my mother
My mother shows up on some other pages on this website, usually in a not-very-good light. This is not a correction, but two glimpses of her that give you a different perspective. She was a complicated woman.
My brother, Charles knew my mother longer and better than I did. He was good enough to share a couple of vignettes that put her in a much better light, and show her courage and her diligence and intelligence.
Courage
She told Charles later in life that she had been incarcerated in a mental hospital after she, the wife of a Baptist preacher, made the then-unforgivable mistake of complaining openly about my father's various affairs and public flirtations. After she'd been in the hospital for a while, she asked the doctors to be released, stating that she felt much better and wanted to be with her children. The doctors told her that her belief that she was better was merely a symptom of her ongoing illness. When she complained and stood her ground, the doctors ordered more electro-shock treatments. Later, one of the attendants, a Black woman who felt sorry for her, told her not to tell them she felt better. "You have to play their game, or they'll just keep punishing you." So she gritted her teeth and played their game for a few days, a few weeks, maybe a few months, telling the doctors that she had come to realize how sick she was. As a result, they soon released her.
Diligence and Intelligence
In Charles' last years of elementary school and his first year of junior high school, my mother worked at an engineering company fairly near the school he attended. He sometimes went there after school, to get a ride to some after-school event or game or whatever. He'd often have to wait for her a few minutes before she could leave work, and the other employees would often talk to him while she finished up her work.
During one visit, her boss told him, "She practically runs this company. Makes my job easy."
Another employee told him, "She's great. She can do all the numbers in her head. When we can't find a document, she knows exactly where it is."
Gumption>
My granddaddy valued gumption a lot, and my mother had it in spades! (My granddaddy was her father.)
What is gumption? A combination of courage and good sense. The dictionary says it's combination of initiative, aggressiveness, and resourcefulness. As an alternate definition, it says a combination of courage, spunk, anf guts. Ha-ha! That raises the question, what is spunk? The dictionary says it's a combination of courage and determination. So there you have it.
A particular example of her gumption was that, once she earned money of her own - yes, my mother went out and got herself a job based on her academic record (she had a Master's degree in something, Home Economics, I think) and her potential. It paid enough that she could afford store-bought clothes for herself (I think she had sewn her own dresses up until then) and save up for the two weeks vacation she got every summer.
No, she didn't stay home for those two weeks. No indeed. She packed four kids into her Chevrolet and drove across Texas - 773 miles, 14 hours of driving time - then down to Baton Rouge to visit her father, my Grandaddy and then onto Mobile, AL, to visit my Aunt Matt. She and her husband and kids had moved to Mobile from St. Louis. God may know why; I'm sure her husband would have said God called him to make that move.
And then we'd drive back, again across Texas.
I think my mother did it to satisfy needs of her own. I'm equally sure she wanted us kids to know her family.
At the time I only knew we did it because she said so.
And it was all up to her. We kids were no help. In fact my sister and my brothers, sitting in the back seat, would get into squabbles she had to settle or stop, and she did so, then we'd drive on.
I thought it was tedious. Aunt Matt's kids didn't much like us, and I returned the sentiment. For me it was a pointless waste of two good weeks of summer. As soon as I had a job I could use as an excuse for not going, I did.
And Mother still made that trip. She planned it. She saved for it. She packed for it. She executed it. With four kids in tow, and later with three. She dared it in spite of traveling alone across the South in the 1950s. If there ever was a good time for that, it wasn't the 1950s.
Gumption.
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