Fold Your Arms and Smile!: My Mosaic of Love, Loss, and Survival - Softcover

Randi Becker Walls, Becker Walls

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1440198306 ISBN 13: 9781440198304

Verlag: iUniverse, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Randi Becker Walls was in her early thirties. It was the 1980s. It was a special occasion and she was attending an intimate family gathering at a relative's apartment. She hadn't seen her Aunt Lil and Uncle Hy for several years. They exchanged hugs and kisses. Preempting the start of any normal conversation, her Uncle Hy made this pronouncement: "You had the worst, most terrible childhood that anyone could ever have had"... thanks Uncle Hy, she thought, for reminding me. Somehow, she made it through that "family" gathering that day. She was used to it. That is how it usually went. Always someone, somewhere, would bring up her less-than-wonderful childhood. The Ritual of Randi had to be performed before they could be engaged in any other meaningful type of conversation with her. But why? After all, she was the one who lived through those years! And while she was living through them she didn't always know that it was so bad. Hello??? How about seeing her some other way, for once, like the fact that she was now a grown woman with a wonderful career and a mountain of accomplishments under her belt. Fold Your Arms and Smile! is her story, the story of not only who she was, but of who she's become, and includes all the beautiful parts of her life, as well.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Randi Becker Walls served as a public school psychologist in Ohio for thirty years, retiring in 2006. She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. She earned her Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the University of Cincinnati. She and her husband currently reside in Dayton, Ohio, where they enjoy their wonderful grandchildren.

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Fold Your Arms and Smile!

My Mosaic of Love, Loss, and SurvivalBy Randi Becker Walls

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2009 Randi Becker Walls
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4401-9830-4

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................................................xvIntroduction.....................................................................xviiWhat I Am Writing About, and Why.................................................xixChapter 1 Meet Me, Meet the Family..............................................1Chapter 2 The House on Hawthorne Avenue, My Real First Home.....................9Chapter 3 You Want Me to Go Where?..............................................15Chapter 4 Marvelous Chicago!....................................................17Chapter 5 About Irv.............................................................20Chapter 6 Life with Dad and Lee.................................................24Chapter 7 About Lee.............................................................30Chapter 8 Way to Go, Stepparents................................................33Chapter 9 It's a Girl! It's a Boy!..............................................34Chapter 10 Thank God for Stepfamilies............................................38Chapter 11 The Young Traveler....................................................43Chapter 12 Been There, Done That!................................................46Chapter 13 Back to Cincinnati, Court, and Junior High School.....................52Chapter 14 A Turning Point.......................................................56Chapter 15 Freshman Year and Back to the Windy City!.............................61Chapter 16 The Humiliation.......................................................64Chapter 17 A Baby Boomer at Senn High School in the 1960s........................65Chapter 18 First Love............................................................71Chapter 19 Moving through College-Literally......................................76Chapter 20 Marriage, Motherhood, and College.....................................79Chapter 21 The Photograph........................................................81Chapter 22 The Crux of It All....................................................84Chapter 23 Another Turning Point.................................................91Chapter 24 Irv's Big Ending......................................................98Chapter 25 Mom's New Life........................................................100Chapter 26 Marriage, New Kids, Grandkids!........................................102Chapter 27 In Youngstown? Yes....................................................105Chapter 28 An Unbeatable Team....................................................110Chapter 29 The Home We Loved.....................................................114Chapter 30 Jane..................................................................116Chapter 31 Several Elites and One Dysfunctional Dude.............................118Chapter 32 After Twenty Years: I Love Youngstown!................................121Chapter 33 Retirement: Mixed Feelings............................................125Chapter 34 About "Don't Give Up".................................................128Chapter 35 The Last Colorful Piece...............................................131Six Major Regrets About Which I Grieve...........................................137What I Have Learned..............................................................139Anger Analysis WorkSheet.........................................................143Issue Resolution Worksheet.......................................................144Author Background Information....................................................145

Chapter One

Meet Me, Meet the Family

A beautiful baby with big, brown eyes entered this world at 4:47 AM, the morning of March 18, 1949, in Cincinnati, Ohio.

See? I started out with a positive self-image! Little did I know that it would take many years before I began to feel comfortable and at peace with my life and me once again, and even that would be fleeting. It has been unfortunate that during my childhood I had to deal with constant challenges to satisfying my basic needs and to a healthy psychosocial development. I would be subjected to emotional and physical abuse. The ripple effects would continue throughout my life, and depression and anxiety were to become my constant companions.

I was named Randy Beth Becker. The spelling of my first name was later changed to Randi-then, by gosh, after awhile the Marines and Army stopped sending me those recruitment letters. (No, that did not contribute to my rejection and abandonment issues.) My parents divorced while I was a baby, and both remarried within just a few years, presenting me with two stepparents. Both sets of parents presented me with a new sibling, and I inherited two sets of stepfamilies. Here is some family history, as I am told and/or remember.

My Dad

My father, Joseph Becker, was born in 1920. When he was a young boy, he had his day vision, but he struggled to see at night. He grew into a tall and good-looking man, a brilliant person. He was an artist, loved to sing and loved music, and was enticed to travel and have adventures. When old enough, he would just take off alone and travel to other places without saying a word to anyone. He traveled by Greyhound bus. He was a bit of a problem child, somewhat troubled and troublesome, but the one thing that contributed to his burden in life was his night blindness, which was to become total blindness in time. Doctors and society in general knew a lot less then than they do now about retinitis pigmentosa, his diagnosis, and his handicap was an embarrassment to him from the time he was a child through young adulthood, one that he felt he must hide from others. When he began dating girls (he loved girls), he would have to double-date so that the other guy could do the driving at night.

Dad told me that back in the old neighborhood where his family lived, Drexel Street in the South Avondale section of Cincinnati, some people considered his family to be lowly immigrants. Later their status in the Jewish community was elevated. My grandparents purchased and moved the family to a large, three-story, yellow brick house in North Avondale. It sat on the corner of Glencross and Mitchell Avenues. Across Mitchell Avenue was the small city of St. Bernard, a "city within a city." My grandparents rented out an apartment on the first floor of the house and lived on the second floor. There was also a nice two-bedroom apartment on the third floor and, of course, a basement, which I never visited.

My grandparents' apartment seemed huge to me, and it was filled with beautiful furniture. I specifically remember the living room, the front porch facing Mitchell Avenue, the huge dining room with its beautiful flamingos on the wallpaper, and the dining room table where the family would sit on Friday night for the Sabbath dinner. I also remember the huge china cabinet that they had. In my own dining room, I have evoked the look of their dining room. I still have in my possession a photograph that was taken of me as I stood in front of that very china cabinet.

The Beckers, my father's family, were a huge clan. Back in Russia, first cousins married.

As Dad always said, marriages between cousins can produce some extreme results. "Genius and insanity," he would say. Boy, was he right about that. My grandparents were first cousins, and I...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: iUniverse
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1440198306
• ISBN 13: 9781440198304
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 168
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland