The First Half of the 2000 Word Monologue About My Mother

Lessons I Learned From My Mother The Hard Way

I’m probably the only woman coming here tonight without a whole lot of positive things to say about my Mother. Mom has always been angry...and no, you can’t you tell her to stop. You can’t understand what she’s been through, because she’s decided that it is the worst life that has ever happened to anybody in the entire History of Mankind. I know. I know. Slavery. Holocaust. The Plague. You and I know they were worse, but Mom only knows what she knows, and it was pretty rough.

Mom has no nice, noble memories of the Depression or of her Mother, Sylvia, who got pregnant when Good Girls didn’t do that. And that’s where the lessons start. The story I heard, which, by the way, Mom will deny I ever heard, and then quietly take you aside and tell you that she worries about my “imagination.” The story, which I have no reason to create from thin air, was that Sylvia had two boyfriends, an Irishman and a Ukrainian, and in 1930, before DNA tests, the Courts had to choose one of them to be declared as Father. Irish or Ukrainian? Irish or Ukrainian...who was it? Ukie boy loses! Irishman off the hook. And I think my cheekbones show their wisdom.

Now, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in the 1930’s, they called people things like “The Ukrainian.” My illegitimate Grandmother Sylvia’s mother was Minnie and her father was “The Swiss”, and that’s all I know of him...except I do have to wonder if it was a literal seduction or an actual rape. The line between the two, in those days, in that small town, was very thin and usually broke in favor of the male. Who knows what relationship my Grandmother had with either the Irishman or the Ukrainian...but the Hunkie, as they were also often called in Johnstown, got caught.

And so, Sylvia and Oskar Molchin married by Court Order in the Year of Our Lord, 1930 and then, she gave birth to Betty Jane. Not Elizabeth. Never Elizabeth. My mother is Betty Jane. Oskar couldn’t wait to get out and ran for a divorce when my mother was two years old. Sylvia, facing starvation in Depression 1932, had to marry someone, anyone. Any man. I believe that his name was Brownstreet or Brownstone, or something with a Brown in the beginning. I believe they had other children, whom I have never met. Half uncles and aunts and cousins and nieces and nephews whom I have never met. And if they don’t want to track me down, they can all happily go to Hell.

I was told that the new family moved to New York City in 1938 and old number two did not like Betty Jane Molchin,  another man’s child. I was told that they lived in poverty with little food, but I don’t know if there was abuse involved or if Betty Jane wrote to Elvina, her Great-Grandmother, (the one who arrived after the Johnstown Flood) about the problems. My sister knows the details because she is a Nurse and it’s all right to tell a Nurse, but not a Playwright. Not a question so much of Angels of Mercy, but that I stand in front of an audience and tell family secrets. Like I’m doing right now.

At any rate, I was told that my Great-Great Grandmother, Elvina, at the age of seventy, all four feet eight inches of her dressed in widow’s black, got on a train to New York to bring back my mother And for this...for keeping her out of starvation...for this...my mother never forgave her. She had to believe that Sylvia wanted her and would have fought for her if Elvina hadn’t interfered. But, I know better. Sylvia wanted to stop fighting with her husband. Sylvia had to keep her husband. She didn’t want to starve.

Logical or not, my mother never forgave her Mother. She did, however, get one lesson out of it. You had to have a man. Even if you sacrificed a child, you did it to keep that man. I know. That sounds ass backwards, like she would have learned to fight for the child, but the child had no income. The child could not take care of the Mother. The man had a salary. The man had the final say. The man ruled the roost. And you needed someone to be taken care of because you were female.

Lesson Number One. A woman is nothing without a man.

My Mother does not believe that a woman should have to work for a living. My Mother does not believe a woman should drive a car. She should be special. SHE...she be special. My Mother should, for once in her life, be so special that someone would want to take care of her. And damn, if she didn’t find it, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I would have loved to have my older sister, Kathy, the Nurse, help me write this, but she pretends not to hear a subject she does not wish to discuss, and Boy, is this ever one! She totally accepts my Mother’s concept that she had the worst life ever and gives her total sympathy. Kathy never questions. Kathy accepts. I can’t. I write plays. Anyway, my Mother returned to Johnstown, a hamlet still recovering from a second flood that was almost as bad as the first but at least did not involve a rich man’s dam falling on top of them. Just the rising river. Rising and rising till it could only spill into the streets and knock things down, but at least it did not involve a rich man’s dam falling on top of them as it did in 1889.