday School.  We had to boldly go into some strange place and pretend we were members. Mom had grown up a Methodist, but for some mysterious reason, she never dumped us at a Methodist church. Sometimes it would be the Lutheran church, the denomination in which we were baptized.  Sometimes it was a Southern Baptist church.  The one that stuck was the Congregational Church.  We kids loved that one, but had to keep it a secret, because our school teachers told us that the only real church was Catholic and to go anywhere else was a waste of time and a sin. So from the time I was six years old, I felt like I was living a double life.

During the week, I went to Confession and Holy Communion and pretended I was Catholic. But on Sunday, I learned Bible stories and sang hymns in the Mission Hills First Congregational Church. I grew up feeling guilty that I was, in essence, cheating on the Catholic church.  And there was always that fear that one of my classmates would see me leaving the protestant church on Sunday and rat on me at school on Monday.

Normal family activities are wrong: 

There was a family of eight who lived in a two-story house on Eagle Street. They were Catholic and all the kids went to St Vincent's like we did. The whole family went to Mass together every Sunday, and then their dad would play ball out on Eagle Street with his kids. They had the parish priest over for dinner one Sunday each month. They had backyard barbecues, went on family ski trips, and on the weekends went horseback riding and sailing.  I wanted us to do some of those things too, and I asked mom why she and Dad never played with us or why we didn't go to church together, or go anywhere together for that matter. 

Mom's answer was full of cruel nonsense:  That family had a bunch of bad older kids that ran away from home because their parents beat them. Their mother was a nurse at Sharp Hospital, and working mothers were bad mothers. Their Dad was a secret Jew.  They were sucking up to the priests in order to keep his Jewish status under wraps. They were all going to get cancer from barbecue and being out in the sun.  So even though the family looked and acted pretty happy, they were a horrible family with many secrets and were not taking care of their kids, according to Mom. She did not like being compared to other families, and her way of dealing with questions was to demonize other people in order to make our weird family seem normal.

Certain Toys were bad:
Like every other little girl in the 60's, I wanted a Barbie Doll.  Everybody had at least one, and the girls who lived in the two-story house had dozens of them, along with hundreds of outfits. Every time I asked Mom for one for my birthday or Christmas, she would scoff at me and tell me that I couldn't have a Barbie Doll because "they give little girls bad ideas."  I often wondered what kind of bad ideas my neighborhood friends were getting from their dolls.  From what I could tell, you just dressed them over and over again.  Maybe the bad idea involved scissors, because eventually, all the dolls ended up getting their hair wrecked and cut. Ironically, she finally got me a Barbie when I was a teen and way past the Barbie stage.  I was expected to be grateful, so I smiled for the Christmas photo, but I was thinking: why now, when I don't want dolls anymore?  I realize now that Mom saw I was growing up, and she desparately wanted me to remain a little girl.

Even Marriage seemed Wrong:

My two oldest sisters, Patricia and Susan, left Eagle Street at very young ages and got married when they were still teenagers. When I was just a little kid, Mom told me that Patti's husband was so bad, Patti tried to gas herself and her two kids. She told me that Susan's husband smothered their baby son and then pretended to find him dead in the dresser drawer that he slept in.. Brother Tim, who was in the Air Force, married very young as well, and Mom hated his wife.  All she told me about Tim's wife is that she was a whore who had only one ear, and that Mom tried to stop the marriage by going to Tim's commanding officer.  She wasn't happy when Lynda got married either.

Mom had no respect for her kids if they dared to date someone, because that made them loose and immoral. She was even more upset with them if they started "living in sin" with their partner. She was really disgusted when Darwin moved in with Liz, and became livid when Darwin then dumped Liz to move in with Mary. But she seemed to equally disrespect her kids if they made things legal with a marriage certificate.  I grew up thinking that marriage was not something to plan for or to dream about.  It was just another bad thing that Mom would not approve of, and there would be nothing but grief in the aftermath.

Mom's weird way of looking at normal things was confusing for me.  My common sense told me that Mom's opinions were not mainstream thinking.  But it wasn't smart to question her too much.  To do so would get you slapped across the face.  So on Eagle Street, we needed to just let her talk, keep our opinions to ourselves, and leave home as soon as the opportunity arose. And that brings me to the saddest thing:

Growing up and Leaving home is wrong: 

Mom's ultimate nightmare was to be left by herself. She did not want her kids to ever leave the nest.  And because of her extreme need to keep the children under her control, she did not want us to develop relationships with anyone other than her.  There was no talk of going away to college.   She didn't even really care if we graduated from high school.  She wanted us to never grow up and depart Eagle Street.  So any normal activity that is expected of a young person on their way to independent adulthood was wrong.  This desperate attempt to keep us home and under her control backfired:  It propelled all of us to leave her as soon as we could.