My Mother

I am not aware of anything in my extended history that can accurately be described as family “lore,” but I have always been interested in the conditions in which my mother was raised, and I would love to write a novel exploring some of the factors that influenced her experiences as a child.

To begin with, my maternal grandparents married young. My grandfather was just young enough to have avoided the World War II draft. My grandmother was an intelligent woman who received a scholarship to attend college. In a move that seems incomprehensible by modern standards, her mother forbade her to attend such an unladylike institution. Thus, my grandmother lost an education but gained a husband. They proceeded to spent the next ten years making seven babies. Surely my favorite detail about my family history is the way they were assigned names. The three boys were Jerry, James, and Jon. The four girls were Jeanne, Josette, Julie, and Joni. 

The nine Halls lived in a house that was much too small for them on the south side of Chicago, and at first the years were happy. The family adopted a pet piranha (yes, literally a piranha), and would gleefully drop small mice into its tank on which it would feed. Money was tight, but they managed to make a game out of it. On pepperoni pizza nights, there was a system in place to make sure everyone was receiving enough food. Each child was handed a napkin and instructed to stamp one pepperoni onto the napkin each time they consumed a piece. Thus, bellies were filled and money was saved. 

The story turned sour, however, when my grandparents were divorced. My grandfather packed up his bags and moved to Cave Creek, a small town in the desert of Arizona that looks nothing like Hazelcrest, Illinois. What had been a happy (albeit cramped) family of nine turned into a single mother desperately trying to raise seven children. She juggled several jobs while simultaneously trying to manage problems as diverse as a broken leg from the youngest child to questionable boyfriends from the older girls. Essentially, she stopped being a real mother and became a manager, delegating responsibility to the more reliable siblings and trying to cope with a devastating divorce. 

What has always fascinated me most about this story, however, is the response from the community. All of my grandmother’s friends were Catholic. After the divorce, they were never more than acquaintances. Because they could not condone the act of divorce, they left her to struggle alone with seven kids and a failed marriage for the next fifteen years. My mother was the third child but the eldest of the four girls, and so quickly was forced into the position of more of a second mother than a real sibling. She too lost friends and chose to attend a high school outside of her unforgiving neighborhood. My mother lost her childhood at an extremely young age, and she was raised in a culture of isolation and intolerance that makes me profoundly sad. I have always been interested in the choice her neighbors made, when values of charity and forgiveness certainly should have overrode a simplistic set of rules. If I were to write a novel, it would be to explore the mindsets of the people around my mother and grandmother who allowed them to struggle, and to watch as their decisions led to the strange childhood of a young Jeanne Hall.