Briana’s Genealogical Journey Pt. 4: Pause

As mentioned in the last post, genealogical research often requires asking living relatives to provide historical narratives and fill gaps in ancestral data. However, doing so can be harder than it sounds. Some people don’t have any living relatives, and sometimes living relatives are not easy to contact. Even if the relatives are both living and easy to contact, they are not always easy to communicate with.

I’m going to take a brief pause in my genealogical research so I can tell you about my mom. While this is a vehicle of sorts for the “real” genealogical story I’ve been constructing, I think more importantly my mom deserves her own post separate from everything else I’ve been doing here. This will serve as a way to prove my above-mentioned point, as well as a much-needed written account of some of the more personal aspects of my mom’s life that have, up until now, lived only inside her own head. The details below have all been told to me over the years by my mom.

So here goes: My mom, Bonni* Sue Martin, was born in New Jersey on May 7, 1955. In all her descriptions of herself as a child, she has almost never failed to mention her full head of platinum blond, Shirly Temple-esque curls. She also describes herself as an energetic and affectionate child with a rebellious side that she would carry into adulthood.

My mom’s inner activist revealed itself when she was just a kid. At her elementary school, all girls were required to wear skirts or dresses every single day. Pants were absolutely prohibited unless you were a boy. Well, skirts aren’t exactly the best clothes for running on a school playground, especially if one wishes to slide down what my mom then called the “sliding board.” Most girls were too shy to get on the slide because of their skirts, which would inevitably fly up as a result of the wind-and-gravity-related situation that occurs when one goes down a slide. But Bonni didn’t care. One day she said, “I don’t care about my skirt going up. I wanna go on the slidin’ board!” and onto the sliding board she went. During and after her turn on the slide she was pestered by boys singing “I see London, I see France, I see Bonni’s underpants!” This did not deter my mom; if anything, it led her to take more drastic action. She eventually refused to wear skirts to school altogether, and shocked teachers and students alike when she and her girlfriends walked into the classroom one day, all wearing pants. By my mom’s account, she is the reason her school changed its policies and allowed girls to wear pants.

Bonni’s disdain for conformity extended into most aspects of her life. As she got older, she developed a number of hobbies that–especially at the time–may have been considered unconventional for a young woman. One of these hobbies was working on cars. My mom has told me about how she would spend hours in a garage working on one of her beloved vehicles. As someone who has zero interest in cars, I regret to admit that I often got annoyed at how my mom just could not stop telling me about her TR3. She absolutely adored that car. She loved that she could reach out the driver-side window and touch the ground (presumably when the car wasn’t moving), and she always knew how to fix it when it broke down which, according to her, happened all the time. Other cars came and went over the years, but that “little green” TR3 always held a special place in Bonni’s heart.

My mom wasn’t just passionate about her cars, though. Anyone who knew Bonni knew about her deep love for animals. She confided to me that while working at a vet’s office in her twenties, she would change the records for cats who were scheduled to be euthanized–pushing the dates further and further out so that the cats would get to live longer. Her boss eventually found out, but rather than fire or discipline her, he praised and entrusted her with higher-level responsibilities. Eventually my mom chose to leave the office so she could raise my brother and me, but she continued to help animals in other capacities. Through the state of New Jersey’s Division of Fish, Game, and Wildlife, Bonni became a licensed wildlife rehabilitator and was tasked with nurturing orphaned or injured animals until they could be safely released back into the wild. Growing up with raccoons, squirrels, skunks, opossums, etc. in the house felt completely normal to me and I never understood why my friends couldn’t believe it. As a teenager I was sometimes annoyed by my mom’s requests for help with cleaning cages and bottle-feeding baby creatures, but now I look back with intense gratitude at what those opportunities taught me about compassion and hard work.

My mom’s capacity to love and care for others without ever stopping to take time for herself eventually became a burden, and she began to struggle with mental illness in her late thirties. Her illness led to addiction, which led to my parents’ divorce. Then in June of 2019 my brother–also known as Bonni’s first-born child and only son–suddenly passed away. While my mom has done everything she can to continue being the superhero-level mother she was years ago, life has made her tired. On most days, the pain from her past is just too much for her to bear and her relationship with me is often strained as a result. This is why gathering information about Bonni’s life isn’t always easy–for her or for me. For my mom, retelling her story means reliving her tragedies, and so outright asking my mom for pieces of information doesn’t always feel right to me. So here I’ve done my best to recount a very small piece of her life that I think she’d want people to remember. Most of her stories will stay in her head and leave this world with her, and I think that’s what she’d prefer at this point.

---

*This is not a typo. Her name is spelled “Bonni,” but as you can imagine she is frequently on the receiving end of letters, documents, etc. with the more common but nonetheless incorrect spelling, “Bonnie.” Similarly, my name is almost always misspelled as “Brianna” rather than “Briana” until the perpetrator is corrected. The mistake is sometimes understandably made even after multiple corrections.