TRYING TO GET IT RIGHT THIS TIME:

MY REMINISCENCES

by Mary Macomber Leue

 

PREFACE

My Parents, My Self

 

 

I sure don't remember making the choice to take on trying to understand my life. At least, not as such. It just seems to have happened! Looking back, I seem to have spent an awful lot of my creative élan trying to please and fulfill the wishes of my amazing parents - and equally, in striving desperately to separate myself from them; in, as it were, creating an identity by recognizing the extent to which I am a product of their lives while simultaneously developing - almost surreptitiously - those qualities which come from me alone. Only thus do I seem to have even begun to understand the circumstances of my life and to forgive myself - and them - for having lived these more than eighty years as I have.

 

My early life was filled with sudden periodic jolts to my basic sense of survival alternating with periods filled with blissful satisfactions! As a consequence, I came out of those first years with a bewilderingly discontinuous self-image - an identity, you might say, jerry-built out of both components, but without reliable continuity from one ego state to the other. These astounding contradictions presented my young child's mind with a conjunction of total inexplicabilities - with which I've had to struggle with as an adult.

 

Ah, but there is also another whole dimension of "self" to be explored in this account - a dimension which explains the title of these reminiscences. Throughout my life the events I referred to as catastrophic were that either in themselves or in my reaction to them - and for many years I never knew which explanation to adopt. Certainly my reactions were often inexplicable to my parents, and I was thought to be a "notional" child, but as the person experiencing them, I knew only that they were so terrifying that I sometimes despaired of surviving them. To adopt the version I was given by them that my inner states were symptomatic of my own deviance from the norm would have been to abandon a large component of my inner identity. It was with a great sense of relief that I was, much later on, offered another explanation for my reactions! - that they were caused by the reawakening of residual memories from previous lifetimes before this one! I am not suggesting that the events of this life cannot stand on their own without reference to the parameters of this lifetime - but still ... . I took on, lived with and ultimately went beyond (or away from) a series of religious sects which I hoped would explain some of my fears, or relieve them, including Unitarianism, Catholicism, Sufism, Presbyterianism, Paganism, Buddhism and perhaps some others I've forgotten - and, additionally, fourteen years of therapeutic modalities including psychoanalytically-oriented group, Lowenian neo-Reichian. LSD, Biosynthetic neo-Reichian, Orgonomic Reichian, Transactional Analytic, Native American Sweat Lodge and finally, Past Lives Regression - to begin to sort out all the apparently random ingredients of experience which had shaped my personality so inexplicably, had saddled me with such profound feelings of burden and mystery!

I am grateful to my parents for not having added the burden of religious fundamentalism that would have made opening my mind to the option of struggling to understand this hodge-podge impossible! Not, mind you, that they would have entertained this "explanation" of mine as a viable option - being products of their culture, among other things, a culture of ethical secularity, of scientific meliorism and of literal-mindedness as a norm - at least as a principle for right-mindedness. Fantasy, an appreciation of the non-rational they had in abundance, but as the experiences of others, viewed through the lens of literature - not in their own lives!

 

My father was a brilliant man, a leader in the medical field, devoted to his family of six children; my mother was equally brilliant, devoted and conscientious, with a wonderful experiential background for parenthood as well as a fine college education - and behind her, a family whose two heads were a brilliant engineering innovator and a captain of industry! Both parents were natural teachers, and had an enthusiasm for the role of parenting that filled our young lives with adventure, stimulated the imagination and offered us experiences of many kinds. Fantasy, the unprovable, delight in flights of imagination were channeled into literature and poetry, all realms set aside from the exigencies of ordinary reality. But to have entertained the notion of a life either before or after this one - or of an altered state of consciousness which would allow a person to capture adumbrations of a previous existence - such notions would have been relegated to something like old Ebenezer Scrooge's attempt to reduce Jacob Marley's ghost to "an undigested bit of mutton."

 

I also grew up in a world finally "made safe for democracy" following an appalling world-wide conflict, safely ensconced in a family nest that was both well-furnished and endlessly exciting! Peering behind and beneath such a distinguished and well-crafted façade means breaking faith with my past - and also involves violating a taboo as American as baseball! In my favor, of course, is an equally American impulse toward the breaking of taboos per se, toward exposure of the falsity of façades. I hope I am walking in the distinguished company of such muck-rakers. The completeness of a life, including my own, requires the examining of both qualities - the good and the bad.

 

I sometimes feel that this task I have set myself of struggling to encompass the completeness of the lives of such distinguished parents by one of their offspring is as much for their sake as for my own. We Americans have had a hard time dealing with three-dimensional accounts of our historical past. And yet, that heritage becomes the foundation of our own lives, and in a real sense sets its "terms" - so it has seemed incumbent on me to view it as such, and from there, to attempt to understand mine.

 

With my grandmother

 

But mainly, I guess, I'm writing these reminiscences because I find the past endlessly fascinating, and it draws me irresistibly. If life is circular, which it sometimes seems to me, the beginning begins to draw nearer as you reach closer to the end. And there is also an impulse to leave behind some token of having "been there" - a kind of "Kilroy was here" syndrome. Bill, my husband, was so impelled by this impulse that he kept a daily journal for most of the fifty-six years of our married life, while equally decrying his need to do so! His journal is now a valuable heirloom for his progeny, as the memoirs of my own antecedents have been for me and mine. But mainly it is a matter of fascination - perhaps in order to understand, but also to relive - and perhaps to redo by reliving - although I don't think that has been the chief source of my fascination. Mostly, it's just to revisit that past - and an occasional wisp of trailing memory from those other pasts - to get from it all some "essence de vie," as it were.

 

Always an avid reader, my life has always had a highly literary quality, and the tale is sometimes Gothic. Perhaps that's partly a sign of the times as well as a family pattern. My father, his sister Katharine Macomber Butterworth and my mother have all left accounts of their lives, written in their eighties and nineties. My parents' memoirs have been left to their children in what we callThe Red Book, which contains both a genealogy gathered during a period of several years by my mother from the Athenaeum in Boston and supplemented by the accounts they have written for us, both of their own lives and the lives of their forebears as they have come down to them. My mother's memoirs fascinate me, offering as they do a fresh source of information with which to compare the countless stories she told me throughout my childhood. My aunt Katie's memoirs, also fascinating to me, are virtually book-length, and go far beyond mere narrative. They have a quality of presence and vividness which is immensely captivating and beautifully detailed, leaving nothing out for the sake of avoiding controversy.

 

Since many of the events they recount dovetail with my own, I intend to interweave passages from all three of these memoirs - and extensive passages from my husband Bill's journal - to fill in, correct or augment my own memories of early years. I hope this decision does not represent, like Pooh-bah's ("The Mikado") acid judgment of such addenda as "merely corroborative detail intended to lend an air of verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative." Maybe the kid inside me wants to do that, but Mary the writer of memoirs simply finds them rich and fascinating!

 

In actually starting the writing of this account, I was tempted to title the first chapter "I Am Born," following my favorite Dickens novel, David Copperfield. But then I realized that first there are those earlier stories to be told - my mother's, my father's and my aunt Katie's - or at least the parts of it that impinge on my life and the lives of my parents - and I only wish I had more written memoirs to draw from on my mother's side.

 

But, aside from her own account in the family's Red Book there are her family stories, told to me as a child in response to my frequent questions, which I have tried with only partial success to sort out. Listening to those stories - about her own childhood and her life as a young woman, and about my father's heritage in the context of his father's large family - has made them all as much a part of my memories as the actual events through which I lived. This adds a dimension of myth and mystery to the factual accounts that were written down. It is the mix of this myth and memory which I call my past, and which holds me fast in its passionate embrace - both loving and appalling to me! I find it sometimes diffiicult to distinguish between fantasy and reality here; so this account needs to be read as both, although I will do the best I can to balance out the one against the other when I see it. And where possible, I will try to balance off my own subjective recollections with the written records of the times that have come down to me.

In writing these reminiscences, I am finally at peace with my own feelings of affection and enjoyment of the idiosyncrasies of my large family! I do seem to have managed to incur the displeasure of a number of siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews and in-laws (among other people), so it may be that this account will also be upsetting to them - but I still want to write it all down. I have my own version of my family's history, as did my mother and dear Katie, and "I will a true, unvarnished tale disclose," to the best of my ability to do so.

 

Life at Eighty-four

 

Grandparents' Day at Charlemont Academy, October, 02

with grandkids Ian and Maddy