My Mom Lives On

May 13, 2014 By

DSC02486In October of 2012, I took a trip up to Long Island to scatter my mother’s ashes in the places she loved and had spent most of her life.  She had died in 2007.  Unable to deal with the anger and rage she caused me during her last seven years of life, I tucked her ashes away on the top shelf of a dark closet. It took me until just a few months before that trip to understand what had happened between us and why. I found forgiveness for her in a journey of memory I took through our history together. I found out things I hadn’t known about my mom or me.

As I scattered the last of her ashes in places where she’d spent time as an adult and a child, I felt lighter and happier than I’d been in a long time.  My rage was gone and I was able to pick up the pieces of my life and put it back together.

A month or so after returning home from that “letting-go” trip, I began reorganizing my studio. I found a small tin tucked away in a corner and upon opening it I discovered another tiny plastic bag filled with her ashes.  I took those remains and placed them on the  ground around a tree peony that grows just outside my  studio door.  It had been transplanted a few years earlier and hadn’t adjusted well to its new location.  At the time I asked Mom to help that beautiful plant to grow strong and tall.

This is what she did!IMG_1109IMG_1112

Filed Under: family, Healing, Life, Memoir, The Garden, Travels Tagged With: ,

What Little I Know About My Father

May 6, 2014 By
My grand father's cabinet making shop.

My grandfather’s cabinet making shop.

The photo on the left is of my grandfather’s cabinet shop in New York City.  He is standing on the left. To the right is my father. Further to the right is a hired employee.

Except for a few photos and the stories I remember from the time I was a child, I know very little about my grandparents.  On a visit to Ellis Island a few years ago and my husbands penchant for putting together family trees, we gathered the small amount of information we have about Dzadzia and Babchia. They were very tight-lipped. If they ever spoke about their lives in Poland before they arrived here in America or their journeys across the Atlantic Ocean to a new country where they couldn’t speak the language, I never heard it.  I remember meeting other relatives who came from Poland through them, but the visits were always brief and we never followed up. There was never a sense of having an extended family.

I can say I don’t know a lot about my own parents, who were both born here as first generation Polish-Americans. I do know the day to day Mom and Dad stuff, but their early lives remains a mystery to me in many ways.  For my father all I have are his military records and the medals he was honored with for his heroism during the Second World War.  I have a few photos but that’s it.

I know my dad suffered from shell-shock, known today as PTSD.  He was difficult to live with and my mother, my brothers and I suffered the consequences of his damaged mind. He abused all of us both psychologically and sometimes physically.

My dad as a boy!

My dad as a boy!

He was born and grew up in New York City in what I presume was a Polish neighborhood, surrounded by other ethnic neighborhoods.  He was a bigot, always taking people of other ethnicities down. He was also extremely competitive. I imagine it started in the City where many early immigrants first settled. The competition he most likely experienced in school and on the streets, to be the biggest and the best that he could be, must have been fierce. He experienced the Great Depression, witnessing men jumping out of windows because they’d lost everything. Other than that I know nothing of his day to day family life.

He attended Cooper Union, where he studied engineering and architecture for three years.  I have no idea why he didn’t graduate.  He did however have a chair of his design in exhibition at the World’s Fair in New York in 1939.  He married my mother on Valentines day, 1942. I was born 9 months and 3 days later.

The day after he and Mom were married he went to Montana to begin training for his role in fighting the war with the First Special Service Forces, known by the Germans as the Devil’s Brigade.  The were fierce fighters trained to jump out of planes over Norway, then skiing during the cold winter months to munition factories and labs where the Germans were beginning to experiment with atomic energy and bombs. When their mission was canceled, my father landed by parachute in Italy where he and his men fought their way up the boot, killing and being killed as they went.  He witnessed his best buddies head blown off by a Nazi, as they stood talking and was the lone survivor when he and his men took out a nest of  Nazis hiding in an extensive underground bunker.  When the war was won, Dad was one of the men who liberated a number of the prison camps in Germany and stayed there for several more years doing some kind of secret work. My mother and I joined him there when I was four years old.

After the war he started a home building company on Long Island, where we lived until 1960, when he decided to “retire.”  We moved to Killington, Vermont, where he built and ran three ski lodges.  Despite his early abuse and bigotry, he was a good man in many ways, and became  a loving “Grampy Tom” to my kids.

As Memorial Day approaches at the end of the month I think of him and wish I had known him as a boy, as a student of engineering, and the man who fell in love with my mother.  Before he went away to Europe and came back a different man.

It’s all still happening today as we send our young people across the seas to fight in other lands.

Filed Under: family, Growing Up, Life, Memoir, Mental Health, Trauma Tagged With:

My “Foody” Ancestors

April 30, 2014 By
The Zabski Family

The Zabski Family

Going through a box of photos the other day, I found this family portrait. The man in the foreground is  my grandfather. Dziadzi is the Polish word for grandfather which we pronounced “Jahji.”  Standing behind him and next to each other, from left to right, are his wife, their daughter Polly, and my dad, Thomas. How serious they look. Obviously the photographer didn’t ask them to say “cheese.”

Both Babcia (grandmother in Polish) and Dziadzi came to the United States from Poland. My grandfather, Wladislaw Zabski, was born in the city of Trembowla in 1888.  He came to this country, landing at Ellis Island on September 22, 1912. Babcia was born in 1894, only a few miles northwest of Dziadzi’s home. Her name was Michalina Podhajecki.  She arrived on Ellis Island on March 16, 1911.  She was only sixteen. She was released to her sister, a dressmaker in the city.  She and and my grandfather married on October 5, 1913, at the Church of St. Stanislaus in New York City.

According to one set of records my father had been born on September 18, 1913, just a few weeks before his parents married.  Others say he was born  on the same date in 1914. Obviously more research has to be done in order to find out his exact birth year. I find it amusing that there is talk among cousins that Dziadzi was a lady’s man and “adored” young girls. Also, my father was very strict with me. As his only daughter, I was’t allowed to date until I was a senior in high school. I was forever feeling embarrassed because he wouldn’t even allow me to go to the movies with friends on a Saturday afternoon because, “Bad things happen in the dark.”  Was he trying to save me from getting involved with a cute guy and making the same mistake his own parents had? He did send me to a  private girl’s school for my junior year in high school because I was going steady with a boy named Steve.

Eventually both grandparents became United States Citizens. After years living at various addresses in New York City and Queens, they moved out to Port Jefferson, on Long Island where they both resided until they passed away.  Babchi, at five-foot two inches and overweight, spent all of her time in the kitchen cooking up the food they grew on several acres of land.  Before she retired she worked at a local lace factory. Dziadzi, a bit over six feet tall was a cabinet maker.

They raised chickens, had a huge vegetable garden, and a grape arbor under which they ate their meals during the summer. Babchi thought being fat was the healthiest way to be.  She complained to my mother that I was too thin, saying in her broken English, “Skinny no good. Plumpy is helty.” Her daughter’s son, John, on the other hand  was “good and plumpy.”

The first time Babchi met my soon-to-be husband, Bill,  she happily exclaimed, “Oh Joiny, he’s so plumpy.” He wasn’t even terribly overweight at the time, but standing next to me at only one hundred and five pounds he must have looked massive. Finally I had done something that made her happy.

Dziadi was very tall, dark, and mysterious. I was afraid of him.  He was gruff and tough, drinking his coffee every morning with a raw egg cracked into it.  He loved the awful looking blood sausage that was always on the table. He made me try it once.  I screamed and carried on and never had to eat it again. I didn’t like it when my parents left my brothers and me with them. If we didn’t eat every bit of food in front of us, including the brown, mushy, bananas, Babcia always kept in the fruit bowl, we were threatened with the wolf who lived in the pump house across the street. He thought skinny children were delicious and would come and make a meal of us.

Food was a huge part of my grandparent’s lives, and in turn it became a huge part of my own.  Both of my parents were fabulous cooks. We ate dinner with my grandparents most Sundays, rich with all the Polish fixings. Perogis were alway my favorite, especially those filled with sauerkraut. And Babchia’s Bobka, a yeast cake she often stuffed with farmer’s cheese and studded with raisins was to die for.

I learned to cook when I was around ten years old, making the world’s best devil’s food cake. One of my favorite past times was cutting out recipes from magazines and putting them together in my own recipe notebook.  You can still catch me today finding amazing recipes on the internet or in our newspaper’s weekly food section. My collection fills a file box I bought just for them.

When I was small, I didn’t appreciate my grandparents or even like them very much.  As an adult I’m grateful for their obsession with food and the few recipes they have passed down to us. I wish I could sit around the table with them now and share a meal. I’d like to talk with them about their life in Poland, and what it was like to leave family and friends behind and move to a new country.

Filed Under: Ancestors, family, Growing Up, Memoir Tagged With:

Changing The World, One Person At A Time!

April 22, 2014 By

DSC01663It’s spring! Here in Virginia, bird song fills the air and everything is in bloom.  This is one of those years when the dogwood, redbud, and fruit trees are all blooming at the same time. The brilliant greens of spring  are amazing and I notice each morning how the leaves on the trees around me have grown larger.  My strawberries are blooming. I’m looking forward to having them with my yogurt for breakfast.

Spring is always a time of hope and I’ve been filled with a wonderful sense of wellbeing and gratefulness for all that has been gifted to me. I’m especially grateful to my daughter, Lisa, who got me started on getting rid of the large amounts of sugar I was unwittingly consuming on a daily basis.  I knew I was addicted to sugar, and had been trying  to stop using it, but it wasn’t until Lisa started on the 21 Day Sugar Detox that I got serious.

I am personally watching many of those around me changing and making their way to a more healthy lifestyle.

My husband, whom I never thought would give up his carbs, joined me on this sugar-free road and has lost 17 pounds since we started.  He had blood work done last week just to check his blood sugar and cholesterol levels.  We were blown away by the results. His blood sugar levels are the lowest they’ve ever been and his cholesterol levels are also down.  He feels great, has more energy, and he isn’t as forgetful as he used to be.  AND, he has halved his blood pressure meds and his doctor said he might have to halve it again.

But there’s more.  My housekeeper and friend, Bobbie, saw my 21 Day Sugar Detox book in the kitchen one morning and asked about it.  She went out and bought the book that afternoon. A few days later, she had her family doing the detox.

She in turn told her sisters about it and they are giving it a try.  One of them told some of her friends at work about it and now all of them detoxing.  That’s just a small part of the big picture.  I know we’re not alone and that there are many more people out there who now realize that sugar, which is much more addictive than cocaine, is public health enemy number one.  Let’s keep it going!

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could bring peace to the world in the same way?

Filed Under: Addiction, Change, Healthy Living Tagged With: , , ,

Pain And Suffering

April 15, 2014 By

IMG_1087“We suffer because we marry our instinctive aversion to pain to the deep-seated belief that life should be free from pain. In resisting our pain by holding this belief, we strengthen just what we’re trying to avoid. When we make pain the enemy, we solidify it. This resistance is where our suffering begins.”

 Ezra Bayda, “When It Happens to Us”

It is difficult to get rid of the sting of adversity we often find ourselves surrounded by. Whether it’s a health issue, a relationship problem, or some other circumstance, we deem it unfair and find ourselves going to war with ourselves to keep it at bay. But none of us exits this world without experiencing pain and suffering.

All we want is to feel good. We want to be happy, knowing our own minds, surrounded by family and friends who understand and support us. And that’s the way it is much of the time.  But then pain comes calling in the form of loss and fear. Sometimes it crushes us. We feel desperation. We get depressed or anxious. We scream and cry trying to make the hurt go away.

But pain is what it is. It’s like the weather. It’s an integral part of our lives. Screaming and crying won’t make it go away. Even when the sun is shining and roses are in full bloom it’s nearby. If you aren’t feeling it now, you will before too long. The thing is that as quickly as it arrives, the weather changes and you find yourself back in the sunshine, unless you choose to cling to the stormy forecast.

While our house was torn apart by the renovations we chose to do over the winter, I spent my time suffering.  I just wanted my house back, with nobody else in it.  I ranted about the four weeks the contractor had promised us that turned into eight. I was living in a hotel without a decent kitchen to prepare healthy meals in. I was gaining weight and having one big old pity party. I was forever readying myself for the next problem that would add to my stress.  I was miserable, as well as miserable to be with.

When I decided to sit with my suffering and just let it be, I realized that I had been allowing myself to be a victim. I asked myself, “Who is it that had set up these circumstances?”  It was of course me.  I’m the one who wanted wood floors in the kitchen rather than the stone tile that made my back hurt.  I wanted the laundry room moved upstairs so that I wouldn’t have to lug dirty clothes down into the basement every day.

As I simmered in my pain, I remembered that I had choices. I could be unhappy and negative about my life or I could allow the sun to shine and pay the price of feeling homeless for a couple of weeks while my house got a lot easier to live in.  I chose to look at the positive side of my circumstances. Sure, I was annoyed when things went wrong but then recalled what I’d have in the end.  I try to remember this when other storms blow in, be it something I choose or not.  Stormy weather comes and goes  just like the sun.  That’s just the way life is.
Filed Under: Change, Life, Navigating Through Life, Quotes Tagged With:
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