May the Circle Be Unbroken, Chapter 2

I love him and damn her, anyway. I will have him, come what may.

May the Circle Be Unbroken, Chapter 1

I laid awake listening to the sound of the rain on the tin roof, willing the rain and the night to never stop. For I knew that when the morning came, I would have to rise and go about the business of livin' in a world which no longer included my Mama's lovin' presence. I would have to keep on keepin' on and I just didn't know where or how I was going to find the strength to do so. My Mama had been a Godly woman, but had caught the sickness, anyway. It had gone to her chest and like an unwanted house guest, had stayed there, wearing out its welcome out until late in the night. I sang church hymns to her and laid cold, damp cloths on her feverish, too hot to the touch forehead, assuring her that we would go for a walk together along the heavily ferned gully of our pebble-bottomed creek, letting the clear water cool our feet and feeling that soft moss between our toes. "Jus' you wait and see, Mama. The summer is goin' be fine."

Mama didn't make it til Summer. She died on a sunny Wednesday morning, in May of the year 1931, a few weeks before my tenth birthday. I wasn't the oldest daughter in my family. Vida was the oldest. So, how come it all fell on me? How come she didn't pull her weight? She just laid up in the bed with her magazines a dreamin' of someplace out west called Hollywood that I didn't think sounded so great, anyway.

Charles was the only boy and there were plenty of folks comin' out of the woodwork to offer him a place on their farm. He was snapped right up and poor Daddy and us girls were left to fend for ourselves. Daddy was a proud man and it had laid him low to lose his dear Hattie. He was a war hero and I could still scare off those raggedy Walker boys from up the way with his old gas mask if  I needed to. Those damn Germans had gotten their revenge on my Daddy and many of the rest of the men of the Rainbow Division, the 42nd. They had been gassed in the Argonne Forest of Northeastern France, and he had lost a lung, while over one hundred thousand of his comrades in arms lost their privilege to breathe again, at all, ever. Seeing as how my Daddy had been one of the chosen few to survive the battle where more Americans lost their lives than in any single battle in American history, I was not about to look a gift horse in the mouth. He had come on home and he could still work like a mule, one-lunged, and all.

I loved school and was a good student. Miss Winters praised my well-practiced cursive handwriting in particular. I knew what a luxury it was to be able to go to school and continued making the long walks to the little one room school house in our town, Rose Hill, as long as I could. I would drag my little sister Lea along with me in the early mornings whether she wanted to go that day or not.

But, one pretty spring day when I was 14, I walked past one of Daddy's tobacco fields on the way home from school. Daddy was leaning against the wooden fence, gulping for breath and soaked to the skin in his own sweat. Our horses, Pet and Polly, had made their way to a grassy patch and were chewing happily and the plough lay idly to its side behind them. "Daddy, are you OK?" 

Musings of a former public school teacher

While I was still a teacher, I took great comfort in what a noble, self-sacrificing and necessary profession I was engaged in, telling myself that the kids made it all worth it. I do miss many of the kids and there really were surprisingly wonderful moments with many of the students. But, and this is a big but, the raging teenage hormones, the apathy and disillusionment of the almost surly student body, the scary group dynamics and peer pressure that expose the darkest sides of human nature (Yes, Lord of the Flies is completely realistic and I often thought to myself that watching the group dynamics made me understand better why the holocaust was able to occur.), witnessing the numbness to it all which your colleagues have already developed and which you find yourself being forced to develop in order to survive emotionally in a negative and stressful daily environment, your role as a task master and doler out of punishments, the realization that you have more in common with a drill sergeant than an educator and then add the lousy pay, the constant criticism from the school administration, many of your colleagues (Who you would think would band together in a stressful, mine ridden environment, but mostly do not.) and many of the parents to the mix, the toll it takes on your body and your immune system cannot be ignored. Now that the constant ringing in my ears has stopped, I regret to report that for me it just really wasn’t worth it.

I have met many intelligent, interesting former teachers and the ones I have met, don’t seem to miss it. It is also no coincidence that many writers, musicians, actors, inventors and politicians are or were former teachers who found ways out of the profession. Charlotte Brontë, Sir William Golding (author of Lord of the Flies), Sting, J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown, Steven King, Sheryl Crow, Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert Frost, John Adams, Art Garfunkel, and Mr. T (Now, that is physical body I would have wanted to inhabit as a teacher, as children, not unlike dogs, listen to men more than to women.), Alexander Graham Bell, Roberta Flack, Andy Griffith, etc., etc.

You can begin to hate teaching so much that you surprise yourself with sudden bursts of creativity and motivation stemming from the very real need to get the hell out of Dodge. It should come as no surprise to me that my favorite author, Charlotte Brontë, loathed being a teacher/governess and my favorite book, Jane Eyre, upon closer inspection was her fictional escape from her dull, tedious daily life as a governess for a wealthy family. Hmmm… Rich nobleman falls in love with his poor as a church mouse governess who has to leave him to earn a living as a village school teacher because she discovers he already has a crazy, violent wife imprisoned in the attic. But ,due to a fire crazy wife dies, he is conveniently enough blinded and in need of Jane’s constant care, ergo, she gets to quit her job as a teacher, marry him and have a baby! The older I get, the more reasons I seem to find as to why Jane Eyre is my favorite book of all time. I bet Charlotte Brontë’s biological clock was ticking as loudly as mine when she wrote Jane Eyre at the age of 31. By 19th century standards she was well past being considered an old maid when she wrote Jane Eyre. She finally married at the age of 37 and sadly enough her writing career and life were cut tragically short when she died due to pregnancy complications at the age of 38 in 1855 . For those times, she was dangerously old to be having a baby. I wonder if she had similar thoughts to my own. Often as a teacher, I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t I rather have my own child to raise and educate as I see fit, instead of giving all of my life’s blood to the children of other people who never agree with how I am educating their children, anyway?” and “Wouldn’t I rather give my time and energy to a child or children whom I would love and who would love me?”

In short, as a public school teacher in Germany, I found myself turning into a person I really didn’t want to be. I didn’t recognize myself anymore and I had little or no energy left for my boyfriend, my family and friends (the people who really matter in my life and keep me going). Now, if I could only start writing a bestseller on the back of a pub napkin like J.K. Rowling or write a famous song about my experiences as a teacher, like Sting or, of course, penning a breakthrough novel for women’s literature like Charlotte Brontë wouldn’t be half bad either.

Things about being a woman and over 35 which no one warns you about

1) You still owe on your student loan and the interest is mounting!

2) Sadly enough, a toothbrush will stay put of its own accord under one of your breasts.

3) The irrational, sometimes frantic pressure and fear that you will never be able to have a biological child of your own, compounded by the realization that you are not affluent enough to go on an extended holiday to a Danish sperm bank clinic like half of the British female population over 35, as you read recently in the Daily Mail, or to go to Africa and pay thousands to adopt a baby there like a least 8 American women you saw with their adopted babies on your recent flight from London to the US. This is made all the worse by the fact that you are living in Germany, a country with one of the lowest birthrates in the world, in which there are commercials extolling the wonders of parenthood funded by the German government before the trailers when you go to see a movie, and in which more people own dogs than have children, not to mention the fact that you have a German boyfriend and you have learned the hard way that German men avoid having children like the plague due to the very pro child and mother family law on the books in Germany.

4) You realize from your paragraph long description of the above that you have truly lost all perspective and any sense of rationality when it comes to the baby question.

5) Short term memory loss is really becoming an issue. What am I writing this list about again?

Reasons why living in Europe really isn’t as glamorous as it sounds to your friends back home in the States

1) There are days when you can’t remember when exactly the last time was that you took a shower.

2) Come to think of it, the last time you had a decent shower (In my mind, this is a long, hot shower with decent water pressure during which you aren’t afraid that your German boyfriend or some other German friend will knock on the door to announce that you are wastefully using too much water and didn’t you know that one of the main challenges of the 21st century is a global shortage of water and don’t you feel like a water hog, and besides there is the water bill to consider!) was when you were visiting your family in the States for Christmas last year.

3) Even if you have a car and manage to pass the ridiculously difficult and trick question loaded German driver’s license exam, you rarely drive your car and have to walk a half an hour just to get to it because parking is so hard to find and paying the equivalent of 100 US dollars to fill up the tank of your tiny car does physically pain you at times.

4) You have come to accept that your clothes will always be wrinkled because you don’t have a dryer (No self-respecting European is energy hog enough to own a dryer.), hate to iron, and refuse to turn into an old style German housewife who irons underwear and jeans!

5) You have insurance on everything you take with you everyday because you can’t seem to use public transportation or public restrooms without being pick pocketed by some random teenager.

She knew how to protect you on the bad days

She wished she could write like Hemingway or at least create an instant children’s literature classic on the back of a pub napkin like J.K. Rowling. Depression seemed like such a, yes, depressing topic. Who would want to read about that? Writing about her struggles with depression also felt like beating a dead horse instead of getting back on him after a fall. She was now in that oh so fun stage of recovering from her last bout of depression in which she said to yourself, “Oh, shit, what have I done? My entire life has fallen apart before my eyes and the worst part is that I couldn’t make myself give a rat’s ass at the time”. She supposed she should have written a Facebook status which read, “Virginia is depressed yet again, check back in 2 months.” Of course, that would have only been possible if she had not been in her inability to answer the phone, check her e-mail or go on-line phase at the time. She knew this all sounded like the biggest cop out and or load of bullshit in the world. She really did wish she were just lazy or making this all up, just your average, everyday drama queen. Unfortunately, she was not exaggerating and she knew what it is to be lying on the bathroom floor, the door locked, going through her list of reasons why killing herself is just not acceptable.

Reason # 1 My mother loves me and it would hurt her too much.

Reason #2 I know it feels sometimes like my sisters really wouldn’t miss me that much, but it would probably psychologically scar them and I love them.

Reason # 3 It would hurt my friends and extended family who love me.

Reason #4 Given the state of health care in modern America, if I failed, I would never be able to pay off the medical bills.

Reason #5 Somewhere deep down inside I really do believe that taking the life that God granted me would be a sin and would take my soul to a very dark place indeed.

It spoke volumes that her father did not appear on her list. 

Every psychologist she had ever been to, and there had been more than a few, attributed her depression to her father and the very broken, unhealthy way he was able to relate, if you can call it that, to her as a child. That, and the fact that she was like some sort of genetic dumping ground for her father’s old Southern, and yes that usually means cuckoo for cocoa puffs, family. Her ancestors were depressed before there was a name for it. They were a mix of the violent, depressed, paranoid Southern elite who started the Civil War or the War Between the States or the War of Northern Aggression and the violent, depressed, paranoid, poor Southern redneck farmers who actually had to wring the life out of the enemy somewhere in the mud.

Her grandmother, or Nan, as she told all of her grandchildren to call her, told her once as a child that her great grandmother, or Mama T, as she was universally referred to by her family,  would use the excuse that she couldn’t go outside while the sun was shining because it would ruin her treasured lily white complexion. She supposed that her great, great, grandmother had always retired to her room with the vapors for 2 months at a time when she was afflicted with the sickness. Virginia knew that a family with such a long history of mental illness could only have defied Darwin's law of survival of the fittest for so long because they had other people, namely African slaves and their descendants, doing their work for them generation after generation.

She remembered walking over to Mama T”s house from Nan’s on a warm summer morning because she longed to hear another of Mama T’s fascinating stories about the days before cars and airplanes. That morning Mama T  sent her away by yelling through the screen door of her back porch that she just couldn’t see anyone that day, that she was having one of her bad days. Virginia was so bewildered and saddened at that moment. She was barefoot as Nan would announce that she was too tenderfooted when her parents would bring her to Nan’s house in Virginia every summer. She always prescribed a summer of barefooted, outside adventures as the cure for whatever ailed her. It must have been near the beginning of summer because her  feet were still sore from walking over the small white stones, which made up Mama T’s gravel driveway. By the end of summer, her feet were toughened up and she could go where she pleased. It was already so hot and humid that walking outside felt like walking through pea soup and an ulterior motive for going to Mama T’s was that she would always slice her up some cold honey dew melon from her fridge. She remembered seeing Mama T’s shadow through the screen door and the pain, urgency and embarrassment in her voice as she had to plead with her great grandchild to leave her in peace that day. The innocent sting of rejection she felt as a child helps to remind her of how her depression makes her loved ones feel sometimes. The unanswered text message or call, having to leave a message yet again, the radio silence for months on end…

She wished she could explain to them what it felt like when the blackness descended upon her and how hard she tried to resist it, to release herself from its hold on her, its seducing oblivion, sometimes successfully, but more than she would like, not.

Nan always protected Mama T when the blackness descended. When Virginia arrived in her kitchen, dejected and pouty after her walk to Mama T’s that day, explaining that Mama T had sent her away, Nan took her in her arms and explained, “Lord, Ginny, Mama T’s just having one of her bad days. You and me are going to go over there tomorrow and get us some of that cold honey dew,”  Nan was the daughter of a poor, hillbilly tobacco farmer from the mountains of Virginia and Mama T was descended from old French Huguenaut Southern elites in Charleston, South Carolina, the Fayssouxs. Her great, great grandfather had been Dr. Peter Fayssoux, a physician and wealthy rice plantation owner, who had been the Surgeon General for South Carolina during the American Revolution. She had married well beneath her for love, running away with a dashing and much older railroad man in a fit of passion at the tender age of 15. Nan's family was even further beneath Mama T's origins; and Nan had been so surprised that Mama T accepted her so wholeheartedly into the family when she married Virginia’s grandfather, that she became fiercely loyal to her mother-in-law. They remained bonded and quite the informidable duo until Mama T’s death at age 94. The male members of the family didn’t stand a chance against their combined forces. You were almost always going to do as they wished, you just didn’t know it yet.

On a good day Mama T was confident and refined, with a high class Scarlett O’Hara type Southern accent in which she dropped all of her r’s. She had a biting, sarcasitic sense of humor, was highly intelligent, and had long since mastered the fine art of manipulation to get what she wanted. Nan, in contrast, was about as subtle as a blow to the head, possessed a profound kind of common sense, was physically strong, emotionally generous, determined, stubborn, and visceral. She spoke with a lower class heavily “r”ed mountain twang, and was never depressed a day in her life. She possessed the strength to turn Mama T’s ideas and desires into realities, and Mama T loved her for it. Nan protected Mama T from the outside world, just as she protected me and made me feel so very loved as a child. Nan knew how to protect you on the bad days.