The Family Pecking Order -- A Memoir

Chapter 4: Aunt Louie

My favorite aunt on my mother's side was Aunt Louise. A calm, peaceful, sweet-spirited woman, everyone always enjoyed her company and wanted to be around her at any family event. Never cross or cranky that I can recall, she would listen to your troubles, praise your successes, and give you big hugs and kisses when she said hello or good-bye. Notwithstanding her loving and generous nature, however, when she thought it was needed, Aunt Louise had no trouble handing out what we call "tough love" today. She was never harsh or mean but would not hesitate to correct any child. Whether it was a member of her own family or not was completely immaterial. If you were misbehaving, annoying, or upsetting others around you, she would call you aside and set you straight in a heartbeat.

To me, one of Aunt Louise's most endearing qualities was her accessibility. She always made you feel you were important and that she was genuinely interested in what you had to say. She had plenty of practice with the younger generation, having numerous nieces and nephews and fifteen grandchildren. Her oldest daughter, Patty Jo, produced twelve of the fifteen. Another of those Catholic marriages!

She and her husband took "Go forth and multiply" way too seriously. I swear it seemed my cousin Patty Jo was always pregnant. She just popped out one baby after the other for years and seemed to thrive on it. Patty always looked healthy and happy while her husband Dave always looked stressed and harried and was skinny as a rail. Who wouldn't feel pressured? Providing for a family with twelve children is no easy task. It was a blessing and probably their saving grace that Dave managed a large supermarket, so feeding the family was not one of their biggest concerns. He was a heavy smoker and there was also talk in the family that he had a drinking problem too. I suppose this was one way of dealing with the concerns and stresses in his life, but it sure didn't stop him from fathering more and more children. The final count of twelve would have been more but Patty Jo lost two other babies in infancy. Dave died a few years ago but I never heard what his final cause of death was. It might have been the years of drinking and smoking, or it could have been that he was tuckered-out, stressed-out, and just plain tired.

Patty Jo was dark-eyed and dark-haired like her father, my Uncle Paul. But mixed into her brood of dark-eyed, dark-haired children was the surprise of several carrot-tops with blue eyes. Not sure which side of Patty's marriage produced the proclivity for red-haired, blue-eyed children, but reason dictates it was probably the gene pool on her and my mother's side of her ancestry. Our grandmother, Ellen Ryan, was of Irish ancestry, straight from County Tipperary in the Emerald Isle. Fair, blue-eyed redheads are historically the offspring of both Ireland and Scotland, and are found heavily interspersed in the populations of both of these countries and elsewhere in the British Isles.

On the flip side, Patty Jo's sister and Aunt Louise's youngest daughter, Paula Jane, had a difficult time getting pregnant. Although I never knew this for sure, it always seemed to me Paula died a little inside each time Patty Jo produced another new baby because Patty Jo did it with such ease, like falling off a log. Finally, after Paula and her husband adopted a little girl, she got pregnant. Everyone was thrilled and relieved for her. Maybe knowing she finally had a baby of her own relieved the anxiety and maybe even the stigma she felt at being childless while her sister was so fertile. Fairly close to her first pregnancy which produced a son, Paula became pregnant again and had another son. Suddenly she was a much happier woman. And who knows? Maybe she even felt a little superior to Patty Jo. After all, it is much easier to raise three children than to provide for twelve.

However, her later years, after raising her children and experiencing becoming a grandmother, sad to say Paula developed Altzheimers and slowly began to slip away from reality. Her death hit my oldest sister Barbara pretty hard. She and Paula were close to each other in age and had been great friends all their lives, spending a lot of time together in their younger years. Ironically, Patty Jo still seems to be ahead of Paula. She is still enjoying her 12 children, all married and with families of their own. Patty has even more grandchildren than she had children. I think the latest count was 20!

Aunt Louise always encouraged us kids to "mind your parents, study hard in school, be good in church, and always tell the truth". You knew where you stood with Aunt Louise because she was always the same person. Her attitude and value senses never changed. A very genuine and caring person, she was my most favorite aunt on either side of the family.

My mother died when my daughter Mary Ryan was only 18 months old. After that, Aunt Louise became a kind of touchstone for me because she and my mother were the most alike of any of their sisters. Aunt Louise was a constant reminder of the good, genuine qualities my mother had possessed. When you are part of a big family, there are always certain members for whom you feel a particularly strong love or affinity. Aunt Louise was one of those people for me. She passed away several years ago, thankfully before her daughter Paula Jane died. It would have broken her heart to see Paula deteriorate mentally to the degree she did. To this day, I miss Aunt Louise in much the same way that I still miss my mother.