Life Alterations

    My parents each had terrible upbringings of their own. My mother was taken, along with many of her siblings, by the State of Illinois when she was 5 years old and placed in foster homes and detention homes. My father was the oldest of three sons born to a farm couple in Northern Illinois who kept him at home to be an underpaid field-hand while the younger sons were assisted in gaining independance through education and professional careers. He went through a period of melancholy as his brothers lives were beginning to form through marriage and new families and a fight with his father led to his being committed to a state mental hospital. He remained in the Elgin Mental Hospital for two years receiving regular 1950's style health care, forced baths in tubs of ice water and electric shock therapy. He also worked in their fields, growing some of the food the hospital consumed.
    My father's younger brother married my mother's older sister around the time of my father's detention. My mother had been interested in his other brother but when he chose to marry someone else Mom allowed herself to consider Vernon. He must have made a fair show of his miniscule interest in living to gain her acceptance. She was already someone who had lived in Chicago and pursued a life in the arts as a music student at an academy where she just missed being accepted on a scholarship to study singing. She worked at a music store and was an active autograph hound around the music scene. She had been fascinated with popular music since she was a kid listening on the radio. My father was a fan of Hank Williams and the Grand Ol' Opry and liked to sing a bit. After the marriage he was a constant complainer about Mom's impractical interests in her arts. She was also becoming a painter and had specifically asked if he would be supportive of her doing that should they marry. He lied.
    They had a daughter and Mom named her Viola after a character out of Shakespeare. They lived at various places in this community of Northern Illinois farms and small towns. Dad worked at his parent's farm and at a few other farms while Mom stayed home and pursued her painting amid the universal dissaproval of her new family. They were part of a culture of Presbyterians who generally feel they are connected to everyone in the area who matters through family and my mother was not "acting right." She resented these ignorant people trying to squelch her efforts to invest herself in the arts for the sake of a piddly little job. My Dad spent most of his free time sitting in his parent's home where his mother routinely gave her assesments of everyone she knew of. Mom's was not good. Vernon also learned to put blame on other people and get his family to feel sorry for the poor victim who did all the work and got no respect.
    As my grandparents were losing the family property to poor business practices they assisted my parents in getting a family home of their own started and they both began working at the Dixon State School, an institution for the mentally retarded and disabled who were unwanted at home. My mother was fired for striking a patientg who had hit her in her pregnant belly while she was carrying me. He had been causing a commotion in the dining room, stealing cake off of trays and hit her very had when she tried to control him. She reflexively punched him for it. My father kept working there until he was eventually fired for thinking his job included talking to patients. They did not think he was making enough beds and the other manual labor jobs he was hired to perform.