My Other Mother

My mother was born in 1903 in Milwaukee. Her father was a German cooper and her mother was a Gypsy. A real Gypsy. Mother had had 3 sisters, all older, and was brought up Catholic. (She left the church when she was 15 because a priest wouldn't let her light a candle for her mother unless she paid for it. She challenged him about only rich people getting to heaven, turned and never went back to a Catholic church again.) They were poor, and as each sister married and moved out the house got less crowded. Her mother dropped on the street in 1910 and died on the spot. Nobody knows why she died. Nobody now knows where she is buried. A little girl was too much for her father, so she was sent to live with her oldest sister, married but childless. Her uncle abused her until she went out on her own at 14. The year was 1917. She got a job with the telephone company and moved in with another operator who became her life-long friend. She was an exotic beauty and soon was modeling for various photographers and artists. She was a flapper, a dancer and a general hell-raiser. She met her husband, my father, in 1921 and was married in 1925. The Roaring 20's. He was a hell-raiser too, so they raised hell together throughout the 20's and 30's and endured the Great Depression with a large group of close friends and a lot of bathtub gin. My father was a graduate electrical engineer and had steady work all through those tough years. She raised hell and had a ball. They tried for children, but she could not keep a pregnancy, so in 1937 they adopted my brother. That did it. Thank you Tom for me.
World War II came along and so did I. My father worked in D.C. during the war years (they had moved from Milwaukee to New York in the 30's) She stayed home coping with 2 boys, rationing and a old friend that desperately wanted her (and never getting her. He was an undertaker and she made my father promise that when she died "he" would never touch her body. I don't know if my father ever knew of the attempted betrayal by his friend).

After the war she spent the next 5 summers living in a surplus army tent at the end of a potato field hauling water a mile from the farm house at the end of the road, using a latrine and getting sprayed several time a summer with pesticide from a bi-plane crop duster. She got a tick bite and contracted what was diagnosed as tick fever, and was never the same again.
Enter my Other Mother.
She went down hill pretty fast after that. We moved into a new neighborhood in 1950 and she had an "nervous breakdown" shortly after that. She took loads of Valium when they came out, and got shock treatments several times in the early 50's. She suffered from a continuous string of physical problems, some "in her mind" to quote the family Doc., and some of an infirm body. She smoked like a chimney, lost weight, got emphysema and died in 1971 of heart failure.
I often wonder what life would have been like if my original mother had survived into my adolescence and adult life. She was such a risk-taker and hell-raiser there is no telling how the family would have been different. But she didn't. I miss them both and love them both for different reasons, and wish them well where ever they may be.