And Then There Was Three

I was nine years old in September of 1955 when my only sister entered the Covent.  That same month four of my six brothers left home to enter various seminaries spread across the country. My two younger brothers and I were left at home with our mother who did not take the loss of her eldest children well.

Looking back with the hindsight of a mother now myself, I can more readily understand her falling apart at the sudden loss of her oldest five children. The house at 7311 S. Marshfield went from one of constant noise: laughing, yelling, door-banging, music-playing by teenagers and young adults to … well … almost nothingness.  I was a painfully quiet girl, Jackie was six and Tommy was only seven months old.   The three of us together couldn’t create the activity of my gone-away older siblings.

I recall the day my sister left.   After we dropped her at the Covent, my mother cried all the way home.  When we walked through the door I thought the tears would subside. But I was wrong. My mother proceeded to walk from room to room and in each room she would prostrate herself on the nearest chair, bed, whatever was handy and sob. Not just cry but sob in big loud globs and scream (yes scream) that Mary … or Joe, or Art … or Ted or Mickey … take your pick … was gone…. her life was over…..  how could she go on without her children?

I was only nine and an immature nine at that.  I followed her and her hysterics from room to room.  I watched as she clung to their left-behind clothes or one of their possessions and sobbed over it.  Looking back, I’m not quite sure why I felt the need to follow her.  Was I trying to comfort her?  Protect her? Or, more likely, was I trying to remind her that I was still there?  Sort of my way of saying:  “Hey mom!  You’ve still got me!!  I didn’t go away. Neither did Jack or Tom.   Don’t I count?  Don’t we count?”

So then I did what my immature brain must have come up with to compete: I cried for my lost siblings and I cried just as much as she did   It worked: now she paid attention to me.  But the attention was “poor Jeffie.  Poor little Jeffie misses her sister so much.”  So she told me I had to pray to God and to the blessed Virgin Mary every day that Mary would leave the convent and come home to us   She would get me up for mass every morning and remind me at night to pray.    It was up to me to bring my sister home.

In this I failed.  My big sister gave more than fifteen years of her life to God and the church.  By the time my she decided that the convent life was no longer for her, I was married with a baby of my own.  And my mother no longer cared.

Ted, Jef, Art, Mary, Joe, Mickey / front row: Mom, Tom, Dad / Visiting day at St. Xavier’s