Orphans Always Fascinated Me

Many of them inhabited my make-believe world. From the time I was old enough to be read to, I knew Dorothy Gale who lived with her Auntie Em and Uncle Henry. They gave her enough love to make her long for home the whole time she was in the land of Oz. When I was eleven-years-old I met Anne Shirley, who left the Hopetown Orphanage to come to Green Gables where Matthew and Marilla loved her as much as any parent could. There were others, Heidi, Oliver Twist, the Boxcar Children, and more. The very first orphan I was acquainted with, however, was my mother.

She became an orphan when only five-years-old after her mother died. Although her father was still alive Jewish tradition regards any child who has lost one parent as an orphan. Nine years later when her father passed away, she became an official orphan. She wasn’t sent to an orphanage, though. Rather her oldest brother and his wife took her in.

My mother idolized her father and from the stories she told me I felt as if I almost knew him. He was a dedicated doctor, the kind who would accept a bushel of potatoes for his yearly payment. The kind who would make house calls at all hours of the night. In fact, it was when he was making a house call that he met my grandmother. He’d come to stitch her arm and ended up falling in love. According to family legend she was only fourteen at the time. Their secular wedding certificate lists her as a sixteen-year-old spinster. This was in England. They later moved to America and ended up in Leavenworth, Kansas. My grandmother gave birth to ten children and my mother was the ninth child. Sadly, she never shared any memories about her mother with me.

“When I saw her dead body,” my mother always explained. “it must have wiped away any other remembrances I had.”

She knew her father had died of a heart attack but the only thing she knew about her mother’s death was that there had been some hemorrhaging. 

As a teenager I questioned that fact. Perhaps she’d had a fatal miscarriage? My mother‘s reaction was rather scornful. Her older siblings would have known if her mother was pregnant. I maintained they wouldn’t have if she was in her early months. My mother was not happy with the conversation and I dropped the subject. Still, I always wondered…

Then my best friend from childhood was recently at a Jewish Genealogical Association meeting. Being that our friendship is a three-generational one she decided to check out the burial records from the Mt. Zion Jewish cemetery in Leavenworth. Among the listing of the deceased there was the startling detail that along with my grandmother’s name there was, in parenthesis, a plus sign and the word infant.   

I had been right! But I got no satisfaction from being correct. That one word, infant, left me disconcerted. How could my mother not have known the truth? This wasn’t a miscarriage but a stillborn. Granted, there were a lot of taboo subjects seventy-five years ago, but wouldn’t someone have said something sometime? Had my mother been so traumatized by the fact that her mother “abandoned” her while trying to bring another child into the world that she could never admit it had happened? Was she angry? Resentful?

Like Dorothy and Anne my mother didn’t suffer from a lack of love. She had her father, brothers, sisters, and the beloved housekeeper. It couldn’t have been easy for her sister-in-law to have her husband’s bereaved siblings come live with them after her father-in-law died, but I only heard about the good times my mother had there. Later my aunt made me feel as if she was my almost-grandmother.

My mother, like the orphans from my make-believe world, had a happy ending to her childhood. She met my father and had a home full of love for him and for me. Still, she knew that growing up she’d lacked what most others had.

“I’m raising you by experiment,” she often told me. “I don’t know what it’s like to have a mother.”

Perhaps she observed others raise their children. Maybe she was inspired from the many books she read. Or she could have just been using her natural motherly instincts that she subconsciously remembered from her first five years of life. For she was a good mother. She made me feel I was loved and cherished as I imagine her mother once made her feel. As I know every child wants and needs.

My grandmother with her youngest three children