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Journaling:
When I began scrapbooking in the summer of 2003, Larry and I had been married 20 years. Our wedding album was, shall we say, “uninspiring” and we rarely looked at it. So I started scrapbooking with a simple objective, to upgrade our wedding album and give it to Larry as an anniversary gift. I did accomplish that goal. The upgraded album was much more fun to look at,
so we looked at it more. In the process of making the wedding album, I discovered that scrapbooking was fun. A meaningful album requires more than pictures and pretty paper. What make a great album are the journals, the stories that go with the pictures, and since writing is one of my better talents, my albums include a lot of good journaling. I have created hundreds of layouts in these 2 years and I predict it will be a long time before I run out of ideas and inspiration.
But creating an album for ME, just me, and especially me as a child, was a low priority. Before I started this album, I had created 1 for my husband, Larry, 3 for my granddaughter, Leah, and countless albums of special events, vacations and holidays with my family. It is certainly easier to make albums of Leah than of my childhood. She is young, pretty, smart, and happy. There is so much happiness in my family now; I preferred to focus on that and let my painful childhood just be forgotten. I spent most of my adult life trying to forget about that childhood, but in the summer of 2004, Naieme Livingston, Wake County Director of the Guardian Ad Litem Program, asked me to speak to a class of Guardians in training about using Lifebooks to help foster children develop positive identities. All right, I thought, what a good idea! I could show them some of my own albums. No wait, my albums show a very different life than that of foster children. In my albums, it certainly looks like I live a charmed life. I wanted the guardians to see that they can find something good in ANY life, they can emphasize the good and encourage the child to grow more of it, but could I find good in my own life, despite the many traumas and confusion of my youth?
This autobiographical album was by far the hardest for me to create. To begin with, there were very few pictures of me as a child. Where would I find pictures of the years that were lost? My mother had few pictures of her children. There were long periods when I did not live with her (from ages 3-8 and again from 14-18). During the times I did live with my mother, she did not have money for taking pictures. So I had to ask relatives to look through their shoeboxes of disorganized photos, looking for pictures of me as a child. The few photos I have been able to collect were in poor condition when I found them. Many were covered with marks and hand written captions and required extensive reconstruction. When I got the pictures restored, they provoked questions I would have liked to ask my mother. But she had been dead for years and the answers to those questions went with her to the grave. Would I be able to find answers from my other relatives? Some older relatives were helpful, but others were hateful when I asked them questions. I wondered if the answers would hurt me more than they helped, and sometimes I felt like the pictures would break my heart. The photo that haunts me the most is the one of me in my Easter dress, standing in a driveway littered with junk. Taking little bits of information wherever I could get them, knowing that some of that information was right, some might be wrong and I had no way to tell the difference, I pieced together the puzzle of my childhood. Would I find something to love in that little girl in the junkyard? What drives me now is knowing that if I can not bear to look squarely at the truth—if I can not love that broken little girl—nobody will. For me, this scrapbook and my memoir, Thorny Ground, are about fulfilling the purpose for which God created me. I think He created me, with my intelligence and writing skills, so I could tell the story of women and children who are considered unworthy of love. If I don’t tell this story, it might never get told.
I showed this scrapbook to the GAL class, but mixed it in with 4 ‘happy’ albums, full of color, action and blessings. Who would want to look at the bleak pages of this album when they had happy choices, I reasoned. To my surprise, the trainees glanced quickly through the ‘happy’ albums, and then crowded around this scrapbook, patiently poring over every last word of the journals. The bleak colors and poverty didn’t bother them. I think they were hungry for the truth, too.
I’m coming back to put all the pieces together.
I’ll make something wonderful out of this.
Just wait and see.
I was born Ilene Minerva Maurer, my mother’s first child,on June 7, 1950, in Meadowbrook Hospital, East Meadow, Long Island, NY.
My mother’s name was Ilene Charlotte Maurer.
She was born April 11, 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression. She was the 16th child born to a German immigrant family. Her father died when she was 9 years old. She was 17 years old when I was born. She was an eighth grade dropout and not married.
The first 15 years of my life where marked by poverty and alienation from ‘polite’ society because I was born out of wedlock. My mother struggled to support herself and her children on a meager salary as a domestic. Sometimes she had to leave me in the care of her sisters or brothers, while she lived in her employer’s home and cared for their children. She visited us on days off, but I was often confused by her absences and failed to form real bonds with the other adults in the family.
There are few pictures of my childhood.
Most of these pictures are from Aunt Rosie’s collection.
In the pages that follow, you will find tags that you can pull to read more details about the events captured here, including excerpts from my memoir called Thorny Ground. Read them if you dare. They are not all pretty.
But they are all parts of me that I no longer wish to deny.
My mother, Johnny Boy (Uncle Johnny’s son ‘Buddy’), Patty (Uncle Johnny’s oldest daughter) and Charlie Boy (Uncle Charlie’s oldest son). April 1953
Love is the key that opened the doors long held shut by secrecy and shame
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June 20, 2006
June 19, 2006
June 18, 2006
June 18, 2006
June 05, 2006
June 04, 2006
June 04, 2006