Secrets of the Asylum: Norwich State Hospital and My Family

By Julianne Mangin

Retired librarian Julianne Mangin was a reluctant genealogist -- at first. But after acquiring her ailing mother's genealogy files, something drew her into the family history. Maybe it was years of listening to her mother's cryptic stories of her childhood which featured a delicatessen, a state hospital, a county home for neglected children, and a father who disappeared. Even though Grandpa divorced her mother and never got her out of the county home, Mangin's mother defended her father's absence and called him a wonderful father.
At first, all Mangin meant to do was organize her mother's files so that they could be stored more compactly. But it wasn't long before she began noticing errors, omissions, and discrepancies in her mother's research that cast doubt on the family stories. Thus began her transformation from reluctant genealogist to relentless family historian. She acquired her grandmother's patient record from Norwich State Hospital and the secrets just spilled out. There were four other women in her mother's family who were patients at state hospitals, three of them at Norwich State Hospital. And there was evidence that Grandpa might not be her mother's father.
Reading the transcripts of her grandmother's interviews with hospital staff, Mangin unearthed a dark secret at the heart of her mother's childhood. Through her research, Mangin uncovered her French Canadian heritage and delved into the history of the care of the mentally ill in the early 20th century. She learned how poverty and mental illness loomed over the family's fortunes.
Using patient records, genealogical methods, and DNA testing, Mangin has pieced together a family story that reads like a Dickens novel Weaving in what she learned about intergenerational trauma and the consequences of family secrets, Mangin has created a testament to the power of family history to empower people and heal old wounds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350909982

Book preview

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© 2023 Julianne Mangin

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact the author at juliannemangin.com.

Front cover: Postcard, Norwich State Hospital, Administration Building, ca. 1930-1945.Bonneau family home and shed, Danielson, Connecticut, 2014. Photo by Julianne Mangin.

Back cover: Julianne Mangin in St. James Cemetery, Danielson, Connecticut, 2013.

Photo by Robert Cantor.

ISBN: 979-8-35090-997-5 eBook 979-8-35090-998-2

To Mom and Grandma, whose stories deserved to be told;

and to Bob, who gave me the love and support I needed to tell them.

. . every secret is like a member of the family, reflecting familiar patterns handed down generation after generation, while simultaneously embodying its own unique soul.

The anxiety bound up in guarding a secret spills over onto those who do not know.

Evan Imber-Black, The Secret Life of Families.

Contents

Introduction

Part One

Chapter 1

Mom’s Stories

Chapter 2

Life with Mom

Chapter 3

The Reluctant Genealogist

Chapter 4

The Family Historian

Chapter 5

Secrets of the Asylum

Part Two

Chapter 6

The Story of the Shed

Chapter 7

Emigration from Quebec

Chapter 8

Philippe and Graziella

Chapter 9

The Metthe Children

Chapter 10

Moving into the Shed

Chapter 11

Graziella’s Descent in Mental Illness

Chapter 12

Norwich State Hospital I

Chapter 13

Graziella’s Admission to Norwich State Hospital

Chapter 14

The Toll of Research

Chapter 15

Graziella’s life in Norwich State Hospital

Chapter 16

What To Do About the Children?

Chapter 17

Why Graziella Lost Her Teeth

Chapter 18

Philippe, the Prodigal Father I

Chapter 19

Graziella’s Condition Seems Hopeless

Chapter 20

Norwich State Hospital II

Chapter 21

Graziella: Disheveled in Appearance, Silly in Manner and Very Mischievous

Chapter 22

Graziella’s Decline

Chapter 23

Azilda Bonneau

Chapter 24

Philippe, the Prodigal Father II

Chapter 25

Beatrice Grows Up

Chapter 26

Frank’s Story

Chapter 27

Beatrice & Frank

Chapter 28

Blanche and Napoleon

Chapter 29

Rose Bonneau’s Story

Chapter 30

Norwich State Hospital III

Chapter 31

Rose Bonneau at Norwich State Hospital

Chapter 32

Life at the Delicatessen, According to Mom

Chapter 33

Life at the Delicatessen, According to Beatrice

Chapter 34

Pauline Metthe’s Story

Chapter 35

Norwich State Hospital IV

Chapter 36

Pauline Metthe at Norwich State Hospital

Chapter 37

Finding Cousin Rita

Chapter 38

Failure of the Delicatessen

Chapter 39

Life After the Delicatessen

Chapter 40

Beatrice’s Descent into Mental Illness

Chapter 41

Mom is Taken Away

Chapter 42

Beatrice’s Admission to Norwich State Hospital

Chapter 43

Beatrice Goes on Parole

Chapter 44

Philippe, the Prodigal Father III

Chapter 45

Beatrice’s Mental Illness

Chapter 46

Sickly Pauline

Chapter 47

Where Frank Went

Chapter 48

Pauline’s Education

Chapter 49

Norwich State Hospital V

Chapter 50

Beatrice Makes the Best of It

Chapter 51

Dinorah’s Story

Chapter 52

World War II and State Hospital Conditions

Chapter 53

Pauline Goes to College

Chapter 54

Beatrice’s Second Parole

Chapter 55

Pauline Gets Help Getting through College

Chapter 56

Pauline Searches for Her Father I

Chapter 57

Beatrice & Frank Divorce

Chapter 58

Mom Goes to Washington

Chapter 59

Dad Goes to Washington; Meets Mom

Chapter 60

Mom Searches for Her Father II

Chapter 61

Mom and Dad Move to Wheaton

Chapter 62

My Life as a Child in Wheaton

Chapter 63

Grandma Retires from Norwich State Hospital

Chapter 64

Not Your Archetypal Grandmother

Chapter 65

Grandma’s Decline

Chapter 66

Grandpa Moves to Wheaton

Chapter 67

Grandpa’s Decline

Chapter 68

Mom’s Response to Grandpa’s Death

Part Three

Chapter 69

Life Goes On

Chapter 70

What I Know

Chapter 71

What Did Mom Know?

Chapter 72

Family Secrets

Chapter 73

The Intergenerational Self

Chapter 74

Inherited Family Trauma

Chapter 75

What is a Family?

Chapter 76

Mom and I

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Sources Consulted

Index

Introduction

The family secrets were always there, waiting to be found, in the records of the asylum. As I pored through the notes taken by doctors and social workers during Grandma’s commitment to the state hospital, they revealed more about our family history than Mom – who passed away in 2017 – had ever told me. For decades, she had worked on the family’s genealogy, yet nothing in Mom’s research changed her version of what had happened when her mother went into the mental hospital, when she was put into the county home, and her father went who-knew-where. Throughout those years, it never occurred to her to seek her own mother’s psychiatric records. Perhaps she was afraid of what she might find. Perhaps she already knew.

Frustrated by Mom’s cryptic stories and her unwillingness to answer questions beyond the sketchy details she gave, I finally launched my own investigation into our family history. After retiring from the Library of Congress in my mid-fifties, I requested Grandma’s patient record from the state hospital. I was surprised to learn that there were three other women in my ancestry who had been patients there – Grandma’s mother, her aunt, and her sister. Using the clues I found in two generations of patient records, I set out on a journey that took me to the places where the story played out: the rickety shed where Grandma lived as a child, the delicatessen where Mom spent her early childhood and where Grandma’s mind began to unravel, and the institutions where both of them were committed at the height of the family crisis. I became the kind of genealogist Mom had never been, turning up facts that contradicted the family stories she’d always told and fiercely defended. I visited ancestral homes and cemeteries, underwent DNA testing, and discovered living cousins I never knew I had.

I’d had problems with anxiety attacks and nightmares which began during my adolescent years. As a young adult, I began to seek help by going to the first of what would be many therapists over the years who helped me manage my symptoms. By the time I was in my forties, I had them pretty much under control. But not long after I started exploring my family’s long-ago past, I began to have anxiety attacks and nightmares again. Why would learning about trauma and family secrets that happened over a hundred years ago have such an effect on me? It took a while to realize that the emotions my ancestors had suppressed about forbidden subjects were passed down through the generations because nobody had faced them and worked their way beyond them. I wondered, what if I just let all these secrets out where everyone in the family can see them? What if that ensured that the repercussions of what had happened long ago didn’t continue to trouble future generations of my family?

By the time I finished my investigation, the family tree had been shaken vigorously. Branches fell off and others replaced them. Finally, the family history made sense. It was all I ever wanted from genealogy.

Part One

From Reluctant Genealogist to Family Historian

Chapter 1

Mom’s Stories

Mom’s stories about her childhood and family history were like bursts of steam from a pressure cooker – brief, tantalizing, and at times, disturbing. She started telling me these disconnected anecdotes when I was about eleven years of age. The most frequently repeated story in Mom’s canon went something like this:

My mother had an uncle who set her up in business running a delicatessen. During the Great Depression, the business failed. When I was seven years old, my mother became mentally ill and was sent to a mental hospital. I was taken from my father and put into the county home.

In just a few sentences, Mom would sum up a family tragedy that was Dickensian in proportion; a girlhood weighted down by financial disaster, her mother’s insanity, and separation from her father. It puzzled me that her emotions didn’t match up with the scale of her family’s misfortunes. She would bring up the stunning facts of her childhood in the same tone of voice she might use to tell me what she was planning to fix for dinner that night. When she finished telling the story, Mom would evade the inevitable questions her story prompted with facile explanations and the occasional shoulder shrug. Although she admitted that her father had divorced her mother while she was in the mental institution, and that he had never tried to get her out of the county home, Mom swore that Grandpa had been the most wonderful father ever.

The moments she chose to tell the story were brief and spontaneous. We might be folding laundry together when Mom would put down the pair of socks she had just matched up and blurt out the story. Or I might come upon her while she was sitting at the Singer sewing machine in the dining room, stitching up the seam of a dress, when she’d suddenly be overcome with the urge to spit it out. She might even tell me the story while the two of us were alone in the car, driving to the grocery store or a doctor’s appointment. There’s one instance of her telling that story that sticks in my mind to this day.

It was the late 1960s, and I was about thirteen, when I wandered into the family room after coming home from school. Mom was sitting on the piano bench, with a shoe box on her lap. She was a petite woman with dark eyes, wavy brown hair, and a light olive complexion, just like her French Canadian mother. Although I was also small in stature, I was different from Mom in other ways. I had light brown hair and fair skin, with a sprinkling of freckles across my nose and cheeks. Mom used to tell me I got my coloring from Grandpa, her fair-haired Anglo-American father.

I put down my textbooks and pulled up a chair next to her, still wearing my Catholic school uniform – a blue plaid skirt, a light blue blouse with a round collar, and saddle shoes. The light from the late afternoon sun shot through the window behind her. Something about her back-lit head and the halo-like effect of the light made Mom seem mysterious, and yet somehow approachable. She was going through a shoe box of things that had once belonged to Grandpa, the father she adored. It was a potentially charged moment, but if she was feeling any strong emotion – grief, anger, love – she didn’t let on. It was in this room with the spinet piano, the television, the shag rug, and the leatherette reclining chair, that Grandpa had died a few years earlier.

There was still a sense of Grandpa in this room, which had served as his bedroom for the last few months of his life. Maybe it was the faint smell of nicotine which permeated everything he owned. Grandpa was a chain-smoker, just like Grandma had been. When he moved into our house after Grandma died, he brought with him a small television set that reeked of cigarette smoke. After Mom washed its yellowed plastic shell, it lightened to an off-white and didn’t smell as bad. Mom didn’t allow smoking in the house, but the odor attached itself to his clothes and to the small personal items that she hadn’t been able to scrub. From the box, Mom pulled out Grandma’s pocket prayer book, printed in French and Latin, its leather cover cracked with use, and a postcard photograph of Grandpa as a young man. She gazed at her father’s image lovingly, then looked up at me and said, This is my father in his World War I uniform. Isn’t he handsome?

When I was thirteen, it was unusual to have Mom’s attention all to myself. At the time, there were eight of us living in a brick Cape Cod house built in the early 1950s and expanded in 1962 to accommodate our large family. I am the third of six children. I have an older sister and brother, two younger sisters, and the youngest, another brother. The first five of us were about eighteen months apart in age. The youngest came along after a break of four and a half years. I sometimes felt like my parents barely noticed me in the blur of activity in our home. This was why I savored this moment alone with Mom, even though I knew already what she was about to say. I hoped that this time she would embellish the story with new details or perhaps a revelation of how she had felt about her childhood. If she didn’t, I had some questions ready.

Mom looked up from Grandpa’s photograph and began her usual spiel. My mother had an uncle who set her up in business, running a delicatessen. When she got to the part about being taken away from her father, I summoned up the nerve to ask her why Grandpa had never tried to get her out of the county home.

As always, she defended him, saying, He was poor and uneducated and couldn’t take care of me, and then added, as if it explained everything, In those days, they wouldn’t let a man raise a daughter alone. I had my doubts about this explanation, but I sensed that she needed to believe this so that she could preserve her opinion of Grandpa as a loving father. I asked, How did you feel about growing up in an orphanage? Mom bristled at my question and corrected me immediately. "The county home was not an orphanage. We all knew where our parents were." While my mind was churning on the question of whether it was worse to have no parents at all, or to have living parents who couldn’t – or wouldn’t – take care of you, Mom had begun to put away Grandma’s prayer book and the photograph of Grandpa. As she returned the shoe box to its place in the closet, it was obvious that the discussion was over.

Mom had other tales, equally brief and mysterious, which reached further back into her own mother’s family history:

When my mother was a little girl, she lived with her family in a shed behind a relative’s house. Her sister Pauline was born there.

My grandfather deserted his wife and children and went back to Canada, and my grandmother became insane. Some doctor thought it was a good idea to pull out all of her teeth.

My mother was raised by her Aunt Rose, who was unhappy about having to raise her sister’s children.

My mother met my father when he was delivering coal to the house. Her family did not approve of him.

One of my mother’s relatives committed her to the mental hospital. While she was there, she was given electroshock treatments.

Even though Mom had never been good at expanding on her stories, some of them had such intriguing details that I had to ask her questions anyway. Why was Grandma living in a shed? What kind of doctor pulls out someone’s teeth to cure insanity? Mom would become defensive, as if she felt she was being interrogated. That’s what I was told, she would say, with a hint of irritation in her voice, and drop the subject. As I child, I assumed that she was telling me what she knew from her own experience. It wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that I made the connection between the gaping holes in Mom’s stories and the fact that she’d been separated from her family for a significant chunk of her childhood. I realized that the things she told me, she could only have learned from Grandma, who was paranoid, delusional, and therefore not the most reliable source. But Mom held on to her stories just as they had been told to her. For most of my life, I couldn’t figure out why.

By the time I was a young adult, trying to figure out on my own the meaning of family and relationships, I could only look back on my mother’s stories with bewilderment. Although I accepted that Mom’s knowledge of her own family history was limited, it seemed to me that there had to be more to the story. I knew where Mom, Grandma, and Grandpa had ended up many years after the tragic disintegration of their family. But with the meager information Mom had given me about their lives, I couldn’t figure out how the three of them had gotten from point A to point Z, because points B through Y were missing. I could only piece together a picture – not much more than a sketch, really – of what had happened to Grandma, Grandpa, and Mom. What follows is most of what I knew about their history until my retirement in my fifties when I began to dig into the secrets of the asylum.

Grandma spent a dozen years in a state mental hospital during the 1930s and 1940s. Meanwhile, Grandpa divorced her. Mom had told me about how jealous and ill-tempered her mother had been, so I could hardly blame him for wanting to end the marriage. Even though her schizophrenia was never cured, Grandma was eventually discharged from the state hospital. However, instead of returning to her family, she moved from a patient ward to employee housing. She lived at the hospital for fourteen more years working as an attendant. When she retired, she received a state pension.

Mom remained a ward of the State of Connecticut until she reached the age of twenty-one, in 1946. Because she had been such a good student, she received several college scholarships and grants. She earned two bachelor’s degrees, one in education and the other in library science. In 1948, my mother, Pauline Tillotson, married my father, Daniel Mangin, an engineering student she’d met in college. The two of them settled down in Wheaton, Maryland, a middle-class suburb outside of Washington, D.C., where they raised a family.

Mom didn’t know where Grandpa had been during the years that she and Grandma were living in institutions. She had only seen him a handful of times after she went into the county home and saw him once or twice during the late 1940s and early 1950s, when she was on her own. I found it incredible that Mom adored her father so much, given how seldom their lives intersected.

In 1958, something even more incredible happened – Grandma and Grandpa remarried. I was just a toddler the first time they came together to our house in Wheaton. Although Mom was happy to have her parents reunited in marriage, their visits could sometimes be tense. Grandma would follow Mom around the house, peppering her with sarcastic commentary on her incompetence as a wife, a mother, and a homemaker. She was not your archetypal warm grandmother, who gave hugs and homemade cookies to her grandchildren. I kept my distance from Grandma, fearing her angry outbursts, and sensing that there was something wrong with her.

In 1966, eight years after my grandparents re-tied the knot, Grandma fell ill and died. Grandpa moved from Connecticut to Maryland to live in our house. Mom was only too glad to finally have her beloved father living with her again, more than thirty years after she had been taken away to the county home.

I have few memories of Grandpa because he didn’t spend much time talking to or playing with me or any of his grandchildren. He blended into the flow of our crowded household, spending most of his time with Mom. Having so much time with him made her so happy. But four months to the day after Grandma’s death, Grandpa was struck down by a massive heart attack and died. Mom was devastated at losing her father yet again. Grandpa’s death was my first experience with losing someone in the family. It was unnerving for me, at the age of ten, to see my mother seem to fall apart after he died. But I couldn’t ask her questions about death or tell her what I was feeling; she was too consumed with her own grief.

It was several months after Grandpa’s death, when I was eleven years old, that Mom began to tell the story of the delicatessen, the mental hospital, and the county home. Up to that point, I hadn’t known that he had abandoned her when she was a child. No matter how many times she told the story – throughout my childhood until the last year of her life – I always ended up having the same questions. Whether I chose to ask them depended on how I gauged Mom’s mood at the time. It’s funny to me now to think that I even tried, knowing how testy she could get if I probed too hard for details. She never wavered in her conviction that none of her family’s troubles were her father’s fault. Mom expected me to accept her story at face value and viewed my questions as an unwelcome challenge.

Why did Grandma lose the delicatessen?

What happened to Grandma in the mental hospital?

Why were you taken from Grandpa by a social worker and put in the county home?

Why hadn’t he tried to get you out?

It was this last question that started bothering me during my teenage years, and it continued to bother me throughout my adulthood. I was particularly unimpressed with her explanation that in those days, they wouldn’t let a single man raise a daughter. Surely there were many single fathers with daughters during the Depression. We studied the Great Depression during American History class in high school, and such a thing never came up. Children who had only a father couldn’t all be taken away to live in county homes, I thought. I couldn’t understand why Mom didn’t seem furious at her father for abandoning her there.

In addition, I had always suspected that it was more than just the Depression that had caused Grandma to lose the delicatessen. Mom sometimes admitted that Grandpa would take money from the till whenever he needed money to buy a part for some car or piece of machinery he was fixing at the time. When Mom talked about Grandpa’s petty thievery, she seemed amused at his antics, as if it had been no more serious than a child being caught with his hands in a cookie jar. Her tolerance of Grandpa’s behavior seemed odd to me. I shudder to think of what would have happened if I’d been caught taking money from her purse. But Mom would never blame Grandpa for the failure of the delicatessen or for leaving her in the county home.

Abandonment is one of the primal fears that a child has from the moment he or she is born. I think that’s why Mom’s story bothered me so much. During my girlhood, my insecurity about my mother’s attention – or lack of it – sprang from her emotional detachment. That, too, was a form of abandonment. It was confusing to hear her tell a tale that was clearly about abandonment while at the same time excusing Grandpa for letting her be taken away. If I pointed this discrepancy out, she’d deny that it had been abandonment at all. I wonder if my fascination with the story as a young girl was the result of my need for reassurance that I would never be abandoned as Mom had been. The only problem was that Mom’s denial about her own experience made it hard for me to ask her for reassurance.

I was also affected by what Mom said about Grandma’s descent into mental illness, since it was the first domino to fall in the catastrophe which resulted in Mom’s abandonment. I was terrified by the idea of losing control of one’s mind and being sent to a mental hospital. Mom called Grandma’s condition paranoid schizophrenia but didn’t explain it except to say that Grandma would sometimes hear voices. All I knew was that it had to be bad if it had caused her to be locked up for so long and subjected to electroshock treatments. I didn’t know what to make of all the strange words – schizophrenia, electroshock, mental hospital – that swirled around in Mom’s stories, without being clearly defined. All I had to rely on, to understand what Grandma had gone through, was my imagination – worrisome images of Grandma in a straitjacket, locked behind bars, being restrained, and having electricity course through her body.

The bad dreams began when I was thirteen. I’d be sleeping normally when I’d suddenly feel as if I were paralyzed and having an electric current running through my body. It was terrifying, especially when the dream turned into a lucid nightmare. I would become aware of where I was – in my own bed, unable to move – but I couldn’t wake up. Lying helplessly in my twin bed, in the room I shared with my sister, I’d become engaged in a mental struggle to regain wakefulness. All I could do was breathe deeply and hope that I wasn’t about to die. After several minutes, I’d finally wake up and then be too afraid to fall back asleep.

I knew not to tell Mom or Dad or my siblings what was happening. It wasn’t like I could prove what was happening in my dreams. I might end up sounding crazy like Grandma. At the very least, I suspected that Mom would simply dismiss my fears and say I was just making things up to get attention. Doing something for attention was a big no-no as far as Mom was concerned. I had five siblings to compete with, so it was usually better to save getting Mom’s attention for things that were more urgent and easier to verify, like falling down and scraping one’s knee.

The nightmares didn’t happen every night. I’d go weeks without the nightmare of being unable to wake myself while electricity coursed through my body. I tried not to think about them during those nights that I was free to sleep normally. Then, without warning, it would happen again … kind of like the way Mom would pop one of her stories on me.

Questions about Grandma’s mental illness, Mom’s time in the county home, and Grandpa’s apparent absence during most of Mom’s childhood nibbled at my brain throughout my adolescence. As I got older, I sometimes tuned out Mom’s recitations of family lore whenever possible. She’d start talking about the deli, and I’d listen politely, but not make any comments or ask questions. It was clear that she wasn’t interested in a different interpretation of what these stories might mean. Mom was also a compulsive talker, so I didn’t have to change the subject when she was done; she’d always do it for me. I became convinced that my opinion about her stories didn’t matter to her anyway.

Chapter 2

Life with Mom

Mom’s family history wasn’t the only thing that puzzled me about her. It was the way she relied on criticism to guide me through life’s ups and downs. She was great when I came to her with a physical problem. If I came home from playing outside with a scraped knee, she knew exactly what to do. She’d take me into the bathroom and sit me on the toilet lid. Then she’d clean the wound, spray some antiseptic on it, and cover it with a bandage. She wasn’t affectionate, but I felt that my pain was acknowledged and treated with all the seriousness that a boo-boo on the knee deserved. Once, when I was around ten, I fell on the ice and hit my head on the neighbor’s driveway. I didn’t think anything of it at the time it happened; I just picked myself up and continued playing with the neighborhood kids. When I went back into the house to warm up, I sat in the kitchen with Mom, drinking hot chocolate. I asked her, Why are there little mirrors floating in front of my eyes? Alarmed, she sent me straight to bed and called the doctor. I had to stay in bed the entire next day because I’d had a mild concussion.

But when it came to emotional hurts, Mom wasn’t soothing at all. If I came home feeling sad and left out because the neighborhood girls had excluded me from one of their games, she’d ask, What did you do? as if there was no question in her mind that I had been responsible for my own rejection.

Mom was proud of her two college degrees, which she had managed to earn without any support from her parents. She had always made it clear that getting a good education was important, so I studied hard, hoping to earn her praise. I was a B-plus kind of student – smarter than most, but not the smartest. When I was in the fourth grade, I must have been in some kind of academic overdrive, because I managed to produce a report card with straight As. I couldn’t wait to show it to Mom. She took one look at my report card and said that she’d heard that the girl down the street had gotten all As with a few A-pluses thrown in. She handed my report card back to me. I was puzzled and disappointed. I had done what I thought I had been expected to do. Why hadn’t she congratulated me for my achievement?

When I was in eighth grade, Mom began dying my hair blonde (Miss Clairol Winter Wheat) because she thought it would make me more popular. Blondes have more fun, she said, echoing an advertising slogan of the day. The other girls in my class thought it was cool that I had a mother who would let me dye my hair. But it only made me feel like Mom thought I needed fixing. I would much rather have heard her say, You’re beautiful just the way you are, even if she was lying about it. As it turned out, the fact that my social life didn’t noticeably improve after I became a blonde only made me feel more like a failure.

Things got worse when I became a teenager and old enough to date. All through high school, Mom urged me to concentrate on my education, as she said, because you might not ever get married. I took this to mean that she didn’t think I was pretty enough to attract a boyfriend. As a result, I dated very little in high school. The few times that I did, she would ask, What did you promise him you would do? as if there was only one reason a young man would want to go out with me. This was the extent of the dating advice I got from my mother. I couldn’t enjoy being taken out on a date until I was much older. As a teenager, I couldn’t stop wondering if the guy was expecting something from me that I wasn’t prepared to give.

While the gifts Mom gave me were not emotionally sustaining, they were substantial just the same. Despite raising six kids, Mom eked out time for her own hobbies, ones that added beauty and interest to our surroundings. Wearing jeans and a cotton shirt, and wielding a trowel, Mom would plant petunias, marigolds, portulaca, day lilies, and irises all around the house and along the edges of the back yard. Forsythias and lilacs livened up the edges of the yard with their color and scent. When I was old enough, and expressed an interest in growing vegetables, Mom gave me a little plot of my own, behind the backyard fence, in which I grew onions and string beans. Unfortunately, it was near the basketball backboard, which meant it was sometimes threatened by balls that missed the hoop.

In the far corner of the back yard, near the tulip poplar tree, Dad erected a five-foot wooden post, and built a little shelter on top of it. It was custom-made so that a small statue of St. Francis of Assisi could stand, as if in a niche in a cathedral, under the peaked roof. At St. Francis’ feet, Mom would spread millet seed, then watch the birds that came to feed on it. She had a heavy black pair of binoculars, and an elementary field guide to backyard