The Matriarch

She loomed large through my childhood, the grandmother I never knew, but referenced often by my mother to me. The stories my mother told of her mother-in-law were not positive: the chaotic family my father had, moves, a stint in the New England Home for Little Wanderers, mental illness, criticism of my mother’s parenting to her first born child, a son, my brother.

In so many families it is the mother’s mother who rules the roost, but not in my family. My mother’s mother was long dead by the time my mother married my father. My mother was absorbed into my father’s family. There are pictures of my mother in Maine before she and my father married, or shortly after their honeymoon to the Cape Breton Islands in Canada. My grandmother had a house in Maine, we have photos that show it with my aunts. I never found a record of my grandmother owning property, but for generations the Lang family, father, sisters, Grandpa Lang and Gertrude, my sisters and brother and our cousins saw each other every summer. “We go to York,” was our mantra. To this day, when I visit my sister Joan, we drive to York, it is our pilgrimage. We thank the grandmother we never knew but who gave us a love of Maine, a touchstone of our childhood, the happiest memories of our childhood. And my own mother, she fell in love with Maine, too, and the time to be with her sister-in-law Iris.

Matriarchs are powerful.