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Separation from Birth
Kelly Schmainda

    I look at pictures of my grandmother holding me as a tiny baby, not more than a week old.  She is smiling the well-known smile of a proud relative.  Sometimes I wonder what went wrong within this image.  Since I do not remember being so young, I have never had any good memories of my grandmother, being our relationship fell apart soon after I started school.  Since then, all my recollections have been ones of distant tension followed by bitter words that neither of us really meant.  However, I often contemplate if I did something to warrant the negativity that followed those first few blissful years.

    My grandmother started her life as a baby literally left on the doorstep of a Catholic Charities hospital.  In New York during the 1910s to the 1930s, unwanted pregnancies spread like wildfire because of hurried relationships and socially rebellious women, according to my grandma.  My grandmother just happened to be one of the trees that caught the blaze.  She still feels like a statistic to this day because she never knew her real mother.  Even though I have never heard her admit it, I know she wants to reach out to those women that are close to her, but because of this early rejection, she pulls away far too often.  The only time I have ever heard my grandmother get sentimental is when she speaks of her mother, who died when Grandma was but fifteen years old.  Grandma says she never had a chance to really get to know her; her adoptive mother was always too busy.

    On several occasions I have talked to my mom and sister about my grandmother being so distant from women.  We all believe it stems from her birth mother leaving her and the rough time she had growing close to her adoptive mother.  Being we three are so close, we can only imagine what it was like for her.  I can remember several times where she was also too busy for me.  She would never bake and shower me with gifts like normal grandmothers; instead, she would tell me how women should act and to watch my weight so I could catch a good man.  I know she meant well and was trying to protect me, but the way she said it often made me feel like a failure.  However, when it came to my brothers, they could essentially do no wrong.  She would praise their accomplishments, big and small.  I never received any praise; in fact, I was often criticized for doing simple tasks wrong.  For example, I could try to wash the floor, but if I didnít do it her way, it would never be clean enough, and she would do it over.  I would get frustrated, and we would undoubtedly start to fight.  I now regret some things that I have said, such as ìI hate youî and ìyou love my brothers more,î but at the time, I truly meant the words.

    Grandmaís life was difficult from the start, aside from being abandoned.  She had to stay at the orphanage until someone requested a child of her age and sex.  When she described the process to me, it reminded me of a fast-food order.  Soon-to-be parents would, for example, write Catholic Charities saying they wanted a boy and a girl aged less than five years, and the program would match children based on the first letter of their last name.  Often children had nothing in common:  not religion, regional background, or ethnicity.  My grandmother and her new brother, Irving, were lucky; at least they looked alike.  This process grew to what is now called The Orphan Train.

    When my grandmother first told me of the program, I was appalled.  I could not believe that this was the best way the charity could think of to adequately help these vulnerable children.  They were treated no better than cattle getting on a meat train.  These trains of orphans took infrequent stops, and any adult who has ever been on a train knows how noisy and confusing it can be, which is why I cannot imagine how awful it would have been for a child to endure, especially one so alone and young as Grandma.  She said the charity dressed her in her best dress, a white one with a blue velvet ribbon at the neck, and sent her on the weeklong journey.  She did, however, sit next to her brother-to-be.  She says she does not remember the trip, but she has seen actual footage of trains very similar to the one she took at Orphan Train reunions.  Irv remembers bits about the trip, and has told Grandma about how cold and isolated the train made each of the children feel.  He recalled that looked scared and alone, he recalled.  Grandma has shown me pictures of the trains, and the pictures still haunt me to this day because all the children look utterly lifeless.  However, it does help me to understand why my grandmother still feels so isolated.

    However, this train trip was not the end of her strife:  my grandmother never learned of her adoption until she was eight years old.  In the 1930s, adopted children were looked down upon.  A classmate teased my grandmother that she was adopted during lunch one day; the girl had overheard her parents talking about the two Dobisóher adoptive last nameókids being adopted.  My grandmother was heartbroken.  When she turned to her mother, Anna, she was rejected and called a liar.  Anna gave feeble excuses about why the siblings looked dissimilar.  Eventually Anna gave in and told the kids in a very quiet, ashamed voice that they were part of the Orphan Train they had already heard about in school.  She showed them adoption papers and baptismal certificates issued by the Catholic Charities church.  Her mother never spoke of the incident again.
I still feel awful knowing that my grandmother had to deal with her own parents, not to mention society as a whole, being ashamed of adopted children.  Although I know what it is like to be teased as a child, this was desperately different.  She was teased to the core of her self, her adoptive self.  I cannot relate with this, nor can I empathize.  Once again I feel withdrawn from her as a person.

    Roots can never be denied, though, and when they are stems of neglect and abandon, one, too, may decide that is the only emotion this world knows.  I can never be a part of that world, nor can anyone empathize who has not lived it for oneís self.  To realize this truth about oneís self can not only alter oneís own life, but a whole family as well.
 However, Grandmother was lucky.  Many children just like herself were never given good homes.  She told me that too often children were adopted as slaves to work on family farms and gain revenue for the family.  Other children were put into homes and abused daily.  Social services eventually stepped in and moved these children into different homes.  Unfortunately, this did not stop the cycle of abuse for many.  After she went to the reunions, Grandma explained about survivors of this abuse.  She has seen scares of lashes across backs, burn marks, and scattered stitches, yet she could feel their courage and strength.  She says this without emotion.  To look into her expressionless face pains me; I never want to be that detached from a situation of which I easily could have been a part.

Her family life seemed perfect to the outside world, but I can see the hardship in her eyes when she tells her stories.  Her father, John, and her mother, Anna, daily ran the family store.  Even through the Depression, times were not rough for the family.  Her parents were hardworking people yet often seemed cold and uncaring to the children.  However, this was not the worst of their troubles:  alcoholism consumed her fatherís life.  My grandma can often recall times where she would put her own father to bed.  When I picture her being all of twelve years old and struggling to put her six-foot drunken father into bed, I wonder how she could have been so strong.

    One of the worst memories for her was when she visually caught her father having an affair with the housekeeper, Rosie.  Grandma had always looked up to Rosie as a sort of mother figure and thought that she could do no wrong; she was more of a maternal guide than her own mother.  Rosie became pregnant and John fired her, causing the only other close resemblance of a mother to leave her life as well.  I believe she never received any other nurturing, maternal or otherwise, in her life.  Her parents were quite a bit older than most with toddlers; therefore, they had not been able to acquire that parental instinct that comes with youth and child raising.  Essentially she was thrust into adulthood at the age of fifteen, when her mother died.  Her father broke down and sank deeper into his alcoholism, leaving Grandma to take full responsibility of the store.  She oversaw everything from managing to sales to bookwork.  Her brother, a full-time student, was of little help.  I understand how she felt.  At the age of eight, I was already working at my familyís restaurant.  I think we both grew up more quickly as a result.

    While working, Grandma met my grandfather, Stanley, whom she thought would change her life for the better.  Unfortunately, she was wrong.  After she and Stan had been dating for a while, she became pregnant.  Because he did not want to keep the child, Stan suggested adoption.  Understandably, she refused, and he left her.  After a year Stan returned to marry her, and together they inherited the store.  Unfortunately, my Grandmother essentially married her father.  My grandfather, too, was an alcoholic and little help to her in running the store.  When I think of all the times my Grandmother has been abandoned, it makes me feel so helpless.  Her actions toward me have caused me to pull away from her, yet in knowing all her pain, I want to become closer to her.  However, I honestly think the latter is impossible in this late state of our relationship.

    Nevertheless, she and Stan raised their four children, my father included, the best they knew how.  However, Sharon, the youngest and only girl, never received much attention from Grandma.  To this day Grandma does not speak as much to Sharon as she does her other three children.  Grandma criticized Sharon in much the same way she does me.  I believe she never learned how to properly respect people, especially women, for who they are, rather than what they believe and the circumstances in which they are involved.  I know she will always be analytical and negative toward most of my lifeís choices, yet I, like Sharon, have learned to never let that get me down.

    No tears grace my cheeks when I look at those pictures of her holding me.  They never have, and I have never thought twice of it.  Perhaps in that aspect I am more like her than I wish to believe.  Even after the short years of being separated from my grandmotherís daily life, I now feel like a stranger in her house.  Until you know differently, you can never know what is considered normal or even proper in grandparental relationships.  However, what you donít know can hurt you, even if you cannot help the ignorance.