The Power of Choice

Crafting a Heroine's Story

Growing up there were no photos of my grandfather’s mother anywhere.

It’s inconceivable in this age of smart phones to think of there being no record - not even one photo of someone. 

An entire life undocumented. 

No living memory once the last known relative has died.  I’m sure there are many immigrants like her – too poor to afford a formal photo sitting. 

However, her absence is all the more poignant if you look at the shelf on my office bookcase with my three other sets of great grandparents. 

The clue to the puzzle of my undocumented great grandmother is that she never married.  Most couples, even the poorest scrounged together the means for at least a wedding day photo shoot.  Therein lies a shame filled secret that I didn’t even know my family carried until I unwittingly decided to do a family tree project.

Here is what I do know.

Her name was Pauline.

She came to America from Poland with a child and her father but no husband.

She then proceeded to have two more children – both boys – with an Italian American man who was married and had 12 children with his wife.

One of those boys – was my grandfather.

She died when my grandfather was only 19.

She never learned to speak English.

There are so many questions I’d like to ask my great grandmother:

Who was the father of your first child?

Were you ever married or did you come to America to avoid the scandal of having a child out of wedlock?

Where was your mother?  Why didn’t she come with you?

Did you love my great grandfather? 

Did you hope he’d leave his wife and kids for you?

Did he provide for you and your three children?

Did he pay to sleep with you?

Why did you sleep with a married man instead of finding a nice young immigrant boy of your own?

While the answers to these questions might be interesting, what I’m really asking her is: Did you have choices?  Was your life your own or were you the victim of birth or fate or circumstances beyond your control?

Isn’t that what everyone wants at their core and what every marginalized group is fighting for: The freedom to have the same choices as everyone else.

When women today think we have it so good what we’re indirectly saying is we’re so grateful we don’t live in that time.  A time when women had limited choices.  My great grandmother was born before women could vote. When women’s job and education choices were limited.  When we were barely more than the property of our fathers or husbands. When we had no access to reliable birth control.  Baby, we’ve come so far!  But have we?  I realize our knee jerk response is of course we have!  We have a female Vice President in the U.S.  Other countries have female Prime Ministers. Women run major corporations.  And yet….

It’s 2002:  More than 100 years since Pauline came to America.  I am living in Amsterdam.  The old town cobblestones and canal houses of the city center remind me of how much history I’m riding through as I bicycle home from work.

As I bike through town I smile because I too have a secret.  I’m pregnant.  After 3 years of trying and the disappointment of miscarriages it appears that this time it’s going to work out.  I like that I have this secret – even from my husband for the moment.  I revel in the idea that there is something that I and I alone now know.  I’m going to be a mother.  The smile on my face slowly slides into a look of focused consternation.  What am I going to do?  I am working for a large multinational bank – doing work that is meaningful and pays well.  If I stop working everything that I love around me will go away:  the house on the canal; the work visa that allows me to live is this magical foreign city is all predicated on me working. 

And yet… I have a child coming.  Already my days are long and arduous.  I often work twelve-hour days and that doesn’t include the travel commitments.  It’s been harder to get out of bed in the morning.  I don’t have any underlying illness other than a growing feeling of malaise.  Then I immediately begin to question what’s wrong with me?  Aren’t I living the dream?  Could Pauline even imagine that her great granddaughter would be living in a foreign city working as a vice president of an international bank? And yet… I use coffee to keep me going during the day and wine to unwind at night.  The weekends go by too quickly and Sunday night arrives with a weird knot in my stomach that I have to suit up and show up again in twelve short hours.

Now there is a small person about to come into the world and my life.  Prior to this moment I had always assumed I would have outsourced mothering to a nanny.  It’s in my kids’ best interest I told myself.  They will grow up bilingual.  They will have all the advantages I didn’t have growing up.  And yet…

The bells of the Niewekerk chime.  Despite having left the Catholic church years ago there is something soothing about the hourly church bells that reverberate through the town. 

Montelbaan Toren by my house on the Binnenkant

My best friends in life have been books.  Whenever I don’t know something – whenever I feel truly lost and alone in the world, I can always find solace and answers in a book.  The question before me is “how does one raise an emotionally healthy and secure child in the modern world”.  While PhD theses can be written on this there appears to be a consistent underlying theme: children need a secure attachment to a loving and available caregiver in the first five years of life. 

The uneasiness in my stomach grows – the difference between my hypothetical child that will happily be handed off to childcare daily as I go off to work and this being growing in my body are at odds. 

My mind wants to rationalize.  Define secure.  How available is available?  My monkey mind is wrestling with itself but deep down I know what I’m really feeling is my heart.  My heart doesn’t really want to choose between two desires.  I want to be there for my new child and I want to continue to do interesting and meaningful work in the world.  How had it never occurred to me before? 

I was raised on a narrative (perhaps the first generation of women to have that luxury) that I could be and do anything I wanted “despite being a girl”.  Wait a second.  Despite being a girl… how had I not seen that before.  As long as I can be a good man albeit in a woman’s body – as long as I’m smart enough, work hard enough, play by the rules of this world of work and government – designed by men, for men – then I can do anything I want to do.  But I’m not a man – I’m a woman and as I woman I may need and want things that look very different from what men need and want.  I don’t really want a seat at their table – I want a new and different table.

How do we get a new table?

Systems take a long time to change. 

I had less than nine months!

My bicycle route home takes me through the Red-Light district.  The irony is not lost on me.  Here the oldest profession in the world is normalized and rationalized.  Men have sexual needs and women for a price give them an easy, transactional option.  I’d like to interview these women.  Not unlike the lost narrative of my great grandmother I would love to have a cup of tea with these women and ask them about their career choice.

Choices. 

Once again, this word seems to have an other-worldy power over me.  My thoughts return to Pauline.  Perhaps she would have scoffed at my so-called dilemma.  Millions of women find a way to work and have children so what’s the big deal?

It occurs to me even in that time of seemingly limited choices Pauline did have one choice that was stolen from her by my family: the choice of her narrative.  My family considered her story a shame filled secret. What would she have said?

What if she had kept a journal?  How different would the story be if in reading it we discovered she had escaped from an arranged marriage to an old and ugly man she didn’t love and came to the New World seeking an adventure? 

What if the child she brought with her was the son of her one true love who was supposed to come with her but tragically died before the boat sailed forcing her father to step in at the last minute? 

What if my great grandfather (yes, the one that was married with 12 children) wasn’t a philandering jerk (yes, I know this is a stretch) but loved my great grandmother deeply and wanted to have children with her despite not being able to get divorced and marry her?  What if he too had been forced into an arranged loveless marriage?

Is there a scenario where Pauline is the heroine of her own story?

Is there a scenario where these women in the Red-Light district are the heroines of their own story?

What choice would a heroine in my situation, trying to balance work and mothering, make?

It took me over thirty years from the time I first learned her story to finally find a picture of my “missing great grandmother”.  One of her sons, my great Uncle, had won a boxing match and someone took his photograph.  It was grainy and crumpled but there it was: a visual record that she existed.  That she had lived and loved however briefly on this earth.  Her life couldn’t have been easy – a poor, unmarried immigrant woman in America.  And yet what is captivating about the photo and gives me hope: she is smiling.

My Great Grandmother Pauline hugging her son after a boxing match