BTW (Before the War)

A few years ago, near the end of the semester in my Death and Dying class, the professor said something about how we are lucky because we haven’t lived through a war, as in having the war going on around us. I said that I felt I was still affected by a war. Having grown up with a mom who grew up during a war still affects me. My mother’s life has always been colored by “the war.” She was a child living near London during World War II. It ended when she was eight. I grew up listening to her stories, stories she had to tell, I suppose, because they were still vivid in her life.

One of my best memories of living in North Carolina, were this class was attended, was the night a bunch of friends were sitting around talking. Sophie, who is my age, grew up in England. We were talking about our parents and we started explaining how hard it is to get your parents to feel sorry for you when they grew up amid bombs and death.

“Mom, I don’t feel good. Can I stay home from school?”

“Stay home from school? You’re lucky you have a school. I used to have to get under my desk while the bombs fell, then get up, brush the plaster off the desk, and get back to work. You go to school and count your blessings.”

“Mom, I don’t like this. Is there something else I can eat?”

“You don’t like it? You’re lucky you have food. When I was your age, my mother would give me the coupons for the black market and I’d have to go haggle with old men and what ever I was able to get was what we shared for food that week. Now eat.”

It was fun having Sophie there because she understood. We laughed and laughed.

My Uncle Tom, who is my mother’s brother, sent me this picture. It’s my mother’s mother with, I assume, her four oldest kids.

I was surprised at my first reaction. I thought, “Oh, look. My grandmother, being a young mother, before the war.”

I noticed right away that the three oldest kids are looking right at the camera while my grandmother is trying to get the littlest one to look at the camera. I love the picture. You can see her not just as a mother, but doing the act of mothering.

But why did I instantly need to anchor the picture into a timeline of the war?

I always have a sense of impending doom. As a child, I just assumed that my war would come. Looking at history, few generations miss it. I figured everyone gets their war. As a child of the seventies, I always assume economic good times are just part of a cycle, only to be followed by economic bad times. I deal with that one by living under my means in good times so I’m ready for bad times. I find it surprising when people are surprised by bad economic fortune. What were they expecting? Always a boon? Hmm. Based on what?

This grandmother was the only grandparent alive when I was born. By then, she was living in Australia. I never met her before she died, but I do remember talking to her on the phone once. I was a young teenager I think. With no preparation, my parents woke me up in the middle of the night and said, “Your grandmother’s on the phone. Come talk to her.” I still remember her saying, “You sound so American.” I don’t remember much else of the conversation, but I don’t think I was old enough to figure out what to say.

When I was about 8 years old, she sent me a Koala bear and a silver cross. I loved that Koala bear. My dog chewed it up years later, and I remember sobbing. I was broken-hearted over the loss of that Koala bear. I still wear the cross every day.

I guess I think about the war because this woman was more than my grandmother. She was a person who had many elements to her, many I don’t even know. The fact that she was a women who survived a war and raised her children during a war that was raging around her strikes me as amazing. That I know of her.