From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- From The "Ancient Dreams, Dreams" Sketches- "Growing Up Absurd"

Peter Paul Markin comment:

This was the fourth of a short series of stories about growing up in the 1950’s, the childhood period of the generation of ’68 and of my own. This series got its start as a spin-off from a previous series entitled “History and Class Consciousness- A Working Class Saga” that came from a look back at the trials and tribulations of a family, the Callahans, from my old working class neighborhood where I came of political age. The stories here go back to an earlier time and different location to that of the housing project where my family first started out. They are motivated by a search to find out the whys and wherefores of how consciousness of being poor got implanted early. That the poor, the edge of society poor, the working poor mixed in with all the other flotsam and jetsam down there, really are different from you, the reader. The “what to do about it” part I have discussed, ad infinitum, elsewhere over the past forty years or so.

The previous tale in this series that you may have just read , “A Piece of Cloth,” about my less than heroic misadventures as an up and coming square dancer (apparently in preparation for an career on the Grand Ole Opry)  set the tone for this story. In that tale I was subjected to a poor working class mother’s rage for cutting up one of my precious few pairs of pants in order to impress a girl, a rich girl, well rich compared to us. I learned then, if more painfully than was necessary, the hard lesson that the Markin family was poor, dirt poor, in this wicked old world.

Those kinds of incidents involving my mother and I (and my brothers, as well), although generally more severe and less amiably subject to public treatment than that bittersweet tale of pants and love lost, were standard fare in the Markin household. Such incidents are, moreover, well documented in literature and the media and would be merely cumulative if discussed here. Only the reality is grimmer than anything portrayed in book or film. Not physically, there was thankfully little of that in our household, but the psychological warfare was almost as devastating. Let me nevertheless try to put this thing in some perspective now, although Lord knows I was incapable of that as I was going through it.

I have mentioned elsewhere some of the small details of my parent’s struggle for survival. I have also mentioned that their life profiles fit into a familiar pattern similar to others who survived the Great Depression of the 1930s and fought or endured World War II. I still feel no need to go into great detail about that here. I however find that I need to mention that my mother married my serviceman father just out of high school and quickly became a teenage mother. Moreover, she had great difficulties with the births of my brothers and me. The three of us furthermore were only separated by a year or so each. In short, a handful.

Those facts along with my father’s continual and constant difficulties in holding onto the unskilled jobs that he was forced into meant a very, very tough existence for a woman who was something a princess (a working class one, to be sure-there is a different but a princess nevertheless) to her parents and brothers. The woman’s respond to her conditions was to be in a constant rage. It was not pleasant. We called it, among us boys, the Irish “shaming” routine. In short, what is apparent here is that the nuclear family structure was far too narrow a basis for her and us to survive under the circumstances. I survived. My brothers did not.

Sherry my invaluable ‘hood historian has related some of the same kind of stories to me about her family life except her family was larger, her mother died when she was a teenager, and she found herself as the oldest girl taking care of the household. Others survivors of ‘the projects’ have related very similar stories, almost monotonously so. We need not even speak here of such things as the effects of alcoholism, and later, drugs, and other social maladies on this fragile nuclear family structure.

To be sure, even under socialism, it will take a massive reallocation of funds to right these kinds of situations. Moreover, and here is the hard part for many to understand today, rich or poor, the nuclear family structure is just too narrow a setting to free up the potential energies of humankind. It needs be replaced.

Despite all the pains of growing up poor, despite all the dislocations of psyche that I have dealt with over lifetime to fight the good fight for socialism it has still been worthwhile if only for the promise that some future generation will not have to go through my childhood experiences. Although I will not live long enough to see the replacement of the nuclear family with something better and more attuned to human potentialities I am satisfied with that. On reviewing this piece I find that it was not really a story after all but one of my political screeds. However, remember that mother’s impotent rage against her fate. That is the story.

Peter Paul Markin comment:

This was the fourth of a short series of stories about growing up in the 1950’s, the childhood period of the generation of ’68 and of my own. This series got its start as a spin-off from a previous series entitled “History and Class Consciousness- A Working Class Saga” that came from a look back at the trials and tribulations of a family, the Callahans, from my old working class neighborhood where I came of political age. The stories here go back to an earlier time and different location to that of the housing project where my family first started out. They are motivated by a search to find out the whys and wherefores of how consciousness of being poor got implanted early. That the poor, the edge of society poor, the working poor mixed in with all the other flotsam and jetsam down there, really are different from you, the reader. The “what to do about it” part I have discussed, ad infinitum, elsewhere over the past forty years or so.

The previous tale in this series that you may have just read , “A Piece of Cloth,” about my less than heroic misadventures as an up and coming square dancer (apparently in preparation for an career on the Grand Ole Opry)  set the tone for this story. In that tale I was subjected to a poor working class mother’s rage for cutting up one of my precious few pairs of pants in order to impress a girl, a rich girl, well rich compared to us. I learned then, if more painfully than was necessary, the hard lesson that the Markin family was poor, dirt poor, in this wicked old world.

Those kinds of incidents involving my mother and I (and my brothers, as well), although generally more severe and less amiably subject to public treatment than that bittersweet tale of pants and love lost, were standard fare in the Markin household. Such incidents are, moreover, well documented in literature and the media and would be merely cumulative if discussed here. Only the reality is grimmer than anything portrayed in book or film. Not physically, there was thankfully little of that in our household, but the psychological warfare was almost as devastating. Let me nevertheless try to put this thing in some perspective now, although Lord knows I was incapable of that as I was going through it.

I have mentioned elsewhere some of the small details of my parent’s struggle for survival. I have also mentioned that their life profiles fit into a familiar pattern similar to others who survived the Great Depression of the 1930s and fought or endured World War II. I still feel no need to go into great detail about that here. I however find that I need to mention that my mother married my serviceman father just out of high school and quickly became a teenage mother. Moreover, she had great difficulties with the births of my brothers and me. The three of us furthermore were only separated by a year or so each. In short, a handful.

Those facts along with my father’s continual and constant difficulties in holding onto the unskilled jobs that he was forced into meant a very, very tough existence for a woman who was something a princess (a working class one, to be sure-there is a different but a princess nevertheless) to her parents and brothers. The woman’s respond to her conditions was to be in a constant rage. It was not pleasant. We called it, among us boys, the Irish “shaming” routine. In short, what is apparent here is that the nuclear family structure was far too narrow a basis for her and us to survive under the circumstances. I survived. My brothers did not.

Sherry my invaluable ‘hood historian has related some of the same kind of stories to me about her family life except her family was larger, her mother died when she was a teenager, and she found herself as the oldest girl taking care of the household. Others survivors of ‘the projects’ have related very similar stories, almost monotonously so. We need not even speak here of such things as the effects of alcoholism, and later, drugs, and other social maladies on this fragile nuclear family structure.

To be sure, even under socialism, it will take a massive reallocation of funds to right these kinds of situations. Moreover, and here is the hard part for many to understand today, rich or poor, the nuclear family structure is just too narrow a setting to free up the potential energies of humankind. It needs be replaced.

Despite all the pains of growing up poor, despite all the dislocations of psyche that I have dealt with over lifetime to fight the good fight for socialism it has still been worthwhile if only for the promise that some future generation will not have to go through my childhood experiences. Although I will not live long enough to see the replacement of the nuclear family with something better and more attuned to human potentialities I am satisfied with that. On reviewing this piece I find that it was not really a story after all but one of my political screeds. However, remember that mother’s impotent rage against her fate. That is the story.