Life on the Ramona Coaster (5 page)

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Always Let Faith Be Your Guide

I
AM SITTING IN
the living room of my childhood home, staring out the big picture window that faces our front yard and looks out at the majestic Hudson River in the distance. I am fourteen-years-old. It is spring and the dogwood is beginning to bloom. But I am looking beyond the sea of white blossoms glistening in the sunlight. I am daydreaming again; I’m imagining a life beyond this window. One filled with love, happiness, and success. A life in which I have a father who comes home from work, hands some flowers to my mother, and then gives us each a kiss us on the cheek. A life where we sit around the dinner table and talk about our day.

I am so lost in this alternate reality that I barely notice my mother appear beside me. She stands with her back to the window and faces me. She has a look that I have never seen before. She starts to speak and I can tell by her solemn tone that she has something difficult to say. I just listen.

“Ramona, I want you to know that I pray to God every night that you don’t make the same mistakes that I made. I pray to God that you will have a better life than mine.”

It’s as if my mother has read my mind. Could she know that I was sitting at this window dreaming of a different life, one better than hers?

“What do you mean?” I ask timidly.

“I don’t want you to end up like me. I was so young when I met your father. I was a senior in high school, not much older than you are now. I was instantly attracted to your father. He was so handsome and he seemed like such an adult to me; he already had a great job and earned a nice living. We fell in love. I was supposed to attend Vassar College in the fall. I wanted to get a degree and have a career.” She pauses, and I can tell she is struggling to find the words for what she has to say next, “But then the unthinkable happened. I got pregnant—with
you
. I knew I couldn’t give you up.”

I take a deep breath. I say nothing. I am speechless. I can’t believe what my mother is telling me. I never knew that I was an unplanned pregnancy, that
I
was the reason my mother married my father. I never knew that my mother had wanted to go to college and that she had to give up that dream because of me. I am overwhelmed with guilt. I wonder if she blames me for her unhappy life.

Y
EARS LATER, WHEN
my mother was in the hospital dying, I realized that even though she married my father because she got pregnant, the real reason she stayed with him was because he had given her the home she never had as a child. My mother was a Hungarian refugee who came to this country when she was fourteen or fifteen years old. She was born in Budapest and at some point during the 1940s, she and her mother were forced to leave their homeland and flee to Austria. I don’t know much about how or why she fled—she didn’t like to talk about it—but my understanding is that Budapest was being bombed and they had to leave or they would die. They ended up in a displaced persons camp in Austria because the only way to get into the United States at that point was through one of these camps.

My grandmother didn’t speak German so my mother became her interpreter, her connection to the world. She was barely in her teens, but she took on this adult role of negotiating everything from haggling for food to dealing with the paperwork they needed to get into the United States. I’m not sure how long they lived like this—maybe six months, maybe a year, maybe two—but eventually a Hungarian church in Poughkeepsie sponsored them to come to America. With little more than the clothes on their backs, they left Austria and settled in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York. To support them in this new life, my grandmother took different jobs working for people in their homes as a cook. They moved from house to house, never settling anywhere long enough for my mother to set down roots. I can’t imagine how horrible it must have been for her to lose her home and end up living in a DP camp, only to come to the United States and still not really have a home. She was so young that this chaotic life and lack of stability must have had a huge impact on her.

A few years after they arrived in the States, she met my father at a Polish polka dance. He had graduated from engineering school and had a good job at IBM. My mother was a very beautiful, intelligent woman, but once she got pregnant it must have seemed that marrying my father was the best option she had to make a good life for herself. My father built her a big house in the country and I know this house was deeply important to her. I believe a big part of the reason she never left him was that she didn’t want to leave the only real home she ever had. At that time there were no shelters for battered women, no resources for women like her. My father would say, “Where are you going to go? You have four kids. If you leave me, you’ll have no money, no home.” Nothing frightened my mother more than the idea of becoming displaced again.

My father was the youngest of six children. He grew up during the depression in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. His parents were Ukrainian immigrants who met on the boat coming to the United States. His father was a carpenter and his mother was a stern, sadistic woman who was physically and verbally abusive. The oldest three of his siblings were girls and they actually wanted to take him away from their mother because she was so abusive. I remember my aunt Stella, who was twelve years older than my father, telling me stories of how their mother would make him soak in a warm bath before she would beat him so that his skin would soften and it would hurt more. It’s not surprising he became a misogynist and grew up to perpetuate the cycle of abuse. The only fond memories I have of my father during my childhood are the times he played games with us. When he wasn’t drinking, he could actually be very charming and creative. He used to make up all kinds of games for us to play. There was “Button, Button” where we’d all line up with our hands out, palms together. He’d pass his own closed hands over each of ours, drop a button into one of our hands and say, “Button, button, who has the button?” We also used to play a game he made up called “Tin Can Alley,” where he’d line up his beer cans for us to kick into a makeshift goal. Whoever got closest won the game. My mother was a great homemaker, but my father was the creative one.

Mazur family portrait: me, my mother and father, and my siblings (Tanya, Sonya, and Nick)

As I got older, he and I would butt heads because I was the eldest and I was very strong-willed and independent. I definitely inherited some of his antagonistic streak; when I feel that I’m being attacked, I can sometimes go below the belt say hurtful things without thinking. I decided when I was fifteen-years-old that I wasn’t going to take his crap anymore, or anyone else’s for that matter. My mother was very non-confrontational and, after I stood up to my father in the kitchen that day, I became her defender. After that, he became less aggressive with me, but he withheld his love and approval—which is another kind of abuse. He basically ignored me, and when he wasn’t ignoring me he was criticizing me.

My mother did try to leave him a couple of times, but she always came back. When things got really bad, she’d take us to Brooklyn, where my grandmother lived, to get away from him for a few days. One time when I was six or seven, we stayed there for a week. My grandmother lived in a tiny, one-bedroom apartment and we had to sleep on the living room floor. It was awful. I just wanted to go home, to sleep in my own bed in my own bedroom. We weren’t really allowed to go out, so most of the time we were just cooped up in this tiny apartment. The only time I remember leaving the apartment was when my mom took us on the subway to visit the World’s Fair.

At night, my father would call and I could hear my grandmother saying, “No, Veronika’s not here. I don’t know where she is.” I remember thinking,
why is my grandmother not telling my father where we are?
I was old enough to know something wasn’t right, but not old enough to understand what was going on. Maybe I didn’t want to know.

E
VEN THOUGH I
can tell sharing these memories with me is painful, my mother steels herself and continues, “After I found out I was pregnant, your father decided the respectable thing to do was to get married. So we did. And then we had you, and later your brother and your sisters. So I never went to college.” This is the first time my mother has ever acknowledged to me, or anyone, that she has felt trapped in an unhappy marriage. No matter how much my father drinks or how mean he gets when he does, we have always known never to speak about it with my mother.

My mother and father on their wedding day, ca. 1956

My heart breaks for my mother. She keeps reassuring me how happy she has been with her four children and that we are the only source of joy in her life. But I know that beneath it all she is profoundly sad about how her life turned out. She talks for a long time. She is so honest, so vulnerable. It’s hard for me to take it all in. I keep wondering how she has been able to hold it together all these years. Where does she find the strength to wake up every day and go on living given what she has endured?