I only ever knew one grandparent. My mother’s mother. The other three grandparents had been long gone by the time I was born. My mother’s mother died at eighty-nine outliving her daughter by almost twenty years.
My grandmother’s name was fluid. Born Jane Lee McDonald, she found that name a bit dull so she started calling herself Jean Marie. Distant relatives called her Jenny and that name appeared in one US Census. My sister, brother and I called her MiMaMa.
MiMaMa wasn’t the warmest of women or the most likable. I support this argument with her favorite quote about herself: “If you didn’t like me, there was something wrong with you.”
Actually, some of her favorite quotes provide insight into her personality.
I once asked her why she appeared to like my sister more than my brother or me. Her answer? “I’ve known her longer.”
She did, however, try to be supportive - in her own way. Apparently, I was not the most attractive baby in the family let alone in the population at large. She told me, “I didn’t care what people said. I used to put you in your coach and walk you down the street just as if I were proud of you.”
Despite my ungainly appearance, apparently she believed I’d be able to catch a man which was critical in her eyes. “Grab a boy you like and hold onto him.” Was I off to my first job? No. College? No. First grade. Yep. No offense to the boys in my first grade class but none of them had yet proven they were marriage material. Besides, I wanted to wait a few decades before deciding if married life was for me.
But Mimama was of an era when marriage was a woman’s main goal. Marriage worked for her. She spoke from the perspective of one who had wed her great love.
I don’t know at what age she met John Bennis, but she loved him for her entire life. He died at twenty-nine. Distant relatives told me that she threw herself in the grave at his funeral. I‘m not sure I buy that story but I can’t rule it out. She loved her husband dearly. Her only comfort was believing she would see him again in heaven.
Mimama married a second time but she and her new husband made an agreement that they would each reunite with their deceased spouses after death. She continued to look forward to seeing John again, but she worried. Sixty years after his death, she pulled herself out of her wheelchair so I could see her full image. She was close to tears. “What will he want with an old woman like me?
I am sure my siblings and I underestimated both the painful situation she found herself in before she was thirty and the resourcefulness with which she responded.
Her life could not have been easy. Her parents immigrated from Ireland and settled in Philadelphia. I know they had three daughters of which she was the youngest, They might have had two sons. They were only names to me. Those boys might have been from another generation. When I return to genealogical research, I can figure that out.
I don’t know what her father did for a living but I do know he walked over a train trestle to get there and that every payday he would bring her a nickel. The story is that one night returning from work he was hit by an unexpected train that crossed the trestle and killed him. He had her nickel in his pocket.
MiMaMa lost the most important man in her life three times. Her father when she was five, the love of her life in her late twenties and the husband who offered financial security in her early forties. Each time she had to bounce back. And, she did.
I have photos of her opening a store in the Germantown section of Philadelphia sometime around 1922. Bennis’s Baby Clothes. She made and sold clothing for kids. I can’t imagine it was easy for a widow with two children starting a business in the 1920s. I don’t believe I could do it in today's world.
She married again around 1930 to a widower with six children and had another daughter. To hear her tell it, things remained comfortable throughout the Great Depression but while the country and the world recovered, her new family’s prospects were dimming. Her husband ran an ice company that sold to the retail market. Have you heard about refrigerators? The American public had. Her husband’s business failed and shortly thereafter he died. MiMaMa was back on her own.
For a while, she and her two other daughters bunked with my newlywed parents, married three years with two babies according to the 1940 US Census. I am not sure how long that arrangement lasted but by the time I came along, she was living in a nearby apartment and teaching sewing to underprivileged teen-aged girls. I think her job was at a residence run by nuns. All I recall the adults talking about was the highly polished floors. It was on one of those shiny surfaces that she slipped and fell breaking her hip. She couldn’t have been much more than sixty when she found herself confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life which would be thirty years. Virtually all the time I knew her.
Again, something about her life I didn’t appreciate: what it must have been like for an independent woman who never quit in the face of multiple setbacks to become unable to do for herself,
I would go to see her often - not out of love but out of a sense of obligation. During most of those visits, she told me tales from her generation. I listened and learned but sadly I never wrote down what she told me. My memories are spotty, vague and confused.
If I had to pick a few words to describe MiMaMa, I would choose feisty, indomitable and, maybe, pushy. I never understood why my mother had a small wedding but chose to have her wedding portraits done by Bachrach. There are several shots of my mother and one of my father. Naturally. And, not so naturally, in my opinion, one of MiMaMa. I wasn’t surprised. I can picture her taking the best room when necessity drove her to move into my parents’ house.
Before she became mostly home bound, MiMaMa would return from funerals lamenting that there would be no one left to come to hers. I don’t recall much about her service except that she got a good crowd. I guess a lot of people liked her.
There were many times I didn’t like MiMaMa. Maybe there was something wrong with me.
NOTE: My brother-in-law once told me that the women in my family were crazy. And he hadn’t even met the WAC turned underwear model or anyone on my father’s side - which rumor had it included a gangster’s moll. I like to think what he thought was true - starting with MiMaMa.
© 2023 Jane Kelly
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