24. An Abundance of Marjories

…or how legal, safe abortion might have changed my life

When my mother was nine months old, her mother died of what was then called “blood poisoning.” It wasn’t until I was seventeen and Roe v. Wade was decided that my mother told me her mother had died from an infection brought on by an illegal abortion. My grandmother was nineteen years old when she died.

My mother was named after her mother, whose name was Marjorie. Mom named her first daughter Marjorie, but she was nicknamed Missy by my sister Maureen, who came next. When Missy had a baby girl, born way too early and weighing in at just two pounds, she passed the name on to that wee one, and she promptly had another. The latest in the long line of Marjories is my niece Ann’s daughter, the lovely Marjorie Louise Reilly, who we call MJ.

But the original Marjorie was an only child. Her father was a British army officer named Arthur Johnston from York in northern England. After serving in the Boxer Rebellion and the Boer War, he left the British Army and fought in the Spanish-American War and the First World War. In between he lived in Shanghai and imported silks to England and France…and who knows what else? I think of Shanghai as a city full of opium dens at that time, but I have no idea what he was doing. I do know that he had no time for a wife, let alone a daughter.

So, Marjorie the first’s mother, Minnie, divorced Arthur and married a railroad executive. They settled in Lincoln, Nebraska. The railroad work took him all over the country, and Marjorie’s mother often went with him, leaving teenaged Marjorie alone in the house. She didn’t like being alone and she did like her classmate George Boardman. Marjorie soon was stopping at the Boardmans’ after school and eating Sunday dinner with them. It was no surprise, at least to the Boardmans, that Marjorie and George got married at the courthouse just after their high school graduation.

Marjorie’s mother was another story. She was not at all happy that her only child had gone behind her back and gotten married — and at such a tender age! Minnie headed straight back to Lincoln to fix things, but by the time she arrived, Marjorie was pregnant with my mom, the next Marjorie. As soon as Marjorie gave birth, Minnie put the baby in the care of George’s sister Mae and her husband Seth. Then she sent Marjorie to relatives in England to forget about George. Which Marjorie had no intention of doing. 

Marjorie wrote to her two maiden aunts, Grace and Edna, explaining her plight. They had doted on Marjorie throughout her early childhood in Brooklyn, and they promptly sent her the money for passage back to America. It took Marjorie several weeks to get back to Lincoln, but eventually she was reunited with George and her beautiful, dark-haired baby girl. Before long, she was pregnant again.

This time her mother was even more determined to end things between Marjorie and George. She took Marjorie to someone in Omaha who would “take care of it.” Within days Marjorie was dead, and my mother was a nine-month-old with a 19-year-old father who was ill-equipped to raise a child on his own. 

Little Midge went to live with Aunt Mae and Uncle Seth and their five-year-old son Dean. They would become the only family she knew. But Minnie was not done with her manipulation of this small child’s life. Periodically, she made the trip to Lincoln to insist that Midge come live with her father George in Omaha. 

Now, fully capable of feeling and expressing the pain of separation, Midge spent her days at an Omaha elementary school where she knew no one and her nights in a house far from the only family she loved.

When we were growing up, Mom had a hard time peeling oranges. She said the smell reminded her of sitting on that school playground in Omaha, eating oranges out of her lunch box and weeping, wondering if her mom and dad (Mae and Seth) would come get her. Eventually, George moved to California and Midge was left with her (not quite legally) adopted family.

It was not a coincidence, then, that my mother fell in love with a man who was happy for her to have as many children as she liked. She wouldn’t know that number, she said, until she got there. When Mom was pregnant with their first child, she made an appointment with the doctor who had delivered Dad’s brothers’ children. “No,” Dad insisted, “You’re not going to a Catholic doctor. He’ll risk your life to save the baby’s. You will go to an obstetrician who won’t be bound by the teachings of the church.”

But that early loss was with Mom every day of her life. She spent her motherhood instilling a strong sense of family in us. We were loyal, and we took care of each other. It wasn’t just Reillys, though. At her instigation, we welcomed every living thing into our family. Animals, green growing things, and especially people, preferably little ones. 

When my sister Maureen’s high school friend Ann Marie walked into the kitchen one day after school with a black eye, Mom didn’t mince words. “Who did that to you?” “My father,” Ann Marie replied. Mom picked up the phone and called Ann Marie’s mother. “Ann Marie is spending the rest of senior year with us,” she said.

My brother Brian, who never met a stranger, brought home his classmate Joe in 7th grade. Joe’s father wasn’t around and Joe’s mother had other things on her mind besides mothering. Joe usually had dinner with us. And he often came down from the third floor with Brian when it was time for school.

There were no orphans at our house.

When my sister Maureen ran off with her boyfriend Billy and started a family in 1964, Mom was terrified that her daughter was repeating the tragedies of her own mother’s short life. She said Maureen was the one child in our family who physically resembled the first Marjorie. She prayed the resemblance stopped there. Maureen was on her own journey, and although it was also too brief, it wasn’t the same as her grandmother’s.

I understand the desire to protect the life of the unborn. And having seen my daughter Maeve’s barely developed yolk sack at six weeks and two days, I know the beauty and promise those undifferentiated cells hold. But what of my mother’s life? All she ever had were photos of her mother. Not one memory.

No one wants to have an abortion. Life is precious, and it can be more beautiful than we can comprehend. Babies are especially beautiful. But life is also complicated. There is no doubt in my mind that my great-grandmother should not have forced an abortion on her 19-year-old daughter. But I also know that if safe, legal abortion were available, my mother would not have been orphaned. 

There are a thousand arguments on either side of this issue. To be honest, many of them are valid. On both sides. That’s why it seems clear that each woman should have the right to privacy that allows her to make those heart-wrenching decisions. I don’t understand why people who decry the “overreach” of the federal government are often the ones saying that a woman should not have this particular freedom.

It seems fundamentally wrong that four, old white guys and one woman who belongs to an ultra-right religious sect of the Catholic Church have the power to overturn this decision that has been settled law for nearly a half century. But I didn’t sit down to write a political post. I don’t want to argue the merits of one side or the other. 

I can’t imagine what my life would be like if my grandmother had not died at such a tender age. I would have loved the chance to know her.