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July 24, 2009

Identical twins were not so identical

By JERRY McGOVERN, School Ties

I have an early memory of kicking a nun in the shins. I was with my mother visiting her identical twin, who was a member of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd. While I was wandering around the convent, the nuns decided it would be fun to dress my mother up as one of them and see if I could figure out which twin was which.

Family history says I didn't enjoy the game, screaming when faced with identical women in identical clothing and kicking the mother superior who held my hand while asking me to pick out my mother.

Mom always insisted I went to her immediately, but I don't remember much more than being scared and trying to get away from the mother superior.

As I got older, however, it became easy to distinguish my mother, Mary, from her sister, Kathleen, and not just by their clothing.

Kathleen was the softer of the two, allowing my teenage brother, for example, to light up a cigarette in the convent garden over our mother's objections. Our uncles always said Kathleen was the wilder of the twins, wearing more makeup and dating more frequently than our mother when they were young.

She was gentle and very interested in our lives, though her semi-cloistered existence made conversation a bit difficult for kids. Her knowledge of baseball stopped when she entered the convent, so she knew none of the current Brooklyn Dodgers. Nor did she watch television or go to the movies.

That meant she asked about school, and since I never had any idea what was going on in the classrooms I inhabited, that conversation didn't go very far.

But she tried.

A NATION'S STORY
Of course, my mother put up with five children on a daily basis, not just on a Sunday afternoon when visitors were allowed to enter the convent. If she got tired of our antics and her patience wore thin, it was understandable.

But like many kids, I didn't appreciate my mother until I was a parent. Then I wondered how she did it.

One of her sons spent time in a Long Island tuberculosis hospital.

"They strapped him to a bed," she told me later, "to keep him quiet. I cried every time I went to see him. We didn't know what else to do."

He was there for two years and eight months.

Another son spent a few years in St. Charles Hospital for Crippled Children.

Some of this was happening during World War II, when Mom's husband was in the navy and her three brothers were also serving — one of them did not return. Maybe most startling is that her experience was not unusual. It's our nation's story, played out in families all over America during those years.

Eventually, the war was over and her children out of the hospital, but the normal family difficulties were present. We kids had trouble in school, academically and otherwise. The brother who had been strapped to a bed became famous for hopping out the window and getting on his bike when the teacher left the room.

And no family sails through the rebellious, hormonal high-school years placidly. There were arguments and slammed doors. The world was changing — Elvis was singing and walls were coming down.

But there was a meal on the table every night, with enough red meat to horrify today's nutritionists. And our friends were always welcome.

Mary and Kathleen, now deceased, were born in Brooklyn on this date exactly 100 years ago.


Jerry McGovern, the Press-Republican's coordinator of Newspapers-in-Education, taught in New York state's public schools, and now teaches in the Communication Department of Plattsburgh State. He can be reached at gmcgovern@pressrepublican.com or 565-4126. This column is the opinion of the writer and not necessarily of this newspaper.



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