Standing Tall

Every now and again, I hear a phrase that catches my attention. This time, it's "survivor sit-ups," a phrase used by an author who has written a book entitled I Will Not Be Broken. When I caught snatches of his conversation with the TV personality, it brought back two times in my life when people took it upon themselves either to break me for their own purposes, or to convince others that I was already broken--and needed to be fixed. However, it also reminded me of my parent's strength to overcome lives that could charitably be termed dysfunctional.

My father was a man who was not broken by his harsh family life prior to his marriage to my mother. My father's mother, for whom I am named, died when he was 3 years of age. His father, perhaps wanting a fresh start, relocated from the east coast to the west coast, bringing his young children with him. He met and then married the daughter of a prominent family in the community, and started a second family with her.

At that time, the phrase "evil stepmother" wasn't commonly used, but that's what she was. She locked my father out of the house every morning at 7 am and allowed him to return at 7 pm for dinner and bed. Her days were spent caring for her own children, and she let it be known that my father was not, and never would be, her child. He was the baggage that came with her new marriage, baggage she wasn't going to carry.

My father survived, met and married his own woman, fathered 6 children, all of whom carry his name, the same name his father gave to the woman he married after his first wife died. My father stood tall and strong until his life was cut short at age 50 by leukemia, a disease which, at that time, was little known. Not once during his brief illness did anyone from my father's family contact him or my mother to express concern or, after his death, condolences. The step-mother did, however, confront my mother, now a young widow with 6 children, as she walked down the main street in town, and convinced her that my father had taken out a personal loan with her, for which there was no paperwork, and she demanded that it be paid in full -- NOW!

My mother had no personal resources, no financial resources, no employment. The insurance provided my mother with a total of $5,000, every penny of which she needed to keep her house, as well as her family, intact. It was not inconceivable that we would all end up living on the streets because we had nothing to prevent that from happening except the insurance money, and it wasn't going to stretch very far. The step-grandmother trash-talked my mother to other people in town, as well as to her family, insisting that my mother was living high on the hog on my father's insurance, while refusing to repay a personal loan. With everything else my mother had to handle, she simply did not need the added burden of the defamation of her character, as well as my father's name.

My mother did eventually pay back the "loan," but the hardship created by that demand is long-lived.

When my step-grandmother died at age 102, there was much bally-hoo in the local media about her, her life, and the unselfish giving that marked her later life as a pillar of the local church. You would have thought her a saint, but I knew better! My mind recalled the vengeance with which she hounded my mother to repay a loan that, perhaps, never existed. A Christian woman would have realized how desperate my mother's situation was and forgiven the loan in love and charity.

The final insult was that my father, who carried the last name his step-mother died with, was not mentioned in the lengthy obituary; however, her children, and their children and their grandchildren, were extensively chronicled.

Life's adversity strengthens us or it destroys us. In my life, I was taught "survivor sit-ups," to work through and then move beyond the tests of our endurance. My father never accepted the word "can't" as his focus was in the power of "can." I have been able to accomplish that which I doubted I could because I have the strength of my convictions, as well as the determination to be better than what has been done to me by others, a lesson I learned from my father's death and my mother's survival.

My father was reunited with his mother and his father after his death; I'm sure that when his step-mother arrived, he came to the Gates to greet her, too. She would have looked at him, bewildered, and asked, "Do I know you?" because that's the woman she was. Knowing my father, he would have introduced himself because that's the man he was.