Abandonment

Abandonment can be real. For example, someone can be abandoned for real as a child physically. However, the abandonment I'm talking about here is how a child may feel if the parents aren't ready to be parents and so they are sort of like half-parents instead of whole parents.

And for me, this was made worse by my mother's mother who had been abandoned by her husband the day their youngest child turned 18. He just walked out of the door and never looked back once. That youngest child was my mother. Since my mother was born in 1919 the year my grandfather abandoned my mother and her mother was 1937. Since the Great Depression was going on I think my grandfather simply couldn't function anymore and lost it and left.

So, since my grandmother never had worked a day in her life and hadn't gone beyond the 3rd grade because she was dyslexic (but never told me about it ever even though she raised me from birth to 21) she needed to be financially supported by my mother who had just graduated high school. Oh, I'm sure her older two sisters helped some too but I think both of them were married by then because people got married a lot by age 16 or 18 then in the 1930s still because there weren't as many opportunities for women yet then as there are now. Marriage was the primary haven of safety for women then and for thousands of years into the past. This is much less true today.

So, my mother as the traditional youngest daughter financially and emotionally supported her mother until my mother married my father in 1946 two years before I was born. So by then she was 27 years old when she married. My father promised to help her take care of her mother after that because he made a lot of money as a tradesman and always had since his father had trained he and his two brothers to be electricians during the Great Depression in my Granddad's Electrical Contracting Business that he had had since at the very least 1910 or so. My Granddad's father had been a captain in the Northern Army out of Kansas during the Civil War and had started a Drug store there in Kansas that was supplied by native American Medicine men who gathered herbs throughout the area to help heal folks in that area. He ran this drug store in Kansas until 1925 when he retired. My parents met in Seattle, Washington where both of them had spent part or most of their growing up years there.

So, the first part of my life (4 years) was spent there in the cloudy, foggy, snowy, and rainy Seattle. One friend of mine from California said that the year she spent there that there were exactly 7 days of sun the whole year. She counted them. This was also my experience during the 4 years I lived there as well. I don't remember much sunlight at all during that time. And when my parents gave me the lemon that I reached for at about 2 or 3 years old I ate the whole thing rind and all and was very happy. Boy, were they surprised. Citrus (oranges, lemons, and limes) are like liquid sunshine to a child that needs desperately vitamin C. So, they bought lemons for me to eat so I could be healthy and strong. Because I had already almost died of whooping cough around age 2.

So, my grandmother (Nana) who lived with us seemed most of the time to fill a room with feelings of "Abandonment" whenever she wasn't playing with me, teaching me to become a Scottish-English Gentleman here in America. To the point where when people asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would tell them, "I want to grow up and become a gentleman" (and I did). She used to go around sighing as if forcing herself to stay alive another moment another day. I think it was a real struggle for her to go on in that era without her husband to validate her existence. So, she dedicated herself to raising me much like a live in Nanny or babysitter or as the live in Grandmother that she was. For her, literally, "If life gives you lemons make lemon pie or lemonade". I guess I was the lemonade or lemon pie of her life. This worked sort of okay until I was going into junior high at about age 12. We had moved first to Vista and El Cajon near San Diego but then at 6 we had moved to Tujunga, and then to Glendale when I was 8 in 1956. I remember going to my cousins house in Glendale then and watching Disneyland with my cousin, a program on TV then when my parents went to church on Wednesday nights when I was 8. We watched it in Black and white as color didn't really get very good until about 1962 for TVs.


But back when I was little my parents really weren't ready to be parents (Is Anyone?) and so I felt the abandonment of my Nana(Grandma) from being abandoned by her husband of at least 30 years marriage or more and the parental confusion of my parents and I felt abandoned a lot as a little kid and wondered why I felt so alone in addition to being an only child? But it wasn't my fault. It was actually the fault of circumstances beyond my control and probably beyond the control of my parents and grandmother as well. No one was as (psychologically healthy) as people are today just after World War II and the Great Depression. People were happy just to be alive still and to still have food. But sometimes I wonder if we all have lost pragmatism and reality in the process of getting to 2011 (psychologically healthy) because without pragmatism (Sacrifice  for the survival of oneself and one's family and friends) we all suffer in the end. So, I worry about the people especially in the western world today who tend to live in fantasy a whole lot more than people who actually survived back when I grew up did. When I grew up there was the struggle of the pragmatism of everyday life and then there were books and movies and sometimes entertaining people who often died young from various causes. These were the actors, musicians and playwrights and various other kinds of people who entertain for a living. But the world was much much different than the world of today. There is really no useful comparison today to how it actually really was then. Everything culturally was completely different than now. It is like a different country entirely than it was in the late 1940s and early 1950s when you compare it to today.
Pragmatism   
The pragmatism word button above will take you to an article I wrote before this one. The two are related in content.