Was My Mother a Spy?

I am struggling today. A simple question from Becky after a visit to the cemetery to see our Mom and Grandparents graves led me down a rabbit hole and began to piss me off the further I went. 

The question was “When was Grandma Vivian born?”

My Mom’s mother has only the year of her birth and year of her death listed on her headstone, and with almost no contact with my Mom’s side of the family, there’s very few people who might actually know. A few hours of online searching, I finally caved and got a Newspapers.com subscription and started searching there. Lo and behold – Grandma was born May 8, 1928 and she died November 20, 1965 at 37 years of age. 

I found the wedding announcement for her and Grandpa, the details about their wedding bringing a smile to my face because it’s the kind of announcement that we don’t have anymore. It read like something out of a magazine for a celebrity rather than a rural town gathering of only twenty guests. 

After I’d exhausted all my searching for her and Grandpa, I started searching for my Mom. Finding all the newspaper clippings from us kids being born, her obituary, or the things I already knew of, I also found things I didn’t. I learned that my Mom was the school reporter in grade school (I knew she had been in high school), and she reported monthly in the local paper what her class was up to starting in 5th grade. She was in choir, band, and joined every literary contest and club she possibly could. It is no secret to us kids that our mother could write, but I’d had no idea that she’d been interested in it since she was a child. 

I learned that in 6th grade, her and Dad were both on the honor roll – which was a surprise to me because while I knew Mom was usually top of her class, the way Dad would tell it, he was smart but sucked at school, normally a problem student who had an issue with authority and didn’t test well. I learned that my Mom also didn’t shy away from public speaking or performing as one article talked about her giving a “humorous reading” at a literary event in 8th grade. 

The warmth of feeling like I had yet another similarity to her, as well as sharing them with Stefanie to show her the pieces of her I think she got from Mom even if she doesn’t really remember her, was short-lived as I sat and thought about it though. Left in its place is an almost bitter upset at the people who are continuing to withhold information about her from her kids.

When I started working on the book about my childhood, specifically one centered around the trauma my Dad inflicted on those around him, this led to a lot of questions about my Mom. I wanted to know her not from the people in Dad’s life who knew her as his wife, but people that grew up with her and knew her BEFORE Dad. I wanted to understand who my mother was before my Dad’s manipulation kept her tethered to him. In another life, I’m sure I should have been an investigative journalist because I pick up on these little threads of something just not adding up and I become almost obsessive.

This has extended fully to what everyone is hiding about my Mom.

I’ve known people who were absolutely awful human beings, that when they passed away no one would really talk about them. It was almost like that old saying “If you can’t say something nice…” applied when talking about them. I get not wanting to speak ill of the dead, and I’m typically a person who will be quiet about it, or find at least one redeeming quality about someone rather than to speak ill of them because even the most heinous people still have people that love them right? I don’t ever want to be the source of pain to someone who is doing nothing more than grieving someone they loved. 

But I can assure you, this does not apply to my mother. 

Janice (McBroom) Anderson by all accounts was a selfless, funny, and extremely intelligent woman for the majority of her life. A quick-witted instigator that was always up for a good joke or a laugh. Anyone who has ever known her has all said the same thing. This is not just my opinion as the daughter that lost her at fifteen. If you ask anyone who knew her, they will say one of two things – she was the funniest person they knew or she was the kindest person they knew. But if you ask them to elaborate or to tell you specific things about her that made her uniquely her, the vast majority will trail off or not reply at all. My Dad’s family will talk about her, her family and former classmates from her hometown however will not. 

I live in one of the towns she lived in as a child, still very close connected to the town nearby that she mostly grew up in, she has several cousins in the area who I’ve reached out to, even her own brother, and all of them remain VERY tight-lipped about my Mom. One of her cousins has blocked me completely on social media after telling me to come back by and she’d pull out pictures from them when they were kids. The few other cousins who have actually responded to me when I’ve asked about her and if they’d be willing to let me pick their brains about how Mom was when she was younger have all acted like it’s an imposition but that they’d be willing to talk about it if I come meet with them in person. The problem here is, when I’ve then tried to lock in a date to do this, I typically get left on read status, no reply given. It makes it increasingly difficult to meet with them when they will not reply to a message, phone call, letter, etc.

This has left my imagination to wander rampantly and the only conclusion I can come up with is that she was a spy and they’re all in on the secret. 

Realistically, I know that is not the case, it’s probably something far more simple than that, but as the girl who just desperately wants to learn about her Mom, I can tell you that their silence is infuriating. It seems like it’s one big cosmic joke that the universe has played on me, to rob me of even more of my connection to her than my father already did with his years of systematic manipulation over her memory. 

The other explanation – and one that is 100% plausible as well – is that they know as well as everyone else does, exactly who my father was and what he was capable of. The one cousin who talked with me briefly before blocking me on social media made a comment about how Mom would get twitchy almost if you stopped by the house and stayed close to the time Dad would get home from work. Everyone knew you never knew what kind of mood Dad would be in from one minute to the next. She wouldn’t elaborate further on what (if anything) she’d actually seen of Dad’s temper and mood swings, but it was almost like it was an unspoken rule when visiting Mom that you were expected to leave the minute Dad got home if not before. 

I know from talking to an aunt of mine that she carries regret for not stepping in when Mom died to take us kids from Dad. My own daughter has asked me on several occasions if I carry animosity towards the family for not stepping in when Mom died and to be honest, I don’t. I say that because I believe Dad had the majority of the family fooled about how bad he actually was at times, and also because without the things I lived through with him, I honestly don’t think I’d be the person I am, or the parent I am today. So no, I don’t have blame towards anyone but him, and at times, Mom, for not leaving him. My questions about Mom are not to try to make anyone in the family feel guilty for leaving us kids alone with Dad when she passed, it is solely for the purpose of learning about my mother from people who knew her that aren’t trying to manipulate my memory of her. 

Until that happens though, given the amount of secrecy that still follows any mention of my mother in these small towns she grew up in – I’m just going to have to believe she was a spy and that information about her is classified.