A long time ago in a land far away…
In a few weeks, I’ll be accompanying a school group on a community service trip to Tanzania, seeing my place of birth for the first time since my family left in 1978. Plans began months ago, but despite payments made, vaccinations received, and logistics discussed, I struggle to believe that this trip is really happening. I’d resigned myself long ago to never fully knowing where my story started.
I am terrified. I am ecstatic.
In addition to the suggested clothing and equipment, I’ll carry with me a host of different voices and stories: my mother’s, my father’s, and the grandparents who pledged the assurances and paid the fees necessary to relocate us to (and in) the United States. I’ve been studying the family documents in preparation. The more I learn, the more I see that circumstance and opportunity made my life possible, but not without cost.
*
Sometime between my birth and the spring of 1978, my mother and father separated – though I’d argue they were never truly together – and Mom sought political asylum in Austria. Her visa had expired, but she refused to return to her native Ukraine. In January 1978, my paternal grandparents, living out retirement in Boise, Idaho, signed an affidavit of support for Mom, my half-sister, and me through the U.S. Department of Justice, expressing their wish for us to have “a permanent home and [be] properly cared for.”
Shortly thereafter, my grandmother, Edith, wrote a beseeching letter to my mother, who faced a critical juncture. “It will not be easy tomorrow for any of us,” she wrote. “But we [Edith and Stan, my grandparents] dare to offer you what we can share because we know we both want to help you and are able to. And we are quite willing to work harder as long as we live to make this possible, and you will also know that we will work together to make a good life possible for all of us.” Though Mom rued her decision in subsequent years and journal entries, she accepted my grandparents’ offer and came to the States.
*
In all of the arrangements for this upcoming trip, I’m astounded by the credence of tangible things. It is one thing to think I might be going to Africa, and another to hold an actual, ticketed receipt; to have heard family legends versus piecing together, detail by detail, the histories written in my parents’ personal effects. I have liquidated my Vegas fund, my rainy day fund, and a good deal of non-earmarked savings to pay for the journey – tangible currency for tangible experience. Still, the prospect that I will stand on African soil, dwelling for two weeks in the landscape that so inspired my father and so changed the trajectory of my mother’s life, is almost too much to fathom.
*
In April 1978, Dad hand-wrote, and had notarized, his own terms for my financial providence: $150 per month in child support payments “until such time as Julia Moris attains the age of 18 years, or marries, or is adopted, or dies, or otherwise emancipates herself, whichever event shall occur first.” He stipulated ten points, all of which illustrate his determination to separate us from his ordinary life and everyday affairs. (I am glad that I read the document as an adult who enjoyed an excellent relationship with her father; it would have crushed me as a child.)
Money undermined my parents’ relationship, even after it “unraveled.” I represented a ledger to Mom and Dad. While on paper Mom’s figures appeared in black, she worked a string of low-paying part-time jobs to make ends meet. (Mom pridefully turned away assistance from the Moris family in instances that did not directly impact me – for better or for worse.) Dad’s column bled searing red: our connection a documented, illegitimate liability. Neither of my parents profited – at least financially – from my presence in their life.
*
I’ve always been aware of the economics of my worth: sublimating guilt over my mother receiving child support, though it never alleviated her daily worries; knowing implicitly to order off the budget menu, though the Moris family is, by disposition, generous to a fault. My mother fastidiously saved her small earnings and modeled frugality. Save. Invest. Take good care of your things. Don’t squander. Be humble. I read these lessons in years of furrowed brows and diverted glances. There were few lectures, but I learned.
*
My much-beloved grandmother distrusted Mom from the outset. “I would like to see Tina have security also, and feel warm and safe,” she wrote to Dad. “But I doubt very much that providing it for her will be of the best help. It can make a parasite out of her… To help her get to Dar – yes – and perhaps the first month of support there, but beyond that if she really tries she will be able to manage.” She warned Dad that sustained financial ties to Mom would “become an Albatross around [his] neck.” She was not wrong to express her concerns (although, again, these words are brutal on the page). Though she obviously experienced a change of heart after I was born, she realized, rightly, that my mother and I would by default be Dad’s albatross for the next 18 years, fiscal atonement for a doomed romantic misstep in Tanzania.
Mom’s six-year stint in Idaho incurred a bill for almost $5000 in foreign student tuition at Boise State University. To my father, Edith wrote: “We paid non-resident fees for her – but it was not too bad – $795 in fees, and we had her buy her own second hand books at $60 as she received $300 from World Church service to start life here, and altho [sic] it was to be shared with us, we told her she could have all for school.” My grandparents cared for me while Mom went to school and work. They invested their time and their hearts – an even greater debt to repay – in addition to the unanticipated costs of “adopting” their son’s unplanned second family. Money remained a frequent theme in the letters Edith wrote to my parents until her death in 1982.
*
There were many more bills and debts in intervening years, expenses that outlasted my 18th birthday: my airfare for every summer vacation spent with Dad’s side of the family; my first car, handed down from Grandpa when I started college; a considerable portion of my undergrad and graduate studies. I doubt my grandparents foresaw the extent or duration of their investment in my future, but they gave of themselves without falter, proving time and again their willingness to work for a good life for us, as Edith promised to Mom a lifetime ago. When it came to my wellbeing, my grandparents did not once remind me of the price of their love.
© Julia Moris-Hartley, 2016
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