FEST Writing Group

1952 – 1960.  In looking back after the Nuclear Family Collapse, I saw that our original nuclear family, mom, dad, and the three children became a multigenerational nuclear family: grandparents and the three children. My parents were sidelined by difficult-to-understand symptoms.  I am still curious as to who gets the focus, negative or positive, and what kind of symptoms emerge and when? The focus can reveal a triangle (two against one) where people gang up on one another, or where people are drawn in to help one another be more of a self.

After I saw how Butch was lost in his hope to become Jesus Christ, I wished that I could learn all there was to know about the pressure and forces in the family. Hopefully this would help me avoid another hurricane.

What caught my attention was Bowen’s observation and his consideration of evolution as the base for his theory.  Bowen insisted on focusing on his contribution as told by the subtitle of the book Family Evaluation: “The Role of the Family as an Emotional Unit that Governs Individual Behavior and Development.”[1]   

Dr. Kerr wrote the main part of the book. Dr. Bowen did not read Dr. Kerr’s book until after it was published.  Similarly, Dr. Bowen wrote the epilogue to his life journey. Kerr did not read that part until it was published.  Here was an example of each person doing their own thing, without approval or corrections from the other.  This was a clear attempt to let each person stand alone with their own ideas. There is no love or approval or even the dread of disapproval when one is telling the way they see the system operate. 

As an observer, I am aware of the challenge and difficulty of developing one’s own ideas.  

Most of mental health is still focused on diagnosing the one individual, like Butch.  By switching the focus to the ‘interactions’ in the nuclear family, one can follow the way the unit itself distributes anxiety.  This was an amazing, brand-new way to look at human behavior.

One reason for symptoms: above, you can see the cluster of deaths in the family. When I joined the postgraduate program, my parents and grandparents had all died, except for my maternal grandfather who was alive. It was the fall of 1976, I was 34. 

I began to see the rise in anxiety, by tracing back to the deaths in my family and the lack of replacements for those who had died. After 1976, there was only my grandfather and myself left alive in my three-generation family.

I saw that each generation inherited ways of managing family anxiety. I saw how the four mechanisms managed to contain the anxiety around the deaths. The distancing, conflict, reciprocity, and child focus were observable.

A family leader who can observe the reactions in the family can often manage to disrupt the patterns of negative behavior by doing unusual things, drawing the focus more on self than on others. Changing how one communicates with others is part of an effort to avoid the traps of an automatic stimulus-response world. Managing one’s reactivity allows one to shift the focus from the symptomatic one to the stronger one. Differentiation of Self (DoS) is the name of this process of finding and defining one’s own path forward.  This is the fifth way above and beyond the four mechanisms that automatically manage anxiety.

First, the anxiety storm in my family increased due to the automatic activation of distance and conflict around the threat of death during the war.  Secondarily, I heard about my mother’s negative focus on her husband, who was being encouraged and who then went along with the pressure from his father-in-law to go fight in WW II.  My mother was against the war. Whereas her father, Walter Maher, believed that the brightest and strongest were the ones who should fight. He based this on his experience in WW 1.

My mother died believing that war was ‘evil.’ No one should be required to leave their family and encounter the horrors of war.   Her stance left her on the outside of her parent’s beliefs as to who should go to war. Being on the outside was my mother’s position from the time her father returned from WW I. The lovely relationships she had with her mom seemed to disappear.

Photo of my mother in the background looking miserable and the parents close.

Both my mother and father had enormous issues in the effort to get along with one another and raise their children. I was curious, how come they fell apart?  There was something about the forces in the family system that I did not understand, and I needed to if I were ever to know my parents as real people.

Who were these people in my family? Who were they to me? I had not tried to figure that out until I joined the postgraduate program. I was curious about their values and what kind of experiences they had growing up that would make it difficult for them to manage themselves and their families. 

What was this force disrupting each one’s ability to relate well to one another? 

By trying to recall and get to know these people called family, I believed that I would understand more about the early forces that shaped my behavior. 

If anyone has the time to research their early years in the nuclear family, they will most likely find a treasure trove of information as to the forces in the family unit that affect the family over generations. Most of these forces are part of the feeling system and not part of the effort to understand how people relate and communicate with one another.

Part of learning Bowen’s theory is to integrate one’s feelings and one’s rational thinking mind. By taking a more thoughtful look at family interactions, one escapes the automatic desire to fix people or to put blame on one or two people.  Training in Bowen Theory takes time as it requires one to form open and non-threatening relationships with others.

Asking questions can be dangerous.

When I finally had the courage to ask, my grandmother had an explanation or two as to ‘why’ she and her daughter did not get along.  “The reasons” were that my mother loved horses, and my grandmother, Anna, was terrified of them and she was very scared of cats.  Going barefoot was my mother’s preference, while my grandmother never got out of bed without putting on her shoes and stockings and then getting dressed for the day. My mother sang beautifully, played the piano, and generally was freedom-seeking, and my grandmother was naturally the opposite of her daughter – tone deaf. These were comforting explanations built upon feelings and were not facts. 

But there was so much more to discover, as this was just one part, the mother-daughter part, of the relationship problem. I had to go back to earlier times to see the early relationship forces that shaped the mother-daughter-father team.

In 1939, my mother married my father, an older man with an excellent job as the youngest manager of the Washington Gas and Light Company. The way I initially saw my parents interact I got the impression that my father wanted his wife to be his princess.   As the oldest of five, and his mother’s favorite, my father was the only one to attend college and then law school.  The expectations seem to fit with who he was at that time.  His role was to be a dominant/successful male, a savior, of his lower to middle-class Irish family. There is evidence in several letters my father had kept that he was sending money to his family.

My mother had been saved from being in that position by being born into a wealthy, more socially established family. As her parents saw it, her role was to attract and keep a solid male who would maintain her place in society.  These expectations ran into a different reality than the one the families were prepared to handle.   

In the above picture, I could see from the groomsmen’s look that my father and his friends were older.  There were nine years between my mom and my dad and a big wealth gap to boot. I saw my mother’s hope of being a princess with her prince, but then, damn it, the war came and so many expectations and dreams were turned to dust.

Perhaps, even without the war, my parents would have had troubles. But from my vantage point, the war provoked the early challenge for my mother to be able to continue her role as the princess and as her husband’s favorite person. 

A photograph of my maternal grandmother looking at me while holding me, my father looking at my mother, my mother looking at me, and my grandfather looking at the camera.

When the war broke out in 1941, my maternal grandfather believed that my father, Andrew Maloney, must go to war and defend his country from evil Hitler.  There was no choice. Therefore, despite my mother’s strenuous objections, my father volunteered for the Army Air Force and was selected to be an intelligence officer.  He was the first Army Air Forceintelligence officer to fly in a B-29 over Japan.  His job was to document the number of deaths and the targets both hit and missed.  He was intimately involved in planning for the firebombing of Japan and was on the staff of General Curtis LeMay. [2]

FATHER AWAY AT WAR AND AT HOME WITH GRANDPARENTS

With my father away at war, my mother returned home with Butch and I to live with her parents. Every tension that had appeared when she was a child resurfaced. My mother was a bit of a wild child and frequently went out with her friends despite her parents’ warnings. 

It is interesting how when I saw little snapshots of people from my past, the story became larger and led to more memories. It was like pulling at a string and out came so many memories from my past. Once I started with the photographs, I began to see how to make my story come alive.

I do not know how accurate these stories are, as memory is not like having a video camera with a time stamp; instead, memory seems to link simple snatches of moments that have been hidden from view.   I can write about them and pull more and more memories out into the light from the often-dark spell of the past.    

There is only one photograph (see above) of my mother with Butch and me during this time, of which I have only a few jumbled memories. Photographs are so important as many early memories are not available, but photographs are a stimulus to remember. [3]  They give birth to evidence that these people existed and are not just products of one’s imagination. Bowen decided that his theory was to be focused on the reality of life and not as Freud thought, on one’s imagination.[4] 

I was so young. yet, I can still recall calm moments watching my grandmother and mother making lemon meringue pies or Butch and I having fun with our grandfather on Sunday mornings. He would let us crawl up in his lap and read us the funnies. 

On occasion, I remember my mother playing the piano and singing beautifully at home. At other times, which I still recall, my grandmother and I would go to the theater to see the various plays my mother was performing. Then, at Christmas, we would sit around the table and string cranberries and popcorn for the tree. 

At various times, my grandfather would walk us around their farm by the water and point out the plants. Amazingly, I found out just how long it took for asparagus to grow—two years seemed to be an incredible length of time for a vegetable.

I remember there was a sailboat that we were not allowed to go on without an adult and parties where people ate oysters and then left the shells on the ground. There were so many things to be curious about.  

1945 – 1952

FATHER RETURNS FROM WAR

Here is my dad, on the left, standing with one of the pilots of a B-29. He was in the 21^st Air Force, 73^rd Bomb Wing, 875th Bomb Squad. This photo was taken on the 14th of September 1945, in Saipan, 12 days after the war’s end.

I was almost four years old before my father returned from the war, which ended on September 2, 1945.  By then, I was firmly at home with my grandparents and regarded this returning soldier as the enemy. I still recall vividly when this tall stranger came to visit.  My dad was handsome, but I was not comforted by him and his uniform.  I knew he was there to take us away, but I was “just fine” living with my grandparents who made my life feel safe.

When he returned from the war, my father’s memories were strong. When I was a child, he once described how he witnessed the fire-bombing of Japan and the smells of burning flesh.  I had no comprehension of the war or what he had experienced. No one else talked about the war and what it was like for the many families who were caught in its aftermath and all the terrible memories created by the violence and destruction.

My father would get upset about little things, and my mother had no ability to calm him down. They were unable to relate well to one another. Was it too many expectations that the prince and the princess would be able to do anything? Or was it that, plus other issues, that increased the anxiety and made it so difficult to relate to one another?  Also, I could not make a connection between the war and what my parents and I were going through much less realize that there were many other families with these same issues.

MOVE TO WASHINGTON DC

1945 – Washington DC

After the war,we did not move right away as my father had to secure a job and find a place for us to live.  I am guessing that we moved to Washington, D.C., in 1946.  Despite my strong objections, I was packed up and moved to Washington.  Butch was three, and I was five.

The division between my parents was easy to feel and difficult to talk about.  Once we moved to D.C., there were no brakes on my parent’s ways of managing themselves. The fighting and the drinking escalated. I knew they were drinking but not really the reason for the drinking or the reason for the upset between my parents. This unintegrated or meaningless conflict began to erode both their and my ability to function well.

My father took us to this strange new city, and my life began to deteriorate.

As I recall, I started nursery school in D.C., and that did not go well.  I was too embarrassed to raise my hand and get permission to go to the bathroom, so the inevitable happened. It was embarrassing, but I learned to speak up.

My mother, on the other hand, was especially fearful that the Japanese would come and steal her children as revenge for my father’s part in the war.  One day, she told me I was to watch Butch at the playground. Instead of looking after my three-year-old brother, I was talking to another girl.  Without saying a word, Butch got on his tricycle and silently peddled down the road. Eventually, I noticed he was gone. I looked all around and could not find him. I was in big trouble.  I had to walk home and confess to my mother that Butch was missing.     

My mother got so mad that she picked me up and threw me into my bedroom with my yellow galoshes still on. I knew they did not belong on the bed.  That was my focus, get the boots off the bed. Then I could listen as my mother called the FBI and my dad to tell them what I had done.  When the FBI got here, they interviewed me. After that, my dad was reassuring me and saying they would find Butch and not to be upset. 

The FBI went on a house-to-house search and found Butch having cookies and milk with a widowed woman who lived a few blocks away.  Of course, she would report Butch missing eventually, but it was so nice to have a young boy come to visit.  My lesson: Butch could get me in trouble with my parents and the community, I knew that. Therefore, I was more determined to save Butch from getting into trouble.  

To give you another idea of how the family anxiety was tilted, even in those early years, Butch would often poop in his pants. That would set off a storm with my mother and my dad. Therefore, I would sneak him some new underpants and bury the old ones in the backyard. Problem solved.   

Then, one day, I saw a bulldozer.  They were going to build a new house near us.  I panicked. They would uncover the dirty pants!  No bulldozer came, but the level of tension in my life was high.   My parents fought, and they drank.  It was not a good time for me. There were a lot of fights and drinking over the next four years. Of course, there were also several attempts to try to live together in harmony.  However, it was not to be. 

SEPARATION AND BACK TO MATERNAL GRANDPARENTS

My mother finally left my father and took us children back to live with her parents again.  Eventually, my mother decided to officially separate from her husband. What a relief.  Back to Virginia Beach, Va., where there was a much higher degree of safety.

It was hard for me to know exactly how much time I spent with my grandparents and how much with my parents. But by 1947, I was in Virginia Beach attending kindergarten. My parents’ war had seemingly stopped. Now, I rode the school bus and was very proud to live in the biggest house on the bus route, but I was an outsider at school. I liked to win at sports, but I did not like to ask for help, and I was not friendly.  

One day, the bus driver, an African American man, noticed my shoes were untied.  He asked me to stay on the bus for a minute until the other children had left.  When they were gone, he showed me how to tie my shoes.  This man was a stranger, but he still taught me to tie my shoes and told me that I was a fast learner. Perhaps he sensed my insecurity, but he helped me with that small pat on the back: good job.  Interesting to see how that one act stands out in my memory.

These snapshots from more difficult times indicate how I related to adults and kids my age. Kids were more challenging, as they would ask, “Where are your parents?” I would have to make up stories about them: My mother was going ‘back to college’ and my dad had a job ‘elsewhere.’

1947: I entered first grade at The Everette School. I recall my teacher talking to me in front of my grandmother, asking if I would like to learn how to play the piano. Apparently, I had big hands, a sure sign I would be capable.

I was very aware that although my grandmother said nothing, her anxiety about me following in my mother’s barefooted musical footsteps was palatable. Of course, I said no. I thought, who wants to be like their mother? I have big hands: I might as well play basketball.

Schools were not of any real interest to me. I wanted to understand the world around me, which had little to do with school but more with how people around me behaved. Also, I love to be in nature, to go fishing, or take long bike rides with Gudrun, and just be outside. 

My grandfather knew a lot about nature and the rate of change. He told us about how the lake used to freeze over. He and his friends would drag a boat across Crystal Lake; then, if the ice cracked, they could get in the boat. These older people seemed so very adventurous. They seemed to know that time was changing the environment. My grandfather showed me a photograph of the day the ocean froze, saying, “You will never see that in your lifetime.”   

I admired my grandfather, his red hair, and even his temper tantrums. He would tell us stories about his life that made me laugh. For instance, as a young man, supervising men on the coal piers, he saw manual labor as basic to man’s life.  He had no patience for drinking; instead, hard work was the ticket to success.   I had no idea how long this struggle between drinking and hard work to manage anxiety had been going on.  There was so much about the history of my family that I did not know.

Stories of the old days stuck in my mind.  My grandfather showed me photographs of men shoveling coal into a six-master sailing ship.  My great-grandfather, Nicholas Dominic Maher, (NDM) had been the Norfolk & Western Railroad president.  This connection helped my grandfather get a summer job working on building the first Canadian railroad, with a crew made up of Englishmen. One day, they asked him to make tea. And without thinking, he dumped the whole tea box into the boiling water.  He had ruined their tea, and they were furious with him. 

I recall this story of ‘living with your mistakes’ to this day. This lesson (doing what people asked me to do without thinking of the consequences and clarifying the details) was buried somewhere in the back of my mind, but eventually, it would prove helpful as I became more aware, that I was not thinking for myself.  I also did not know how hard it would be to think for oneself and not just go along with others.[5]  Bowen called this urge to go with the group ‘togetherness.’

I thought my grandparents were a good couple. They did not scream at each other, and they seemed to enjoy a distant marriage. They slept in separate beds. They seemed to stick together and yet each had their own life. My grandfather was on the board of various organizations: hospitals, banks, the country club, etc. 

My grandmother was a community organizer during the war. She started the Red Cross in Virginia Beach and, after the war, the Garden Club. Every Wednesday, she and her friends would play mahjong, and with her winnings, she bought bonds for her grandchildren. She was very fond of her grandchildren but wanted us to turn out well—just a small demand.

In my memory of those early years, I was very close to her. She seemed to understand me. For instance, we would go to her favorite dress shop, where she enjoyed picking out my clothes while I was free to read books. Dressing up was not my cup of tea, and that was OK with her.  There was a natural connection there that was warm and real, and we shared ‘confusion’ about who my mother was.

These early experiences with my grandfather and grandmother taught me the importance of relationships and to think carefully about what people ask me to do. Overall, I felt safe again. However, I was becoming increasingly aware that nothing lasts forever, and this time, too, would end, as my mother was now pregnant.

REUNITED AND IT FEELS SO GOOD – parents go to Daytona Beach FL

After the separation, my mother somehow got pregnant with my brother Drew. My grandparents realized it was time for us children to go back and live with our parents. I was eight years old when my mother officially reunited with my father, and obviously, we children were to live with them in this new family structure: mom, dad, and three children.

My grandfather tried to make the best of the situation and helped my parents financially. There were several long letters written back and forth between my father and my maternal grandfather, Walter C. Maher, about the separation and the marital conflict in the past:  

“In view of the manner in which you and Mother Maher have acted during the several difficulties in which Puddney (my mother’s nickname)and I have managed to get into during the past four years…. I should have known that both of you would be kind, tolerant and generous.…..  

Irrespective of what might have happened to Puddney and me that I could not, even under the most adverse circumstances, have had anything but the friendliest and kindest thoughts for both of you, and never have done anything about either the children or Puddney which did not meet with your approval.” December 17, 1949.   

Neither Butch nor I wanted to go live with our parents again and it seemed as though my grandparents were none too happy about us leaving. We were to live in Daytona Beach, Florida for several months as this is where my father had a job.

I had no idea what was going on in the back of my grandparents’ minds. They must have known about the drinking, but to take the children away from their parents would have seemed impossible at this time.   As far as I can tell, my grandfather returned to his work.  He wrote to my father about the increase in his business, perhaps trying to give him hope as to how things can change for the positive over time. For example, he wrote about how they had just broken a record, going from shipping one million tons of coal per month (12 million a year) to shipping out 48 million tons of coal per year.[6]  

To us children, my grandfather also told stories about how things change.  He told me about the Pony Express which could cut half the time to get a letter to California from 25 days to 10.  In a way, I felt that my grandfather was wise, telling me things were changing, but even he could not talk about the real problems in our family lives.  Therefore, I knew that things were amiss and that there was little I could do. 

Here is a photograph on the right Gudrun (our nanny or the third mother) is holding on to Butch while I am seemingly freer, standing by my grandmother’s side.  In the photographs below, none of us look very happy about the situation and the coming separation. 

1949 BUTCH AND ANDREA GO TO FLORIDA (DAYTONA – MIAMI)

1950

After Drew was born in Daytona Beach on September 22, 1950, my grandparents had to return us to our parents. It seems I had a most optimistic father as to what he imagined that he could do. My father wanted his own business to manage. So, he talked to my grandfather about his idea of buying into a Pyrex gas company franchise in Miami. For some reason, my grandfather decided it might help if he lent my father money. Upon reflection, I wondered if my grandfather, Walter Maher, had bought the Gas Company for my father to run as a payback for pressuring my dad to get into the war.

 The deal was made, and now we would move to Miami to stabilize our new family with baby Drew. I was going to be isolated from my grandparents, and looking back, to me, this was the family’s downfall.

Sometime soon after we left for Florida, my grandparents sold their oceanfront home. However, Gudrun was still living with them. I always wondered why Gudrun was still being paid when no children were to look after.  Did my grandparents have doubts about my parents’ future and therefore kept Gudrun in reserve?   People were not talking about what was going on. I had to guess.

Then, my grandfather purchased four miles of oceanfront property called Sandridge.  It was a bit south of Virginia Beach with no road access, so remote and private that my grandfather had to have a jeep to access the property.  At one time, it had been a Duck Club.  Now, it was a duck hunting place for my grandfather’s friends and for his family to have a summer home for great adventures. 

When we were young, it was an amazing place to go hunting and fishing.  We could visit, but I got the impression that my grandparents wanted to be free of raising children.  The war was over, and my grandparents were planning a life of their own, but hidden forces were shaping a different future for all of us.

MIAMI

While living in Miami, Butch and I were free of parental concerns, but teachers at the school were worried; there were parent-teacher calls.  Butch and I did not care and often left home on our bikes, free of our parents, who were drinking.  Teachers were more like the school police to me.  They were not so interested in helping but rather getting us to admit that we were the problem.  In one particular meeting where we had to be present, the teacher asked, “Where did Butch get the money to buy reams of paper?” Butch was seen as a small-time thief.   Meanwhile, I got in trouble for skipping school and being unable to spell. 

Butch and I created our own lives. We biked all over the place and tried to avoid school and parents. Butch refused to go to school, and once he climbed a tree so high that the fire department had to come and use the ladder to bring him down.  

But by August, school was out, and I liked to ride my bike through the steamy streets of Miami. The rain would produce steam, and you could ride your bike and be as wet as if you were showering. The stickiness and thickness of the air made the perfect metaphor for our family’s problems. 

Who knew that our parents were trying to survive the memory of war?  These two events, war and drinking, did not seem connected.  All I knew was that there were frequent, loud arguments between my parents, some of which were about the problem with the priest from our school. Our mother was too close to the priest. I could see they were too close, snuggling on the couch.   I could also see my dad hiding bottles of whisky under the bed. Even later, when we were with my grandparents, no explanation could clarify how the war and the family falling apart were connected. There was no coherent story.

Life was choppy, and I was unsure of the storms that might lie ahead. In the future, I would see this confusion as reflecting and affecting my inability to integrate my thinking and my feelings about my life. 

During the good times, Dad said we were in his army.  He would wake us up in the morning to march and enjoy some lemonade afterward.  Two-year-old Drew could not walk even though most children begin to around 12 months. This made Drew exempt from military service. 

There was an African American woman who worked for the family and made the meals, did the ironing, and would take Drew out of his highchair.  She told us that smoking was bad.  To show us the proof, we had to blow smoke through a sheet to see the stained yellow with tar would stick to our lungs. Yes, we “took” my mother’s cigarettes and smoked in the bathroom.  But all these moments were like snapshots, not yet connected to increasing stress or any meaning. 

I am not sure how long it took for my parents to completely fall apart. It seemed like a long, drawn-out affair to me. They were both drinking, and one or the other went for treatment, which did not last.  My grandmother came for a visit, as did Gudrun.  But there was little that could be done until my parents fully collapsed. Years later, we were to learn that their drinking also had a severe impact on Drew, who was later diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome. 

Then, one hot August night, the anger mounted; there was yelling and cursing.  We three children were used to the fussing and fighting, but the neighbors were no longer putting up with this. They finally complained to the police, who were sent to assess the situation.  It did not take a genius to see that the children were neglected and the parents were suffering from out-of-control emotions.  Our parents were arrested.

The police put the three of us in one car and my parents in a paddy wagon. As we sat in the police vehicle, the neighbor woman approached us.“I am sorry,” she said, but you will be better off.”  

How did she know that we would be better off?  How did she know the future?  I was mad and scared, so I asked if we could stay with her.  But the police officer said it was a legal matter now. Our parents were charged with being drunk and disorderly. That was easy to see as when they brought our parents into the police station, they were still yelling and kicking at each other. 

One of the police officers told us that they were charging our parents, and we would go live in an orphanage.  So, back into the police car we went.  It was very late at night when they drove us to the orphanage. They rang a bell, and a woman came out, grumbling. She was in a foul mood, cursing at the police for bringing us out there at 3 AM.   Two other people came to take Butch and Drew to separate buildings. I went upstairs into the bathroom. She told me, “Take off all your clothes, give me your necklaces.”  Thenshe drenched me with a chemical guaranteed to kill bugs.   

The following morning after breakfast, a teacher took me aside and told me I was now going to attend school at the orphanage. Our parents were unfit to care for me, Butch, or our little brother, Drew. We were 10, 8, and nearly 2 years old. I knew my parents were not coming to get me, but how would my grandparents find us?  Looking around in the orphanage, I realized I was on my own to solve very big problems.

It was not till much later in life I began to understand that the war had resulted in my father and mother turning to alcohol to relieve the pressure on both of them. The slow loss in functioning was hidden from my grandparents for the most part. But once my parents were arrested, the family had to be reorganized.  This was the first time I had to figure out what to do without my parents and no way to contact my grandparents.

Yes, I was a child, and I made funny and unrealistic plans to escape the orphanage. Butch and I had been able to skirt the authorities and meet for a moment in the back of the auditorium, where I told him, “We could kidnap Drew and hitchhike back to Va. Beach!”, where our trusted grandparents lived. I would distract the “helpers” by making noise, giving Butch time to run in and go get Drew.  I took the fact that Drew would have to be carried out to the road into consideration when planning our escape from the inhumane ways of the orphanage. Then we would meet by the road to hitchhike back to Virginia Beach.

Luckily, I didn’t have to try out my plans. We were there three long days before our maternal grandparents came to the rescue. How did they find out how to get us?  We stayed in a hotel while they went to court to get custody.  Later, they made it official by adopting the three of us. Even then, I realize how brave they were to take on three children when you are in your sixties.

ADOPTED BY GRANDPARENTS

 1952 What a relief to be back home with our grandparents again. I also knew that my grandparents had rules and expectations. There was no freedom like we had in Florida. But there was safety. Butch being a boy and being younger and perhaps having a predilection for risk-taking, got into way more trouble than I did.

When we arrived from Florida, Gudrun Lund was there. She had decided to stay and help raise us. Each night, we would eat all our meals with her while my grandparents ate by themselves. Their hopes for my parents to regain functioning had been eroded.  Now, they were a strong twosome in dealing with the fallout from the war.  We children were on the outside and tended to be seen as troublemakers. The tension as to how things would go since my parents were arrested was very high and Butch seemed to be the one who acted out the tension in the family. 

For example, the very first day we arrived at our new home on the 16^th floor, the penthouse of the Mayflower condominiums, we were checking out the balcony when Butch decided to climb up on a ladder holding flowerpots.  Before anyone could stop him, Butch and the ladder were falling backward, hitting the floor, and breaking the pots, spilling dirt all over.  I was in shock.

Gudrun tried to pick up Butch while my red-headed Irish grandfather threatened him.  “If you do anything like that again, I will return you to the orphanage.”  I was watching the whole thing and was thinking – better be careful. I could see that my grandparents had no idea of the impact of such a threat on my brother or me.  Gudrun would be our defender against the powerful twosome of my grandparents, but she did not have any authority to disrupt the negative focus on Butch. 

One day, Gudrun drove us down to the piers to fish. The fish were running, and we could catch 30 or so spots in a couple of hours. Gudrun brought a wicker basket to put them in.  We drove back and got in the elevator with this basket of fish. I held the elevator button while Gudrun and Butch tried to get the basket out. But as they moved it forward, the bottom split open and the fish slid all around the elevator.   

Gudrun went to get another container, but before she could return my grandfather appeared and saw the mess. His reaction was to immediately blame Butch.  Almost automatically, I defended Butch, as a 10-year-old lawyer might. “But Grandaddy, Butch had nothing to do with choosing the basket, but he did catch the most fish.”  I was at home in my role. I could argue and save my brother.  I am not sure if Butch appreciated that “help.”

The way I got into trouble was over the dress code.  I had returned to Everett School and the girls I once knew had invited me to come over.  I told my grandmother that Brenda and Penny wanted to have a playdate with me.  “Well,” she said, “you must wear a dress.” “What for?”, I asked.  “That’s the rule.” I refused. She said, “Fine. You cannot go.” I fled to the bathroom and cried my eyes out, something I never did.  Finally, I could see the pitiful situation I had been in and was still in.  Eventually, I relented, put on the dress, and saw my friends. 

We were still in shock, as the looks on all our faces showed. In the photograph, my grandfather looks determined to protect us. We were not at ease in this photograph, it would take a while.  Meanwhile, we had family photographs that enhanced memories of the past, making the future more understandable.

There were new rules; now, we had to adapt to a new life with our grandparents. We were out of the orphanage, but the memories were still there. I had a vague memory of relief and of being safe again. My grandparents seemed pleased that the worst of the ordeal was over. 

When we children initially left for Florida, they had sold their big home and moved into a four-bedroom penthouse condo. Now that we were back my grandfather realized that my parents would most likely not be returning to pick up their children, so they sold their condo and moved into a home on the oceanfront on 74^th Street. However, there was still tension at home. No one talked about anything that had happened. There was the life my grandparents planned and the life they got.

In these photographs, Drew was standing up, and he was beginning to walk and talk.  I was catching fish, and I could still dress up while Butch had the football to hold onto or pass. Happier days were here.

1953

Academic life had its challenges.  I was 11 starting 6^th grade. I went to public school that first year. My grandmother bought me the encyclopedia, so I did not have to be driven to the library. I could learn at home. I started reading from the A’s, and who knows how far I got before I had to transfer schools. The good part was that the boys liked me. The girls liked to play skip rope, and I liked to play marbles with the boys. I was a tomboy, as I had two younger brothers, who influenced my comfort with playing sports rather than doing girl things. 

When we moved, from the condo, I was the only girl with seven boys in the neighborhood. Perfect for me as there was more freedom and adventure. The boys got me to put my hair back in my baseball cap and try out for the baseball team.  I made the team but was soon discovered to be a girl.  In that day and age, girls were prohibited from playing sports unless they went to a private, all-girl school. [7]It took until 1972 for girls to have the same opportunities as boys to play sports in public schools.

Then it was Graham’s School for Girls. I was in eighth grade, and there were no boys in the school, and it was tiny.  There were 8 people in my grade versus 30 in the public school.  The school was also an hour bus ride away. Sometimes I would spend the night with my grandmother’s youngest sister, Tilly, in Norfolk.  I was fond of Tilly and her husband, my Uncle Walter, who was a doctor and taught me all kinds of things about medicine and told me I could be a doctor.  I told him I could not spell or memorize.  He laughed and said, I could learn to do it as medical school was years away.

Another positive event was that my grandfather would take me to the nearby drugstore for a banana split when I did well in school.  No one knew about dyslexia, and I struggled with spelling and memorizing.  But I loved to learn History and English, were my favorite courses, and I got my fair share of banana splits. 

The next summer, after we had arrived from Florida:  Butch and I were both sent to camp in North Carolina for two months. I was not ready to leave home.  But once I got to Camp Merrie-Woode, I loved it. Mostly I loved the horses. I did not relate well to the other children, in my mind. However, according to the camp log other girls liked me, but I clearly chose to focus on learning to be a good rider.  Compliments were and still are, hard to take.

I would get up early in the morning and go feed the horses, muck out the stalls, and get in an early ride.  These were some amazing prize-winning horses.  The owner was a Hungarian man who had barely managed to escape Hitler.  Here I developed my first real crush on a male counselor named Hugh. I think I talked to him once, but he was a tall guy with a guitar. Finally, I was becoming a bit more of a girl. I was adapting, life in the summer was good. When we moved, I was the only girl with seven boys in the neighborhood. Perfect for me as there was more freedom and adventure. The boys got me to put my hair back in my baseball cap and try out for the baseball team.  I made the team but was soon discovered to be a girl.  In that day and age, girls were prohibited from playing sports unless they went to a private, all-girl school. It took until 1972 for girls to have the same opportunities as boys to play sports in public schools. [8]

1956

At 14 I was still struggling in school and had no friends that lived close by. Therefore, my grandmother decided to send me to a boarding school, Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School, in Washington, D.C.  I had a fit; it seemed like I was going to another orphanage. I cried again but to no avail. The car was packed, and off we went. I repeated the ninth grade again and did much better. Probably due to this new opportunity to excel. “Sports teams for girls” was a gift that gave me breathing room to be more myself in boarding school. I still knew the importance of status in these all-girl groups. I was very aware, and so at some level, I knew how to excel.

I still did not ask questions about where my parents were. Seemingly, I knew what the right way to fit in was. I fell in line with the emotional process. I could not see the real situation that I was in. I was emotionally blind. I was just willing to do what it might take to live with my grandparents and keep the peace. 

As a young preteenager, I recall going shopping with my grandmother at the seafood store, a favorite of mine as there were big fish everywhere.  I would “help” my grandmother cook fish on the weekends.  In the evenings, she would knit, and my grandfather would read while I tried to do my homework.  I experienced my grandmother as a calm, caring, and organized person who would read me stories in the evening.  But who was not going to be sympathetic if you broke the rules. Only later did I see the cost to her of taking on and trying to manage her husband and my mother and her grandchildren, as she had chronically high blood pressure.

In my early teen years, I would accompany her to the doctors and read detective and science fiction stories that were divorced from the life I was living.  She always had candy in her car, and I would often get a reward.  Butch, on the other hand, would often get punished.

Butch got more negative focus as he had taken to lighting fires on the beach when he was about ten.  As punishment his grandmother had him hold matches until they got close to burning his flesh.  Of course, I objected to such punishment and begged my grandmother to stop. Later in life, I wondered how this enactment of the fire on the beach and the burning of one’s flesh had to do with the war and Butch’s confused way of understanding his father’s pain.

I got away with arguing with my grandfather as I turned my attention to knowledge.  He paid me $1.00 if I could read and explain the first paragraph in a Scientific American magazine.  I felt proud that my grandfather was interested in listening to my explanations of science. I was good at anything that did not require spelling.  No one had heard of dyslexia in the fifties. Eventually, they just put me in the creative category classes.

I had never heard of separation anxiety or even anxiety, but Butch more than I ran into hard times adjusting to a new world run by nuns and priests. Butch manifested his issues by rebelling and drinking at age 14.  At 15, Butch was kicked out of Georgetown Prep for drinking.  I could not understand how he would “choose” to be more like his father than his grandfather, whom he was named after, Walter Maher Maloney. It seemed impossible to believe that Butch chose what he was doing.  We drifted apart. Butch found surfing and I had tennis and other sports.

I still rebelled as early on I assumed the role of lawyer and caretaker for my brother. I was the “little mother” and tried to convince Butch to go along with all the demands from his family. Butch did not want to conform to a Southern culture that offered conformity as the big prize. As one of the first and most talented surfers in Virginia Beach. Butch had an identity that he liked.  But still, he was a surfer and not a businessman. 

Butch helped lobby for and create The East Coast Surfing Championship, with his friends.[9]

I saw that Butch had his own life that he loved, but still I saw that he was drinking and had some kind of a conflict-oriented relationship with his grandfather.  Butch seemed determined to say his grandfather was wrong, but he did it in a way that harmed his own life. I could not figure that out. There were a lot of things I did not understand. But I knew that Walter Clement Maher, our grandfather, had encouraged his son-in-law to go to war.  Perhaps this is what Butch and our grandfather were fighting about. 

Above is a photograph of my grandfather, Walter C. Maher.

Then here is Butch taking a right turn, riding his beloved ocean waves.

I had no real relationship with my mother.  Whereas my grandmother was in weekly contact and sent the monthly check. She was to receive money every month for staying away from her children.  They bought her a home and a car and made sure that she could survive. My mother moved further and further away till she got to Portland, Oregon.  I may have talked to her on the phone a few times. But there was no serious contact until after I was married. 

I had more contact with my father during these years. My father lived in Williamsburg and in Arlington, Va., where his parents lived.  From the recollection of my cousin Liz, who lived in the Arlington home with him, she noted that he was up and down with his drinking. I recall his coming to Virginia Beach to see us at least once.  He was cold-sober by then.  He was not going to risk going sideways with my grandparents.   There was so much distance that it was like living in a dark tunnel.

I have one memory of my father taking Butch and I out for an adventure in my four years of high school. I was distant but curious about him and his life.  Charming as he could be, I was safe as long as he was not drinking.  The adventure time that lingers in my memory is when Butch and I went to a Washington Redskin game with him.  We had fun and that was remarkable.

During those high school years, he also took me to see his parents and meet my cousins. Three of us were born in 1941: my cousin Mary Ann, myself, and Fred Maloney. My father’s first two siblings had their children that same year that I was born. My father was the closest in age to his sister Marie, so it made sense that we would spend more time with her children, Charles and Mary Ann. 

In addition, they lived close to my grandparents, whereas Fred was in Williamsburg working with his dad, Jimmy Maloney, at the Williamsburg Pottery Factory. We would visit their family there in the summertime.  Jimmy was active, taking us water skiing and riding in a truck full of hay.  I have many fond memories of playing basketball with Jimmy while ‘working’ at the Pottery, and then it was time to go to college.

In the sixties, society turned towards civil rights for African Americans.  My grandparents could not believe in equal rights; they had barely accepted that women could vote.  The old hierarchy should be maintained.    

My grandmother warned me not to touch the hands of the woman who did the laundry but to put the money on the mantelpiece for her. I said,  But she touches all your clothes, how does that make sense?” My grandmother said: This is how I do it. Now you must do it for me as I am sick.  She had heart disease and high blood pressure, and therefore I could not fight with her. I could only see that I would have to adjust. Possibly the best decision I could make at that time.

 I had seen society, and my parents fall apart. My grandparents had done so much for me and my brothers, and many others, including my mother. I felt very strongly that I owed them both deep gratitude and respect. But how much of a solid self, did I manage to hold onto when I left home for college?  What was important to me was having knowledge about human behavior. How else could one prepare for the coming hurricanes?

---

[1] Family Evaluation by Michael E. Kerr and Murray Bowen | Oct 17, 1988

[2] Curtis LeMay, the war against civilians was necessary. Curtis LeMay (1906-1990) was a United States Air Force general. LeMay is known for designing and implementing the systematic strategic bombing campaign in the Pacific Theater during World War II.

[3] The role of the hippocampus – The Strange Order of Things by Antonio Damasio, page 95

[4] First three lectures that Freud gave Clark University.

[5] Asch’s experiment demonstrated that peer pressure has more of an impact on our behavior than was originally believed. It was unexpected that the influence of a peer group would convince people to give a response they could see with their eyes was obviously incorrect. https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html

[6]  Lamberts Point Coal Terminal is an NS-served and operated transshipment terminal located on the Elizabeth River in Norfolk, Va. Annual throughput capacity is 48 million tons. http://www.nscorp.com/content/nscorp/en/shipping-options/coal/transload-facilities/lamberts-point-coal-terminal-norfolk-va.html)

[7]

[8] The passage of Title IX, the 1972 Education Amendments to the Civil Rights Act, expanded high school athletic opportunities to include girls, revolutionizing mass sports participation in the United States. https://users.nber.org/~bstevens/papers/Title%20IX%20and%20the%20Evolution%20of%20High%20School%20Sports%20(old).pdf

[9] https://www.pilotonline.com/2019/11/09/butch-maloney-surfings-east-coast-wild-child-dies-at-76/.