This is the link to one of the ‘article’ pieces I have found among my mother’s papers.  It was with August 1960 letters, but had no date on the paper it was written on.

My mother was certain that she was going to ‘someday’ write a book on homesteading, She specifically planned that her letters to my grandmother, written during this time were saved, and returned back to her.  Yet very, very few of the letters had any date placed on them at all.

I can estimate letter dates by the envelope postmarks, but many letters are NOT in envelopes and without dates it makes it extremely hard to know where to place the letters along the ‘timeline’ of my childhood years that I am trying to create!

My grandmother, an educated and astute woman, obviously knew of my mother’s plan because she was a participant in it.  Yet she did not make sure on her end, once she had received a letter, that she wrote at least the date the letter came into her hands if there was no clear postmark on the envelope – which happened often!

The inability to ‘tell a coherent life story’ in adulthood – or even during an abusive childhood – is a prime hallmark symptom of an insecure attachment-disordered pattern formed by ‘inadequate’ early infant and childhood interactions with caregivers.

My mother had such an insecure attachment pattern, which she GOT in her childhood from her interactions with her mother (and others).   It looks to me as I work with the writings — that went back and forth between these women for years — as if this total lack of organization or coherent ordering of all these carefully written and preserved letters about the story of homesteading, are themselves in a state that is a clear indication of the MESS that the insecure attachment patterns created in my mother’s life as well as in my own childhood.

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It is almost as if these letters, journal pages, pieces of articles my mother wrote, my grandmother’s response letters to my mother’s letters – all of them, in the tattered, confused, disorganized, often undated, never been sorted, hauled around in this box or that over thousands of miles and many, many moves, stored in assorted storage lockers for decades – are themselves all remnants of once-lived lives that were lived in a very similar fashion.  Yet they also reflect a certain value shared in common – they endured and they survived.  They are still here, as I am.

It seems to be my life’s work right now to find the stories in the stories.  I have amazing advantages that my mother and my grandmother never had in their lifetimes.  I have the very real gift of a computer, the gift of the internet, and the gift of this free blog space so generously provided by WordPress.com.   My sister gave me this computer for my writing.  My brother gave me this printer.  My children pay for my internet.  I am grateful to all of them.

My mother and grandmother cared enough about one another to write all these letters.  They cared enough to hold onto them, to keep them, to preserve them.  In the same strange way that I can never ‘blame’ my mother for her abuse of me because I understand how sick she was, I cannot ‘blame’ her for never, in her entire lifetime, being able to accomplish with them what she had hoped to do.  She could never write her own book.  She could never publish.  She could never tell her own coherent life story for the same reason she could not adequately mother her own children.

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These papers are in their own form of chaos, and within their words they tell stories of the chaos that was my childhood.  It would take an almost super human effort to actually create the coherent story now.  I would be very surprised if I can do it in my lifetime.  My process does not feel like ‘blogging’ to me.  It feel like ‘plogging’ as I spend hundreds and hundreds of tedious hours trying to find and create order out of this madness.

For every step I take I hope that if I can’t actually finish bringing this whole story together, maybe at least the work I am doing now will be picked up by another generation so it can be ‘finished’ in the future.  We are a family of writers.  Perhaps that is our curse.  Yet I feel as if all my ancestors’ words are being placed in safe keeping as I enter them into this clean white screen of my computer.  I feel honored to be able to share them with you., including this article piece that my mother wrote 49 years ago.

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