Things My Mother Never Told Me
Old memories are funny. They tie
themselves with long threads to a sound or smell or image, and occasionally
they are pulled into awareness, swirling into view, tugged forward by one of
our senses. I seem to have more childhood memories than most people I know. I
could talk months before I could walk, and I’ve always supposed it was the
early language that allowed for so many early recollections. Since I was very
young, I’ve carried a few scenes around in my mind that seemed familiar and yet
unrelated to the rest of my life.
One of these memories is attached to 1958 and the short
time we lived in Lamar, Colorado. I was almost four. In my memory, I can see a diner with a large wooden
screen door, covered in bright metal advertising. The door is so large I can
hardly reach the worn, metal handle. I am too small to ever pull it open on my
own. The metal spring squeals as my dad opens the door, and it closes behind us
with a sharp clap of wood on wood. Overhead, a wooden fan, with long blades,
cuts through the summer heat and blows my curls around. Ahead, I see a circular
stool as tall as I am. Its seat is upholstered in green and white vinyl, with
shiny metal trim along the rim. It’s attached to a tall metal pole, bolted to
the floor. It sits in a row of identical stools in front of a long, wooden bar.
My dad lifts me onto that stool, and I sit carefully as the seat swivels and
twists left and right with my movement. The bar is tall, and I rest my arms on
it as best I can. On the other side of the bar is a smiling man with a big
laugh and a gentle, teasing manner. He
talks to my parents and to me, leaning across the wide bar to hear my answers
to his questions. Behind me, I hear the big screen door squeal and slam as
people enter and exit throughout our visit; each of them greeting the friendly
man behind the counter. It’s a very happy memory, surrounded in love, and
yet, totally unrelated to anything else I know in my life.
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For as long as I can remember, I have always had three grandparents. My dad’s
parents, Ida and Arthur Johnson, and my mom’s mom, Frances Dibbens. I spent a
lot of time with all three and have many wonderful childhood memories of them. You would think I would have wondered why there were only three, but
I don’t recall questioning it.
My single memory of my second grandpa
was the day he died, in 1963. I don’t think I related the event to him as a
grandpa at the time. The phone on the
desk in the dining room is ringing. That isn’t anything new. My mom is close to
her family and has many friends, so our phone rings often. Mom appears in the
kitchen door, reaches over the desk in the dining room, and lifts the receiver.
The memory of that phone call is tied to a moment seconds after she says,
“hello.” In an instant, that call is set apart from all others, and a thread is
tied that will forever connect the memory in my mind. First, there is silence, and then a quiet sob. If you’ve ever uttered
a sob or had your voice crack around children, you know how quickly they home
in on it. As Mom speaks softly into the receiver, quiet sobs periodically
interrupting her words, my two little sisters and I are drawn to her like
magnets. She sits at the desk with the receiver to her ear, tears filling her
eyes. 
I don’t think any of us had ever heard her cry. Her tears continue as she
says goodbye and sets the receiver back on the cradle. As the oldest child and
the worrier of the family, I have questions. “Why are you crying, Mommy? Is everything ok?”
Mom looks at my youngest sister, Laurie, whom she has pulled onto her lap
sometime during the call, and then at Kris and me. She wipes her eyes with a
tissue, pulled from the box on the desk, and simply says, “My Daddy died
today.”
That memory is the only one I have
concerning my “other” grandpa. I don’t remember wondering why we didn’t know
her daddy. I don’t remember whether she went to the funeral. It would have
required a day’s worth of travel each way because of the distance.
By grade school, I understood that my
grandmother was divorced. She was a single unit in my eyes, and I never thought
to connect her with “Mom’s daddy who died.” She lived in a house across the
highway from her restaurant, “Dibben’s Drive Inn,” on the outskirts of Garden
City, Kansas. She was independent, resourceful, and a manager of fry cooks and curb
hops. She drove around town in a green and white, air-conditioned Buick,
turning the big knob on the steering wheel as we eased around the corners on
the way to the bank or grocery store. Everyone seemed to know her, and she had
a cheerful word for each person she met, punctuated by laughter. To the east of
her two-story house sat a small mobile home; the home of her brother-in-law,
Jarman, and his wife, Pearl. Uncle Jerry and Aunt Pearl were a big part of the
visits to my grandmother’s house. The laughter and teasing never stopped when
they were around. From the descriptions of my grandpa that my mom’s cousins
have now given me, I’m pretty sure that my grandpa and his brother, Jerry, were
very much alike.
As a teen, I remember digging through a storeroom shelf in our basement
one day and finding a white cardboard box. It was filled with sympathy cards,
dried flowers, and purple ribbons that seemed to have been pulled from a floral
spray. I asked Mom about it at that time, and she told me, in the fewest words
necessary, that they were from her dad’s funeral. She then placed the box on a
higher shelf and said no more.
Was it evidence that Mom attended the
funeral or that someone saved these “remembrance items” for her?
Grandma moved to Boulder, Colorado,
when I was nine. It was further from me but closer to my uncle and five
cousins, who needed her help. Eventually, she took a job as a house mother for
a large boys’ dorm on the campus of the University of Colorado. We saw her as
often as we could, but not as much as when she lived in Kansas.
In my late twenties, I was a young divorced mother myself. I was
suffering the aftereffects of shame and a fear of the future. My mom, my
daughter, Emily, and I headed to Boulder to visit Grandma that summer. Soon
after we arrived, Grandma pulled me into her little apartment’s bedroom, away
from my three-year-old daughter and worried mother. She closed the door, and we
sat together on her bed. She told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was strong
and would survive. By that time, my grandpa had been gone for nearly 20 years.
It didn’t seem appropriate to ask more questions. I was still wallowing in
humiliation and guilt, fully focused on my situation. What I remember feeling
was her strength and determination as her arms wrapped around me and she said
those words, “You are complete the way you are. You don’t need someone else to
make you happy.” I never doubted those words, born of the experience of the
strong, joyful woman I called Grandma.
That happened several years before I
caught the genealogy bug and decades before I stood at Grandma’s grave. The
boxes and bags of her letters, pictures, papers, and artifacts found their way
into my house, now operating as the “family history library.” It was then that
I discovered the brittle pieces of a faded wedding certificate, ripped in half,
yet both pieces still safely stored away with the rest of her life's artifacts.
As I processed this puzzle as an
adult, the memory of the phone call swirled through my mind, and I experienced
it, this time, as one of a granddaughter hearing of her grandfather’s death.
The holes in the puzzle saddened me as
I worked to fit the pieces of a broken family together;
a romance,
a marriage,
a happy start with two children,
fond memories voiced by nieces and nephews of their Aunt Frances and Uncle
Forest,
stories of Grandpa’s big keg parties held at their farm in south central
Kansas,
arguments bad enough for family intervention,
love and laughter,
family pictures,
a 200-mile move to Garden City,
a family business,
thirty years of marriage,
a betrayal,
broken trust,
a separation,
a divorce the year I was born,
a marriage certificate ripped in two,
carefully kept secrets,
and a collapse in communication between Grandpa, his extended family, and his
children.
Mom’s wounds were covered in perpetual
bandages of silence.
Mom has been gone since 2004. She is
the one who got me interested in genealogy, and we often spoke about our family
tree. I don’t remember anyone asking me not to talk about my grandpa. It seems
so odd now that I wouldn’t have asked her something. Was there an unspoken
rule? Did it just feel so normal that I ignored the silence? Was she just
waiting for me to ask, ready with a prepared speech that she never got to give?
I’ll never know. She was so close to her family; both her mom’s and dad’s families.
I asked her questions about everyone in the family, except one person: her dad,
my Grandpa Dibbens.
The detached memory of the man across
the counter in Lamar swirled through my mind for nearly sixty years before I
ever thought to describe it to anyone. By that time, my dad was the only one
left who could fill in the blanks and link the memory to my life. When I told
him what I recalled during a visit a few weeks before his death, he nodded and
said, “That was your Grandpa Dibbens. He had a diner in Lamar at the time I was
transferred with the company, and we moved there for a few months.”
As I sat processing this information,
I realized how full of God’s blessing and healing His plan had been. How
fortunate was my dad’s transfer! Mom had to have been hurting from the
abandonment by her father. No one knew that Grandpa would be dead within five
years. Dad was transferred to the same state and town in which Mom’s estranged
father was living. We were there for several months, and Mom had a chance to
reconcile with her dad, healing some of the damage caused by the trauma in her
childhood. She had the chance to forgive, and he had the chance to be forgiven.
As for this granddaughter? I have the
gift of a lovely memory of a grandpa I thought I’d never known.
I don’t know why Mom stayed silent
about her childhood and her dad. He remained in all the family pictures but not
in the family stories. Possibly, it still hurt to talk about it, or more
probably, she had determined early on to move past it and make our childhood
different from hers. From all I’ve learned and all I know, she succeeded at
that! She was her mother’s daughter, after all! My sisters and I grew up
sheltered from all the vices that marred her own childhood, and all the love
and goodness she could gather.
