My mother has never been good at telling me news. Revelations from her seem to be abrupt and unprovoked, and as a result, surprising. For example, three or so years ago, we were sitting in the car, and my mom was trying to explain her job to me, a topic that was mentioned often but one that I barely understood. I knew that my mom worked in the business of fertility, mainly with patients who struggle to get pregnant through traditional methods and turn to in-vitro fertilization, where the mother’s egg and father’s sperm are combined in a test tube, but I wasn’t exactly sure about her role in the business. While clarifying what it is she does, my mom remarked, “Well, you know that you were in-vitro,” then tried to continue with her explanation. I, as a matter of fact, had no idea that I was in-vitro, a “test tube baby.” I was taken aback, and my mom realized this, and began to laugh and apologize for not telling me earlier. This experience has become a favorite of my mom’s, a story she tells often at dinner parties and among friends. While I was a little thrown off for a few days afterwards, I’ve come to find the story funny myself.
A similar thing happened a few months back when I was speaking to my mom about her teenage years. I asked her about what party culture was like for her and her friends. She responded by telling me that she used to host lots of parties in her later high-school years. Knowing my maternal grandparents, especially my grandfather, I was surprised.
“How did you get away with that?” I asked her.
“I mean, my parents were out of the country for most of my senior year, you know that,” she replied, with that same sense of pointing out the obvious to me, like I should have known better. Once again, this caught me by surprise. The story of my mother’s childhood was never necessarily a sore topic, but one that slowly unraveled as I grew, with my mom letting out more and more information until she evidently lost track of how much she had told me. I learned in bits and pieces, through little anecdotes and lessons involving neighbors and friends. One accident while riding a bike here, another fight with her sister there. I tried to absorb what I could without actively prodding, but once I understood the true gravity of her life before marriage and kids, I finally had the interest to ask about the narrative in full.
Pamela Theresa Schumann was born on January 27th, 1966, in a U.S. base camp in Germany. Her mother, Inge, had lived in Germany all her life. She met George, my mother’s dad, while he was stationed in Germany, and a couple of months before my mother was born, he was called to Vietnam. Shortly after my grandfather returned from war, they moved to the United States, into a split-level ranch house in East Brunswick, New Jersey. My grandmother worked in a department store, and my grandfather received his MBA and then got a job at CitiBank. There, they lived across from Italian neighbors, the Iadivias. They had meats curing downstairs, and the house always smelled of fresh sauce being prepared. I remember hearing descriptions of the Iadivias, along with a story that took place years later. My mother was living in Hoboken, and some mail was misplaced in her mailbox, addressed to one of the Iadivias’ daughters, Filomena. As it turned out, Filomena had been living right above her, and she had no idea. Glimpses like these were the extent of my prior knowledge of my mother’s childhood, nice stories that I could tell were bursting with nostalgia when she told them.
When my mother was ten years old, her family moved to Westfield, New Jersey. There, they lived in a traditional two-story colonial house, with a formal dining room and a squared-off, gated yard. Westfield was a little bit of a stretch for the Schumanns, who were a lower-middle class family, but they made that stretch because they wanted the best public schooling for my mother and her older sister, Patty. There, my mother was able to live as normal a childhood as she ever had. Family dinners, pool clubs, and gatherings of friends filled her preteen years. Her parents never pushed her to do homework, but she worked decently hard in school and was a B student. My mother worked outside of school through lots of her education. She got her first job at twelve years old, a paper route. She remained independent from a young age through academics and work, and never complained about her jobs. “I started working to get more money,” she simply explained to me. “My parents could only give me a certain amount, which I was fine with, but I wanted more, so I worked for it.” For me, my mother’s time in Westfield initially consisted of stories of old boyfriends and football games; now I know it as the place where my grandmother left.
When my mother was around fourteen, her parents told her that they were getting a divorce. This didn’t come as a surprise to her; she had known for months due to the thin walls and sense of tension throughout the house. They initially planned to stay together until my mother graduated high school, but my grandmother had met someone back in Germany, and once the news was out, the divorce accelerated quickly. Inge was out of the house three months after they divorced. My mother and her sister were invited to come to Germany as well, but they refused, knowing that my grandfather would never let them go.
After Patty graduated high school, she stayed at the house, working and attending some classes at Rutgers. My mother worked as well, cleaning houses and serving food at fourteen, working as a bank teller at sixteen, and working retail at eighteen. That year my grandfather took months at a time to go to Asia for work, leaving the house without parents for lots of long periods. Inevitably, the Schumann house became a party hotspot, with people coming over every weekend, invited or not. My mother threw parties as a cover-up; she found it to be the easiest way to throw others off the track about her own home life. By this point, she was cooking herself dinner every night, working several hours a day, and trying to maintain her grades, all at once. Parties seemed like a good distraction from a truth she never even told her friends. These parties never got out of hand, however. My mother always controlled them because she knew she’d be the only one dealing with the aftermath. She was popular in high school, though she speaks of that term now like she never really knew the true meaning. She graduated high school in 1984 and attended the University of Maryland in College Park. My grandfather paid for the education in full. When they got divorced, my grandmother didn’t take any money, so she felt that she didn’t have to give any. When my mother was in college, her father moved to Asia for a few years, then bought a new house in Scotch Plains, New Jersey.
After college, my mother moved back home for a little while, then lived alone in Hoboken. Eventually, she moved to Manhattan, where she took a job in healthcare, met my father there, moved all the way to Cold Spring, and had children. Early adulthood isn’t a topic my mother talks about as much; it was even hard for her to remember where she worked and when. I feel like she doesn’t view it as history yet. Besides the off-handed comments that my father flirted with her long before he asked her out at work, I know very little about my mother during that period, even after talking to her recently. In that conversation, I could tell those times meant less to her, as she skipped from job title to job title and city to city, with a much less reminiscent tone.
When my grandmother left the country, my mother struggled less than others would have when it came to independence. She had to fend for herself from early on. However, my mother still had a very hard time forgiving her. They called each other rarely, and those calls were mostly at the request of my grandmother. Beside those few calls, there was no other contact between the two of them.
“Even though my mom has tried to explain her reasoning many times, I just couldn’t grasp how she could leave us like that,” my mother told me.
This stain in the relationship didn’t dissipate quickly, either. The first time they saw each other afterward was over three years later, when my mother, a sophomore in college, flew to Germany to stay with my grandmother. This only initiated the process of reconciliation.
“In some ways, it got harder to understand when I became a parent. She’s apologized to me many times, and eventually I realized that I had to choose whether or not to forgive her.”
With time, my mother came to the conclusion that forgiving my grandmother was the healthiest thing to do. “I wanted to have a relationship with her. I could just as easily have never spoken to her again, and that would’ve been it, but I didn’t want that.” She also wanted my grandmother to be able to form a relationship with me and my sister; the value of family seemed most important.
Nowadays, Mom is gone a lot more than she has been. This past December, she took a new job as CEO of a start-up, working with machine learning to assess egg quality of women trying to get pregnant. This came after she quit her old job as an executive with the IVF company she was with for so long. She broke this news to me amid normal conversation, and I would have expected nothing else. Her new company is located in Toronto, and she flies out almost weekly, for three or four days at a time. My mother is trying to present the start-up company in conferences, looking for investment wherever she can find it. On the days she is home, she works until the late hours of the night. In December I performed in a musical that I had written and directed, staying at school late with my cast during two of the toughest weeks of the school year. She couldn’t come. In mid-January, while I was sitting and doing homework on an average Tuesday night, I got into my first college. She wasn’t there.
It’s selfish to blame her. How dare I think that, I tell myself, she is working hard for you and your future. I know that’s true, of course I do. I’m privileged to have the caring parents that I do. I’ve never really felt an absence that I know my mother felt. When I grow older, and my children ask me about what my teenage life was like, I’ll be able to recount experiences of outings with friends and family vacations without feeling like I’m hiding something. However, as both my schedule and my mother’s become more filled, and the amount of time we spend together shrinks, I can only get a hint of the pain that I know she felt for several years.