Social Work: A Life of Meaning and Depth (eBook)

Background:
“Early Childhood”

I was the second of four children and born in 1946. My sister, Carolyn, is four years older. Carolyn, who was considered the “smart one,” spent her adult life as a scientist. She is our family historian and she remembers what I cannot. We often share our childhood memories.

I found it easy to make friends and therefore was considered the “social one” as a child. I was also very curious and I loved to read and write, but academics were Carolyn’s strong suit, not mine. I was a Social Worker for forty-two years.

Ross, who was named after our father, Donald Ross Converse, was born four years after me. He has spent his life working on cars. He is the “inventor” like his dad. He developed a reputation doing car conversions and built cars for both David Letterman and Paul Newman. Ross spent his adolescence in our garage where he tinkered with cars and avoided our family conflicts.

Janet was the “baby,” six years younger than me. She got the gregariousness gene in our family and has turned out to be much more social than I am. She is outgoing, and a real ham. She keeps us laughing at our family reunions. Jan worked as a Production Manager in magazine publishing. Her passion is dogs and she has had a thriving pet sitting business. Jan and I also rehash our childhoods together. Although we are spread out all over the world we are all close as siblings and we frequently talk on the phone. We’ve had reunions in Scotland, California, Florida, and Maine. Unfortunately this has become challenging as we get older.

As a child I lived in a suburban town in Connecticut. My father worked selling business equipment when he was not sick. Before I was born he was a top salesman at IBM, where he worked for fifteen years. He was also an inventor and sold one of his inventions to Underwood. It was called Kleen-Type and was an adhesive-like strip that went across the roller in the typewriter to clean the keys of excess ink.

When I was close to three I sensed already that something was wrong with daddy. I remember him sitting outside in his bathrobe soaking up the sunshine, and it did not seem right. He was usually working. Mom said he was sick. My father’s first illness, it turns out, was a serious case of encephalitis. I wonder now if this was when three-year-old me first became an anxious worrier. I am still someone who has difficulty with uncertainty. Yet as you will see, my uncertainty did not prevent me from taking risks.

I was six years old when Daddy had his first heart attack. I still have his letters from the hospital, and I feel sad when I read them. Those feelings have never gone away.

Norwalk Hospital

April 1952

My Dear Lindy Lou,

I got your nice letter today and was happy to hear from you. I’ve been missing you a lot, Lindy, so I’m going to get well soon and come home to you.

While Daddy is away, I know you are a good girl and help Mommy and Carolyn with the work around the house and taking care of Rossie and Janet. That’s my good old sweetheart.

Lots of love, Daddy

I realize now as an adult that the stress on my father to keep our family afloat must have been overwhelming. He and my mother had designed and worked with the carpenters to build our home located in an affluent area. Mom did not work and my father was out of work for extended periods of time resting. Rest was recommended for heart disease in those days.

I knew my father’s health was fragile and although I worried I have many happy memories of my early childhood. When I was ten my father suffered his third and final heart attack. It was Ross’s seventh birthday. Daddy pushed a gleeful Ross up the driveway on his new birthday bike. He died later that evening. He was only forty-seven.

My parents loved each other; I felt it. I remember my dad as a warm, gentle man with a down- to-earth sense of humor. His “Trips to Nowhere” were our Sunday drives. He’d herd us into the car, and we knew we were on an adventure. We’d yell, “go right,” then “go left,” and he’d turn wherever we told him to until he got tired and then we’d stop for ice cream. He would bring special gifts home from each of his sales trips too.

His nicknames for me were “Lindy Lou” and “Linda Jane Sugar Cane.” I was always on the lookout for sweets. I once found a big Hershey’s bar under his mattress. Mom told me not to touch it. I now realize Daddy had hidden it from me.

Early in our lives we were strongly encouraged to choose a career. I remember the game my parents played with each of us on our first birthday. They would put the baby on the living room floor and surround them with objects to see which one the child focused on most. Then they would announce that this child would be a “such and such” when they grew up. Ross picked the toy car while playing “pick your career” as a baby. No telling what toys the rest of us chose.

I don’t remember which object I chose, but I do remember climbing up the tall school bus steps in the fourth grade, looking up at the bus driver and announcing, “I’m going to be an anthropologist when I grow up.” I have no idea where that came from, but even then, I must have felt my parents’ pressure to declare a career.

Once my dad died, our lives changed completely. Life became sober for me; it felt as though my childhood had abruptly ended. We didn’t have much money and Mom had to apply for a scholarship so I could continue Miss Boleyn’s ballroom dancing classes, a social expectation in our community. This was when I first became aware of the shame that came along with having to ask for help.

The summer after fifth grade, Mom rented out our house to wealthy New Yorkers. We moved to the Girl Scout day camp nearby where Mom, who was a lifelong Girl Scout herself, became a caretaker and camp counselor for the summer. We slept on wooden benches in the central dining hall. Mom was so busy that she didn’t notice my hair had turned into a rat’s nest until the end of the summer. I winced as she worked to untangle the mess. My hair reflected the state of our lives after Daddy died. Tangled and painful.

My mother remarried the next year, likely out of desperation. Our new stepfather Walter was a stranger to us. I confronted Mom in the den, upset because she was marrying him. “But Mom, you don’t even know him!” Her response was simply, “Linda, you’re too young to understand.”

Before marrying Mom, Walter had owned a general store in Maine. He played the fiddle and sang in his own country band. He wore a cowboy hat and cowboy boots and didn’t fit in very well in Connecticut. He made it very clear that he was unhappy and missed his own children. Mom consequently sold our childhood home and we moved to a small coastal town in Maine, just before my fourteenth birthday.

Throughout the years after my father’s death I felt depressed. At my first boy-girl party in the sixth grade, I stood on the sidelines watching the others interact. I felt numb, unlike the happy girl I used to be.

My mom’s second marriage was not good from the start. She and Walter fought frequently, something we weren’t used to. Although Walter was never abusive, I always felt like we were walking on eggshells around him. Sometime during my high school years, I began experiencing scary out-of-body episodes. I’d involuntarily slip outside myself, and I could not “get back in.” These experiences made me extremely anxious. It often happened while sitting in class. I would pretend to be “there” but I felt like I was on the other side of a window watching and hearing everything going on. The feeling usually went away on its own after a while, although it once lasted for two days.

Sometimes too, I would feel numb when I knew I should be feeling upset. I remember when a boy in my school died from pneumonia. I was shocked, but I didn’t feel sad. I felt nothing. This defense mechanism began the day my dad died, and it still kicks in when I deal with loss. Luckily, I’ve not had this experience now for about thirty years, but it did last into my adult life.

I became Mom’s helper at an early age. When we moved to Maine, Carolyn left for college, and I became the oldest child at home. I helped Mom by cleaning, shopping, cooking dinner, taking care of my younger siblings, and listening to Mom’s problems. At one point she pleaded with me “Linda, you want to be a Social Worker, what should I do?”

Sometime early in high school I had decided that I would become a Social Worker. Perhaps because we were expected to decide on an occupation early, Social Work was my natural conclusion. I could channel what I was familiar with, and was expected of me, into a career. I have struggled ambivalently, however, with my helper identity for years.

I was relieved when Mom and Walter divorced while I was in my teens. But then, Mom impulsively remarried two more times. Stepfather number two, despite a Harvard education, was a schizophrenic alcoholic who could not hold a job. The years that followed were filled with days of desperation for Mom as she tried to keep up with the bills. There were times when the oil company threatened to stop delivering the oil for heat, or they turned us away at the grocery store because Mom had charged too much, and she couldn’t pay for it. By the time stepfather number...