Growing Up--Uphoff

I would like to tell you about my family. Why? Probably because I can't quite figure them out and thought maybe, just maybe, if I wrote it all down, all that stuff that gives me headaches if I think on it too long, will come clear. And if not that, maybe you, dear reader, might be able to offer some insight into what all of this means; the separation and drama that seem to be the core of my family's functioning. Perhaps you can offer some granual of wisdom and truth that I have overlooked. And it does always help to have an outsider's untainted opinion, because lets face it, we often cannot see the problem when it is us, ourselves, who are creating it.

Let me start by saying by parent's were immigrants to the country of Canada having come from Germany in the 50's. They did not know eachother before they married. My father, having been jilted by his hometown girlfriend while he was away at war, left Germany broken hearted, and angry at his own family for reasons I have never fully understood. As well, so I have been told, he was denied an apprenticeship as an instrument mechanic, a huge blow to his pride, and this final factor sealed the deal on his decision to make a new life for himself in Canada.

He went about as far away from his homeland and his family as he could, choosing the desolate coastal town of Prince Rupert, British Columbia to begin his new life. It was maybe not such an odd choice as my father was born and raised in Ausfreisland, a part of Germany that is very close to Holland and is infact close to the sea itself. So maybe it was his love of the sea that drew him to Prince Rupert as much as the fact that it is the furthest west you can go in Canada.

It was here that my father was introduced to Native Americans and North American, evangilist religion. From these he came to the following conclusions: smoked salmon is very tasty and churches just want your money. I heard say from time to time when I was young, that the natives he met in Prince Rupert were, for the most part, an honest and friendly people, willing to share their knowledge of the area and their very tasty smoked and unsmoked salmon. Churches, however, were bad, bad, bad and to be stayed away from at all cost. To him they were nothing more than just another capitalist business out to take your hard earned dollar. He did, however, have a few kind words for one religious organization, the Salvation Army, who he said had never done him any wrong and asked for nothing in return for their charity.

His dislike of organized religion did not abate with time, if anything, his dislike and aversion to anything churchlike grew deeper. But somewhere after the time I was born and heard his few favorable reminiscence about his life in Prince Rupert and the natives he met there, his opinion of them changed. I remember growing up in an extremely predjuced household. I was told that Indians were nothing but lazy drunks who drank a lot of cheap red wine and looked for handouts.

My brother, especially. had deep seated racial predjudices and would constantly poke fun at the local natives. As far as he was concerned, they were best kept segregated and in locations that no one else wanted to inhabit. In Prince George, the town I was born and raised in, this was not just my brother's unkind wish for them, it was a literal truth; the local Indian reservation known as the Island Cache was a desolate mud hole situated on the mud flats of the Fraser River where it meets the Nechako. Every spring it would flood and the people living there would have to clean up the damage done to their already ramshackle dwellings. It was a horrible, squalid place made up of three or four gravel and mud roads lined with wrecked vehicles and garbage.

My brother's idea of a good time would be to drive through the reserve and laugh at the poverty, that to him, was on display for just such a purpose. And though he acted as though natives were nothing but drunken buffoons, or in the case of the women, overweight, slovenly sqwas, I think that he was, like a lot of white people, afraid of them. Northern BC natives are known to be just as predjuced against whites as whites are of them and even the local bars kept them separated. Some catered to natives while others catered to blue collar whites. If you were interested in getting into a fist fight, all you had to do was go into the wrong bar.

But I am gettting ahead of myself. I was talking about my father's arrival in Canada and his subsequent search for a suitable wife after his home town sweetheart sent him a "Dear John" letter. In some of the stories I've heard she left him while he was away at war and in others it was not until he was in Canada that she wrote to say that she decided to stay in their village and marry a local man. Either way, my father found himself alone in a strange country with no family and no friends, and now no hope for a wife.

Not being a social man, this must have proposed a bit of a challenge. But he was resourceful and in bad need of a helper and wife and so he placed an ad in a German newspaper requesting a Christan women with which to correspond, object: matrimony. He hit pay dirt when my mother answered his ad. The fact that the two of them came together was fortunate for them both and what started as an arrangement of sorts became a lasting union of more than 60 years.

My mother's story was a bit different from my father's. Unlike him, she was close to her family and had no desire to abandon them. But circumstances being what they were for her, she felt she had little choice. When she was a little more than twelve years old, her father was listed as missing in action, and so her mother took her and her two brother's and younger sister from the refugee camp they were resettled into during the war and went back to the farm she was born on to wait for her father's return. He never came back.

Times were very hard in East Germany after the war and my mother, second oldest, had to leave her family's small farm to work on someone else's while her oldest brother stayed behind to work theirs. The two other children were still too young to be farmed out for labor so they stayed back, but my mother, fourteen at the time, was considered old enough, so after completing no more than the seventh grade, she left home and school and went to her first full time job.

She has never told me a great deal about her life in Germany, just snippets of information that I have pieced together over the years. My brother, eight years older than me was her confidant and the one that she turned to for comfort. But from what I have been told, the few years on the farm were not easy. The work was hard and never ending and she was always hungry. There was never enough of anything to go around. Its a small wonder that she and other people from her generation and cultural background, make do with very little, getting every last scrap of value out of everything they use. It makes sense to me now but when I was young and being made to wear clothes that she made out of material brought home from my dads work (they were given cotton yard ends for rags) I could have sworn she did it out of some preverse desire to punish me.

When she did go back home to her mother's farm, it was only to leave again. After the war ended and the country was divided up, it wasn't long before the borders between the East and the West closed. This was going to divide families and make it difficult for people from one side to go to the other for a visit let alone to live. My mother's youngest brother, Bernhard, left the East just as the borders were being closed to German citizens travelling within Germany and my mother followed suit not long afterwared. She travelled at night, crossing the border illegally, and went to stay with a cousins family in West Germany. And although it was better in the West with the economy picking up and work being available, it was crowded in her Aunts small home and she felt that she was an unwanted burden that was thrust apon relatives who were fortunate enough to be on the Western side of Germany. So it was while she was there, working in a factory, that she came accross my father's ad and saw it as an opportunity for a life outside of the misery and hardship that the war had created.

She really felt that she had no choice if she wanted to find a suitable marriage partner her own age. A lot of young men died in the war and so those that remained had their choice of elgible females. My mother feared she would be overlooked as a girlfireind and wife as she was very tall and large boned, standing over five feet elelven inches tall in a time when tall was not fashionable for women. Not only that but her wide hips and shoulders were matched by her feet and hands and though she was pretty, she was not a terribly feminine woman. Add to this the fact that my mother was painfully shy and not the least bit social and you can understand why she felt her chances of a good marriage if she stayed on with her cousin's family were slight to none.

It may seem odd and even wrong that a woman of only twenty would feel pressure to get married in order to have a life, but that is the way it was in my mother's world. At twenty my mother was already starting to feel like an old maid and the idea that she could have a life without a man never occured to her. Women only worked for as long as it took for them to find husbands. After that their job was to see to his needs and look after the house and the children. So it is not so strange then that a marriage to someone she didn't know seemed like a perfectly reasonable solution to her problems. She did not see marriage so much as a contract of love as a contract of shared duties.

When I was a little older, my mother confessed that she did not ever really "love" my father in the way a woman is supposed to "love" a man. She, in fact, had never had a real boyfriend, been on a date or fallen in love with a man other than a teenage crush she had on a boy who she claims didn't even notice her. Dad was the only man she ever knew and though she had nothing to compare it with, she knew it was not the heart stopping, feeling faint sort of love that is described in romance novels or in the movies that were popular in her time. Still, together they made it work and she did love him in a more practical and time weathered way. Theirs was a love of like minds and values and it stood them in good stead. I often thought of them as two well matched work horses shackled by fate to the same plow.

-to be continued)