Intergenerational Child Abuse: Life writing to understand the past–and try not to repeat it

Posted on July 16, 2023 by moonbridgebooks

Part of why I encourage life writing is because the past certainly does affect the future, as I discovered with my own mother. Knowing the past of our parents and grandparents helps current generations understand where behaviors come from and can help thwart continuing effects of past bad experiences. Researchers are actually wondering if trauma can leave a chemical mark on genes that can be passed down to the next generation.

Jeanne Felfe is a writer friend who published her mother’s long-set-aside memoir, I Want to Live! My Journey Beyond Generational Child Abuse, earlier this year. Helen Imagene (Jean) Felfe’s story is of her abusive family and finding the strength to break the cycle to save her own children from violence. Following is her daughter Jeanne’s story of publishing her mother’s writing to honor her story and hopefully help others.

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When I was in my late 20s, I rescued my mother’s life’s work—her memoir about surviving child abuse, motherhood, and her mental illness. She threatened to burn it—and all her other writing—in a suicidal rage after another rejection from a publisher who told her that “wanting to prevent child abuse was a poor reason for writing a book.” Since it only existed on paper, if she’d burned it, it would have been gone forever. Visions of my mother’s words—and the history of my childhood—curling up amidst black smoke and morphing into ashes forced me to take custody of this stack of hand-typed papers.

Knowing the depth of her fragility, and believing she would eventually change her mind, I figured I could return it once she found a publisher. Instead, it remained on a shelf with a deteriorating rubber band around it for almost four decades, traveling with me through three states, three marriages and raising a child of my own, and beyond Mom’s death in 2012. And yet, I still had no idea what I was going to do with it, other than maybe copy it so family members would have it.

In early 2015, while in Texas caring for my dad, I spent hours culling through file drawers, boxing up the rest of Mom’s stories and articles she’d written for a variety of publications. By now I was in the middle of writing my first novel, had begun to study self-publishing, and was an active member of a writers’ group. The first glimmer of an idea whispered … maybe I could publish it. It would remain on my shelf for another seven years while I completed and published Bridge to Us, compiled and published an anthology—Elemental Tales—had dozens of short stories published, and served on the board of Saturday Writers, as president for three years.

Then, when COVID turned the world upside down in 2020, my life shifted. Things I’d once been passionate about lost meaning. I went deeper, once again searching for my “why.” While editing a client’s manuscript, Mom’s voice called to me, letting me know it was time. The last of her thirteen siblings had recently passed away, so all those around during her childhood, those who might have seen things differently or who had experienced them in another way—some of whom objected to her sharing this story during their lifetimes—were gone.

I began working on this effort in 2021 while the world was still in a pandemic and after receiving a life-altering autoimmune disease diagnosis. Needing a break from my own creative writing efforts, I decided to tackle Mom’s memoir as a labor of love. Since it only existed on paper, I painstakingly scanned a chapter at a time, converted it to PDF and then to Word. Aged pages—some with hand-written corrections—produced a myriad of weird errors and strange hieroglyphs that needed to be fixed one by one.

I pulled pages from piles of hand-written journals and added those at the end of the book, edited the entire manuscript, found an inspiring cover, and published I Want to Live! My Journey Beyond Generational Child Abuse on Feb 25, 2023, on what would have been Mom’s 90th birthday.

I understood the book wouldn’t have wide marketability—it’s too private, too personal. Despite this, my mother was brave enough to bare her soul, hoping to prevent even one child from suffering the kind of abuse and neglect she and her thirteen siblings had suffered. I simply had to be brave enough to publish it. That my mom never got the chance to see it published was something I could remedy by bringing her work into the light of day. This is my gift to her legacy.

Learn more about Jeanne Felfe at her website https://jeannefelfe.com/. Find her many novels and stories, as well as her mother’s memoir, I Want to Live!, available via the Jeanne Felfe Amazon Author Page.

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Lamenting the loss of letters

Posted on June 26, 2023 by moonbridgebooks

Recently I found a box of letters my mother had saved – dating back to the 1970s. There were letters from Japan I had to use Google Translate to understand and letters from my American grandmother and spunky great-aunt Chris. Some letters were even from me during 1994 when we lived in the UK.

The bundle of letters from my mother’s sister in Japan contained pressed leaves and flowers. My mother used to send greeting cards that included pressed leaves and four-leaf clovers. I send greeting cards with pressed leaves and flowers.

The handful of letters to my mother from my dad’s mother and his aunt showed how his relatives loved my mother and tried to support her during my parents’ divorce, a devastating time for my mom. Reading the letters, I loved these family members even more. The last letter from my grandmother was written on the back of a greeting card and she noted her breathing had gotten bad—she died the following spring when I was away at college. The last letter saved from Aunt Chris was written two years before she died. The handwritten letters held dear memories of people I loved but long gone. Their letters held memories I did not want to throw away despite my big project of downsizing.

Nowadays people don’t write letters, they text on cell phones, even post or message on Facebook. Maybe call on special occasions. Email is out, too old school. Nothing to save to look back on, to remind of what was. No more handwritten messages holding physical remnants of someone’s life. No more pressed leaves or flowers sent. All the more reason to write the stories. Save the memories somehow.

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Mother’s Day, the bitter and the sweet

Posted on May 14, 2023 by moonbridgebooks

For many, Mother’s Day is a time of remembering our mothers no longer with us. My mother passed away in 2012 and sometimes it seems like only a few years ago. While we had a sometimes difficult relationship, we loved and cared for each other. I learned to feel lucky as I became aware that Mother’s Day can be a difficult time for those who did not have good relationships with their mothers or even had no relationship, not to mention those who have miscarried or have suffered the death of a born child of any age.

Some of the difficulties I had with my mother were from cultural differences and her wartime experience, and I did not realize this until I wrote her memoir of childhood in Japan around WWII. I learned so much about her, what she had been through and what formed her, and in turn how that formed me.

In Japan my mother took classes in sewing Western clothing which came in handy during the Occupation when she sewed the US Officers Club waitresses’ uniforms out of American parachutes—normal fabric was hard to come by right after the war. She was an excellent seamstress and made most, if not all, of the clothes for my sister and me when we were young. She especially liked making matching outfits which I did not always appreciate but I loved our red and white sailor blouses and shorts she made to match her own. My mother’s cultural upbringing made me upset one day when I had caught some minnows during a vacation. They were meant for our fishpond back home but my mother ate them, skewered and grilled over our Coleman camp stove!

I was so glad I thought to ask about and write my mom’s stories which became Cherry Blossoms in Twilight: Memories of a Japanese Girl. If you haven’t yet and if you are still able, isn’t it time to ask your own mother—or grandmother—about her childhood? Or maybe it’s you who were born in the first half of the 1900s and experienced so many technological advances and historical happenings. These stories are lived history and it’s time to write them down before it’s too late. They are your family legacy and a way for your mother, your grandmother, or you to be remembered forever. Don’t let these stories—and the memories—die.

Is it Time to Write Your Memoir? by Ben Kyriagis, author of the memoir Don’t Marry an American

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