mother, an occasional factory worker. “We didn’t have a lot of love and security that kids need,” she remembered. Nor was there material plenty. “When I was a kid, I never had much.” Long after that early void, neediness remained. “I always wanted things,” she admitted. “I can get spending and overdo things sometimes.”
Even in her late forties, she was like a teenager craving instant gratification, said Brenda, who worked with Caroline on budgeting and tried to rein in her spending. “She likes her credit cards,” Brenda remarked. “She said that she deserves these things. She said she works hard, she wants nice things before she dies. Of course,” Brenda added, “I come from a family of eight where you just bought the necessities. Food was the most important thing, paying the rent was the second thing, keeping light and heat.”
After Caroline bought her house, Brenda saw her mature. But it was hard to break the patterns of childhood, and the debts of the past did not disappear easily. Caroline’s family had moved repeatedly and disrupted her education. She spent first and second grades in a four-room schoolhouse in Meriden, New Hampshire, then repeated second grade there because of reading problems. “I’m a slow reader,” she confessed, “and I have to have it quiet, and I read word for word. I’m self-conscious about it.” She didn’t remember her mother or father ever reading to her. “With us kids, she was not really a mother.” In third grade, she and her family lived over a shoe store in downtown Leominster, Massachusetts, with sirens and traffic and no place to play. The following year they moved to a trailer park in Keene, New Hampshire, where she spent fourth, fifth, and sixth grades.
One day as a sixth-grader, walking home from a playground, she was slapped with terrible news. A sympathetic friend of her sister’s said how sorry she was to hear that Caroline’s dad was leaving. What? Caroline had been given no hint of this. “And I ran the rest of the way home,” she recalled, “and I remember opening that trailer door, and I just looked at him—we had a double-decker—and I ran up the stairs, and I cried and I cried.” And the seed of distrust was planted.
“There was really no communication in that family, and it was very hard. And my dad come up and tried to talk to me and things then, and he said he was really surprised that it bothered me the most, because I used tobe the tomboy one, you know. But I think underneath I was never really happy, but I would always smile, and I think I was puttin’ on a front making people think I was, when I really wasn’t.”
From then on, she wrote in a college essay, she felt like “nothing but a piece of furniture being shoved around in all directions.” The rootlessness made her friendships transitory. She spent seventh and eighth grades with an aunt back in Meriden, while her brother and sister were farmed out to other homes. Her mother remarried. “My stepdad drank a lot,” she said. “He tried to get fresh with me and things like this, and I was scared and never told my mom, you know? And I got to the point where I hit him.”
Then, since Caroline did not want to live with her stepfather, every year of high school was spent in a different place. As a freshman, she stayed in Lebanon, New Hampshire, with a woman for whom she had been a baby-sitter. She did most of her sophomore year back in Keene, then went to live with her father, first in Woodstock, Vermont, in her junior year, then as a senior in Northfield, Massachusetts, where she proudly graduated. “I’m the only one out of three kids that actually ended up graduating from high school,” she boasted. “My brother ended up going in the service, and my sister got married at fifteen. And I’m not trying to brag, but I felt good ’cause my mom and dad never graduated from high school neither. It took me an extra year ’cause I stayed back in second
Even in her late forties, she was like a teenager craving instant gratification, said Brenda, who worked with Caroline on budgeting and tried to rein in her spending. “She likes her credit cards,” Brenda remarked. “She said that she deserves these things. She said she works hard, she wants nice things before she dies. Of course,” Brenda added, “I come from a family of eight where you just bought the necessities. Food was the most important thing, paying the rent was the second thing, keeping light and heat.”
After Caroline bought her house, Brenda saw her mature. But it was hard to break the patterns of childhood, and the debts of the past did not disappear easily. Caroline’s family had moved repeatedly and disrupted her education. She spent first and second grades in a four-room schoolhouse in Meriden, New Hampshire, then repeated second grade there because of reading problems. “I’m a slow reader,” she confessed, “and I have to have it quiet, and I read word for word. I’m self-conscious about it.” She didn’t remember her mother or father ever reading to her. “With us kids, she was not really a mother.” In third grade, she and her family lived over a shoe store in downtown Leominster, Massachusetts, with sirens and traffic and no place to play. The following year they moved to a trailer park in Keene, New Hampshire, where she spent fourth, fifth, and sixth grades.
One day as a sixth-grader, walking home from a playground, she was slapped with terrible news. A sympathetic friend of her sister’s said how sorry she was to hear that Caroline’s dad was leaving. What? Caroline had been given no hint of this. “And I ran the rest of the way home,” she recalled, “and I remember opening that trailer door, and I just looked at him—we had a double-decker—and I ran up the stairs, and I cried and I cried.” And the seed of distrust was planted.
“There was really no communication in that family, and it was very hard. And my dad come up and tried to talk to me and things then, and he said he was really surprised that it bothered me the most, because I used tobe the tomboy one, you know. But I think underneath I was never really happy, but I would always smile, and I think I was puttin’ on a front making people think I was, when I really wasn’t.”
From then on, she wrote in a college essay, she felt like “nothing but a piece of furniture being shoved around in all directions.” The rootlessness made her friendships transitory. She spent seventh and eighth grades with an aunt back in Meriden, while her brother and sister were farmed out to other homes. Her mother remarried. “My stepdad drank a lot,” she said. “He tried to get fresh with me and things like this, and I was scared and never told my mom, you know? And I got to the point where I hit him.”
Then, since Caroline did not want to live with her stepfather, every year of high school was spent in a different place. As a freshman, she stayed in Lebanon, New Hampshire, with a woman for whom she had been a baby-sitter. She did most of her sophomore year back in Keene, then went to live with her father, first in Woodstock, Vermont, in her junior year, then as a senior in Northfield, Massachusetts, where she proudly graduated. “I’m the only one out of three kids that actually ended up graduating from high school,” she boasted. “My brother ended up going in the service, and my sister got married at fifteen. And I’m not trying to brag, but I felt good ’cause my mom and dad never graduated from high school neither. It took me an extra year ’cause I stayed back in second
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