My Mother's Side

When Jamie was three, he told the ladies at daycare that he was getting a baby sister and her name was going to be Jonah. I found myself assaulted with a flurry of questions. No, I was not expecting, but I didn't know what his dad had been up to.

Then Jamie told me that Jonah was going to live with his short grandparents. His short grandparents lived in the Colonial bank. They gave him the balloon I told him to throw away because we didn't know where it came from. They took him to restaurants Jamie had never set foot in.

Then one day, Jamie pointed to a picture in my mother's house and said in a nonchalant voice that they were his short grandparents.

In a way they were, great-great-grandparents, that is. The picture was different from all the others because it cut them off at the waist, so they looked "short".

They were my mother's grandparents, her mother's parents. Alex and Annie Lennicx. Alex was born Atsanky Lenyk, in the Ukraine before the Communist Revolution, while Nicolas and Alexandra were riding in ornate carriages, their ill-fated daughters dressed matching. When he was just a young boy, his family left with only what could be carried on their backs. Anything left was sold, the money just enough to buy passage to Canada. When they boarded the ship, they had only enough money for a bowl of borscht.

In Canada they trekked sixty miles into the wilderness, tying rabbit skins around their feet against the cold. There they marked out a homestead and eventually others from the Ukraine arrived to form a colony.

Atsanky married, and when his sisters were mean to his wife, he stole his father's oxen and they rode through the night to the border, where they left the oxen and crossed into North Dakota. They rode the train as far as they could, and arrived in south Alabama. Names changed, a new life, and he never spoke to his family in Canada again. That doesn't mean he didn't miss them. He probably did. His home, designed by himself, matched the floor plan of the home in Canada. His family missed him. They looked for him, without success.

My grandmother grew up on that farm, about three miles from a tiny railroad town. She walked to school every morning and walked home every evening. Later, she worked at the corner drugstore, the same one in the picture of her and her friends sitting on the curb, eating ice cream right out of its big, round cardboard tub.

She fell in love with a Navy man whose parents ran the Standard Oil station. He had joined early, lying about his age, his mother sealing the lie with her signature. So until his death, the Navy always had him a little older than what he really was. She sent him away to keep him out of jail, keeping him from the moon shining that supplemented many incomes in that day.

He was handsome and rode a horse around the drugstore, and she would find reasons to walk past Standard Oil. Then, one day while walking through downtown Mobile, he pointed to an engagement ring in a jewelry store window and asked her if she wanted it.

Since he was not Catholic, they could not be wed inside the church. Instead she wore smart suit and they were married in the rectory, where a clatter of falling pots in the kitchen startled my already edgy grandfather.

He died from liver cancer. My grandmother will never remarry. Hers was a marriage of passion that never died. You rarely get one chance at that, much less two.

They and their children, my aunts and uncles, and their grandchildren, my cousins, have never made me feel any different about myself for being bipolar. I remember being so sleepy from meds on Thanksgiving, and my grandparents found me a bed and let me rest.

My father's family has the history of bipolar illness, but my mother's family has imprinted itself on my life, too. The risk of leaving a country. The rash, impulsive decision to run away. The stubbornness to let go of past hurts. But most of all the love, regardless of what I am, simply because I am.

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