Member-only story
Mama knows best.
Born in 1929, nine years after American women won the right to vote, she was a child of the depression and a war across the waters, raised in a home with four brothers, a tyrannical father, and a mother who worked selflessly and never learned to drive. This life is what she knew. She had music in the form of a piano, and she sang in the church choir, but nonsecular music wasn’t allowed in the home. She and her girlfriends gathered at a house where the radio could be tuned to a popular station so they could dance and sing along about finding love and the right man. This act of rebellion kept her alive, which she knew best.
She married, but not for love. What did she know of love? She selected a man with people-pleasing ways and moved their growing family to another state away from his parents, using their money to buy a small farm. It was the sixties, and she brought the family into a semi-hippie community where people gathered around bonfires to sing, dance, and drink wine. At age forty, she had enough, got a divorce, retained the farm and the kids, and didn’t think twice about the man she used to get ahead.
Her sons were fed, clothed, and encouraged to flourish in whatever way suited them, which was the best she could do. Having never known the love of a father, she couldn’t know that the loss of theirs would mark them for life. What she knew best was the calling to survive the best she knew how.
