I wrote previously about family and distance.  There were a lot of reasons why everyone has spread out so far across the country.  A lot of it has to do with old wounds.  With my mother's family, this story is part of the reason. 

My grandmother, Anna, was a child of Polish immigrants, growing up poor in Chicago but dreaming big.  Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger cast long shadows across the landscape of her youth.  Her father died of tuberculosis when she was only 7 years old. When the Depression hit, her mother found it hard to make enough money to care for her and her two sisters and decided it was better to give them up to an orphanage where they would be cared for and get enough to eat.  When Anna was 12 years old, she and her two sisters were listed as residents at the orphanage in the 1930 census.  A few years later, her mother was able to reclaim them.  By that time, they were nearly old enough to be out on their own.

Before she was 20, Anna met and married my grandfather, a south side factory worker.  They did what was expected: settled down and started having kids.  My mother was the first, followed by five siblings.  When my youngest uncle was only a toddler, Anna got restless.   Her sister, a nightclub singer, started taking her to dive bars near the railroad tracks in Kenwood.

They met some rough characters there.  Joe, a petty criminal, had the right quirks to scratch her restless itch.  She hooked up with him and they took off.  My mother, then a young teen, became surrogate mother to her five younger siblings. 

The "official" story in the family was that my grandmother was on an extended vacation. That vacation lasted for years.

Anna and Joe became their own 1950s version of Bonnie and Clyde, leaving a string of armed robberies of stores and telegraph offices in their wake.  They were wanted in at least six states from California to Florida.  Anna was arrested in 1954 and sent to jail in Florida, where they had committed most of their crimes.  She escaped from jail and was recaptured in Chicago in 1955.  She was extradited to Florida and returned to jail.

A newspaper story described her as a mother of six who had been living quietly and working as a waitress since her return home, and also as being so fierce that it took five people to subdue and search her after her arrest in Chicago.  Anna was away from her family for five years, between the crime spree and time in jail - five years in which any semblance of normal, healthy life was stolen from that family. 

When Anna was released from jail in Florida, she returned to Chicago.  My grandfather took her back, but they were always distant from each other from that point on.  My mother went to college and escaped from having to live under the same roof with her. 

Anna's three oldest daughters had developed deep scars that they never overcame.  Because my mother never got to have a normal teenage life and was abruptly yanked into adulthood in such a harsh way, she never forgave Anna.  They fought bitterly for the rest of my mother's life.  One of my uncles, the older of Anna's two sons, committed suicide when he was 23. My youngest aunt and uncle were young enough that they didn't fully understand what was happening during those years of deception.  They were spared the deep scars suffered by their older siblings.

If my mother was alive today, this would be her 71st birthday.  Being in the same room with her could be like being in the middle of a world war.  She's been gone 21 years, and I do not miss her.  It's taken a lot of hard work to salvage some sort of healthy life out of the emotional wreckage she lived in and created.

There is easily a whole novel's worth of material on each side of family.   Maybe I'll eventually write a novel or two.  Some of the stories are wild enough to be fiction, but they're all true.  Watch this space for more stories.