Snap By Snap

The picture above is of my Mom, Aunt Maybelle, and me. Maybelle was really my Mom's mother, but I grew up calling her Aunt Maybelle. She lived in Arizona in a very exciting high rise apartment building where she always had butterscotch candies in a dish. For a five year old this was exciting stuff. We called her Aunt Maybelle because she did not want anyone, even us, to know that she was really our mom's mother, and our grandmother. After 'going away' to have her baby, Maybelle tried to secretly care for her baby for about two years until she became ill with rickets, and had to be adopted by another family. Maybelle stayed in touch, and sometime in her teens my mom finally figured out who her real mother was. They did stay in touch, but what a complicated relationship it must have been. Maybelle sometimes sent presents at Christmas - one I remember was a frilly store bought dress (my mom made most of my dresses) and matching socks - and I think she visited us once. She never married, and never had any other children, and always lived alone. Even when my mom died of cancer at age 49, Maybelle did not want to be listed on the obituary as the mother, for fear someone would find out. She came to the funeral, but refused to be identified.

So now, all these years later, I wonder about Maybelle. It's very likely that she went to a maternity home to deliver her baby in 1922. Although women had gained new freedoms such as the vote, unwed mothers were still considered to be mentally ill or even criminal. I was amazed to read that one in four pregnancies ended in abortion the year my mother was born. Considering the societal pressures Maybelle undoubtedly experienced, I have a lot of sympathy for her circumstances when my Mom was born. I'm so glad she did not abort her, and that she managed to stay in touch with her even when adoption became necessary. What I don't understand is her 50 year insistence on the keeping of the secret. Whatever her reasons, she lost out on a deeper relationship with her daughter and family in order to devote herself to the lifelong nurturing of a secret.