My Life in Words, Part Twelve: Gender roles

My mom's story continues, this is one of my favorite stories of my Me-maw lighting her brother on fire, The memoirs began here, last installment here. 

when Janie was born, so was her chore list

The relationship between my grandmother and her mother had a very  profound impact on her interactions with her daughters.  My grandmother’s birth was seen as the birth of household help for Lizzie.  That is not to say that she did not love her daughter, but in the early part of the 1900s, gender roles were very strictly defined.  If Lizzie had had only sons, she would have had many beds to make and meals to cook.  Sons would not have been seen as a help for their mother unless it was doing physical labor such as bringing in wood, or carrying heavy burdens.  They would not cook and they would not have made beds, washed clothes, or ironed.  It just was not done.  But when Janie was born, so was her chore list. 

She would seethe with anger

  She often told of cooking when she had to stand on a stool to do so.  That act of standing on the stool at the stove was seen differently by me and my grandmother.  She saw it as a child being forced to do something before she had the maturity to do it.  She often told of making beds.  And it was NOT the bed making we know today of slipping on a fitted sheet, then snapping open a flat sheet so it could float down to cover the bed.  It was anything but a happy activity.  The mattresses were made of feathers and any depression upon the bed meant that the making of it had to be restarted.  Janie would complain about fighting to make the beds in the time frame her mother expected – no, demanded.  The only problem with this time frame was that it occurred when her brothers, or “the boys” as she called them, were out hunting.  They would then come home from the hunt, or from their morning masculine chores, and do what came naturally – they flopped down on their beds.  The feather beds.  The beds that their slim sister had fought to make perfect enough to avoid her mother’s wrath.  She would seethe with anger.  

blazingly clear

This went on for a few years until the time came when the man courting her, my future grandfather, heard her complaints about bed making.  He merely thought of a way to possibly  change the behavior of her brothers, by suggesting she take a cigarette paper, slipping it between a brother’s toes, and setting fire to it.  Sounds good in theory and would probably even work in practice.  If the brother in question, Audrey, weren’t such a sound sleeper.   So my grandmother, being a young 15 year old who had never been out of 20 mile radius, and in the absence of her suitor, made a decision without thinking it through to its inevitable consequences.  She took newspapers, wrapped them around her brother’s foot, tied them on, and then set the match to her innovation.  Yes, it woke him up.  His screams also woke the other brothers up.    While it made for a funny story years later, he ended up in a hospital, which was indicative of a serious injury in the 1920s.   Later, I chose to believe that it wasn’t as serious as it was described because as is the case in most stories passed down through the generations, the acts become bigger, the results more astounding, and the aftereffects more unsettling.  But there were no permanent injuries that I am aware of and yes, my grandmother’s true feelings about bedmaking became blazingly clear!

My Life in Words, Part Eleven: Biscuits from scratch.

My Mom's story continues, Part One here, Part ten here. 

And as the day progressed, I learned how to drop the dumplings into the chicken broth, how to fry a chicken, and how to make biscuits from scratch. 

Lizzie, on the other hand, was a strong woman who faced the world unflinchingly.  Kind was not a word used to describe her.  I never saw the mean side, but I have heard that others did.  She was less than soft spoken when it came to her children’s spouses.  But her opinions also changed.  If she didn’t like you on one visit, she may love you on the next.  She didn’t care about your opinions of what she did.  I only knew that she loved me.  She had patience that was in direct contradiction to her reputation.  She allowed me to have so many experiences that I wouldn’t have had if I had spent all my time in the suburbs.  Instead, I know what it is like to walk out to the chicken coop with an apron on to hold the eggs that you were going to steal from the hens.  I thought she was magic because she could walk through the chicken yard without looking at her footsteps, unworried about all the chicken poop she was trudging through.  It was a long while before I realized that she changed her shoes before going inside!  I was too busy delicately holding eggs in the cradle of a cotton apron, dodging poop, and eyeing hens wanting to attack those responsible for making off with their eggs.  After harvesting the eggs, it was time for breakfast.  I was the assistant cook, which meant that I stood on a stool at the stove and assisted.  I learned how to flip an egg so that it was over easy.  I learned how to make toast when there is no toaster.  And as the day progressed, I learned how to drop the dumplings into the chicken broth, how to fry a chicken, and how to make biscuits from scratch.   I would doubt that many of today's foodies would be able to define a biscuit board, much less be able to point one out.  I’m proud to say that Lizzie’s biscuit board has stayed in our family, finding a home with her great great granddaughter.

The story of Lizzie and Ben is another story, and would have been better told by one of their children, but that opportunity has passed.  They had seven children.  Three sons were born first, and I am sure they were despairing of having a daughter.  Audrey came first around 1912.  Then Raleigh Pat in 1914, and Harold Benjamin in 1916.  Finally in 1918, the daughter was born who would one day become my grandmother, my beloved Me-Maw.  They named her Janie Orean Watters and she was born on September 1, 1918.   Four years later, Frank Benjamin was born, and then there was a long spell without the birth of a baby.  Finally Mary Winona came along when Frank was eight, and Margie Faye followed two years later.  That mean that Janie’s two sisters were 12 and 14 years younger than she, but they were close.  In their adult years, Margie and Janie were as inseparable as two women could be.  I doubt that three days went without a long distance phone call.  As the years passed, the closeness of the siblings waxed and waned.  But I grew up close to all my great aunts and uncles, and as it was with great grandparents, my great aunts and uncles were truly more like aunts and uncles.  Three of the siblings – Janie, Frank, and Harold, lived in one block in the suburbs as I grew up.  So for many of my formative years, those uncles were very real masculine role models when my grandfather was working offshore  for a good part of my childhood.  These uncles exhibited the macho stuff – the camping, the boating, the horse riding, the hard drinking.  My grandfather was almost the personal opposite. Never hunted, never drove a boat, and for sure never drank.  More about his horse riding to come, as it plays a very real part in the beginning of my family.

to be continued... 

My Life in Words, Part Ten: The last time he would smell fresh air.

On Christmas Day, mom said "I wrote for you."

The story continues, Starting here, Part nine here. 

To say that I craved sleeping with someone sounds so calm.  Maybe I need all caps in this case.  I CRAVED SLEEPING WITH SOMEONE.  As a reminder, my grandfather was gone most nights, as he worked out in the Gulf of Mexico on an oil rig.  So for most of my childhood, I lived in a house of females.  My grandmother, my aunt, my mother, and me.  When my mother wasn’t available, I would sleep with someone else.  No one turned me down – except for Pa-Paw.  When he would come home, he wanted to sleep with his wife without a child between them.  Took me years to understand that!

The people in my life were not dreamers, or artists, or poets.   They were workers.

Nope.. I didn’t wake up my mother for my school preparations.  That was Me-Maw’s job.  I am quite sure that many princesses didn’t have it as good as I did growing up.  By the time my eyes saw the sunlight of the morning, everything that could be ready, was ready.  My dress was laid out, my breakfast on the table, my satchel by the front door.  Bookbags weren’t invented yet.  I had a little childlike briefcase with cheap plastic straps secured by cheap metal buckles.  I went through several each school year because I tended to be rather rough on them.  Breakfast was the breakfast most kids are unaware of today, unless they go out to I-Hop for breakfast on special occasions.  There was meat (bacon or ham, but most definitely pork), eggs, toast, jelly.  Sometimes it would be grits.  But none of that instant stuff – grits cooked on the stove where I would stand transfixed watching them.  I had a great imagination and I saw them as lava, pulling up into big bubbles until they would pop, sending little pieces of corn meal up inches into the air.  I wouldn’t really see lava in real life until I was in my late thirties on a trip to Hawaii.  And my thought was how much its thickness resembled the grits of my childhood.  I didn’t share that with anyone, however.  I didn’t want to be seen as different.  The people in my life were not dreamers, or artists, or poets.   They were workers.  This is not to say that everyday workers are not artists, it simply means that the mediums they work in are the consumables of our lives.  A farmer grows what he considers to be a perfect squash, but he doesn’t indulge himself with idolizing it or attributing praise to it.  He simply looks at it, thinks to himself how grand it is, then drops it into the bushel with other squash to one day be fried up with butter and onions by another artist whose work is admired by those who eat that perfect squash.  Each artist in that cycle is anonymous to the next, but it doesn’t make it any less beautiful  a process.

My grandmother came from a long line of farmers.  She was the first daughter in a family of four boys and two girls.  For the majority of her life, she was the only daughter.  My great grandparents were Ben and Lizzie Watters.  In talking about my life, I always think of it as a clock that is consistently one hour – in my case, one generation – off.  My grandmother was my mother, my great grandmother was my grandmother, and that leaves my mother as….. well, I really don’t have a good answer for that one.  The closest thing would be to say that my mother was like a sister to me.  I said that to her once and she didn’t speak to me for a year.  But that drama came many years later than the point we are in this story.    

Neither of us imbued any deep philosophical meaning  into those conversations.  We were just friends.

Ben and Lizzie were definitely farmers.  One step above indentured servants to be exact.  They were share croppers.   While they did own some land in “the bottom” as it was known, and made memories there, they generally made money farming land belonging to someone else – someone richer.    I never heard the words poor, or poverty, or needy, or any other synonym we call it now.  They were just “plain folks” who got up each morning, gathered eggs, tended fields, and raised children.  By the time I was old enough to start building my memories, their working farm days were over.  They had moved to “the city.”  And to call Springhill, Louisiana the city was to acknowledge how small was the universe of Ben and Lizzie.  It would be difficult to find two people more diverse than this couple.  While he was a small man, standing only about 5’6’’, she was a tall woman, probably 5” 9”.  My grandmother claimed an English ancestry for her father, but he always looked to me like those described as “black Irish” in that he had dark hair, blue eyes, and fair complexion.  He was an oddity, that his hair never fully turned gray, but kept its dark appearance even at his death in his mid 80s.  Lizzie on the other hand, turned gray very early in life, then when most others are turning gray her hair became white.  WHITE.  Not grayish white, or silver, but white.  It was beautiful, and she was known as a beautiful woman.  As expected, few pictures remain of her, but those that do show a strikingly beautiful young woman, and it is easy for me to romanticize her relationship with Ben.  When they married, he was 32 and she was a mere 16.  At that early age, she was an orphan.  Her mother, my great great grandmother was often called a “black widow”.  She died in her early 30s and left her fourth husband with a young child.  Lizzie’s father was a Newberry and she had many cousins in the southern Arkansas/north Louisiana area.  Ben was known as an honest man and his daughter, my grandmother described him in almost angelic terms, saying that he was the kindest person she had ever known.  I can only say that he was kind and loving to me.  He was the rare adult who treated me almost as an equal.  I spent much of my summers as a young child with my great grandparents in Springhill where I was allowed to do the things that short stories are made of.  Paw-Paw Watters and I planted a field of summer squash.  We would walk every afternoon to feed and walk Buck, his horse around.  We fished.  And we talked.  Long long walks and long long talks.  I wish I could say that I remember those talks, but I think the beauty of them is that I don’t.  They were simply mundane conversations that two friends may share.   Maybe it was the weather, maybe it was the crops.  Neither of us imbued any deep philosophical meaning  into those conversations.  We were just friends.  When I was eight-ish, he had a stroke.  It was a terrifying time for me.  I didn’t understand what a stroke meant.  Didn’t know what it was.  When I tried to ask, I was shushed and when I wasn’t shushed, my Me-Maw would cry.  I learned not to ask, but went back to my tried and true routine of simply listening for those snippets of information which I could piece together into some fabric of understanding.  What I didn’t know at the time was that my life with my Paw Paw was forever changed.  

No more walks.  No more Buck.  No more talks.  Just PawPaw in a hospital bed in the middle bedroom.  As the days went into weeks, the weeks turned into months, then years.  He laid in that bed for close to four years until he died the summer of my twelfth year.  So now my memories are mostly of rubbing his feet with lotion, and combing his hair, and singing to him at the request of Me-Maw.  On one of our visits, she got him up and put a robe over his pajamas.  She walked him out to the porch where he enjoyed his last visit outside.  A dear neighbor, Lee Martin, came over to visit with the family on the porch.  Pictures were taken.  Many in the family probably still have an enlargement of that picture in their home.  I  used to look at it and wonder if he knew it was the last time he would smell fresh air, see the sky, or visit with friends while sitting face to face with them.  The rest of his days everything he saw, felt, or sensed was from a prone position.  That makes me sad.

My Life in Words, Part Five: The words I never heard said were “eating disorder.”

My mom's life story continues, Part Four here, it all began here. 

I would assume that we settled into a few years of normalcy, or what we knew as normalcy.  I was eager to learn.  I knew which adult to go to when I wanted something.  Me-Maw was my source of all things good to eat.  Now, to most people that sentence would end there.  But like most things in my existence, it didn’t end there.  Let’s repeat the sentence above :  Me-Maw was my source of all things good to eat.  Now, the corollary to that was that I was the receptacle of all good things Me-Maw prepared to eat.  Well, of course, the remainder of the family ate her good food.  The trick was that SHE didn’t eat her good food.  You see, she had what was described as an “irritable colon”.  That meant she didn’t eat anything.  Well, most people would describe her diet as not eating anything, but she did eat some things – just not very many things.  Let’s describe her diet, shall we?  For breakfast, my Me-Maw had a delicious breakfast of a soft boiled egg, two pieces of dry toast, milk and water.  That was it.  For lunch, she branched out to enjoy a jar of strained carrot baby food, two pieces of that same dry toast, and milk.  And for dinner, she had to limit those eggs.  Heaven forbid if she ate too many egg yolks.  Dinner would consist of egg whites, dry toast, and milk.  Oh, and water.  That was it.  From the time I was old enough to notice  someone’s food and how it was different from my own, it was all I saw my grandmother eat.  I wish I could say that it was for a limited time, but the reality is that that same diet was in effect for over 50 years.  Over the years she added a teaspoon of apple jelly for breakfast, and strained peas baby food for lunch, but basically the menu items didn’t change.  Oh, she continued to feed her family every southern delicacy known to man.  But she didn’t let any of it touch her lips.  As I grew, I begged.  I cajoled.  I threatened.  All because I wanted to see her eat something.  But she never wavered.  People admired her for her will power.  People felt sorry for her because of what she had to endure.  People whispered about how serious her pain must have been to cause her to stick to such limited offerings.  The words I never heard said were “eating disorder.”  Yet those were the two words that I diagnosed once I was an adult and realized what an eating disorder was.  She used her battle with food to control her family, and even more importantly, to control her husband.  She couldn’t go out to eat with that diet.  We couldn’t go on a long vacation because of her diet.  Of course, some arrangements ended up being made, but those arrangements never included her eating something that wasn’t on THE LIST.

I think her food was the ribbon that tied the family together. 

As much as food was my grandmother’s enemy, she did everything she could to make it my friend.  Are you sad?  Let’s see what we have to eat.   Do you feel bad?  You need some grits.  You can’t sleep?  I think you need a piece of pie cause you are probably hungry.  She was the world’s biggest pusher of southern comfort foods.  Given the fact that she never tasted what she was cooking, she was certainly known as a great cook.  I grew up with specialties that my mouth still can taste – fried apple pies, pound cake, Swiss steak, meatloaf, stewed potatoes, black eyed peas and corn bread. You haven’t had chicken and dumplings till you have had her chicken and dumplings.  I think her food was the ribbon that tied the family together.  At least our version of the family.  It was certainly an odd assortment of people.  All related, but all so profoundly different, even in the way they approached life.

My Life in Words, Part Three: Three mothers

My mom's life story continues, it started here, and continued here. Follow along, its far from over. 

"hyperbole from women who were born with southern story telling in their genes..."

 Evelyn (my grandmother)

 So my grandmother collapsed, grieving for an infant that she hadn’t even known about four months earlier.  While accepting the imminent death of a baby she didn’t know, she prayed for the life of the baby she DID know – her firstborn who yes, had made a mistake, but still deserved to live.  Great aunts who were there at the hospital to support their sister-in-law told me snippets of the story as I grew up.  They marveled at the size of my grandmother’s swollen feet.  Swollen from hours and hours of standing by her daughter’s bed, surely praying silently that she would live.  Other’s talked about the head of the bed being put on blocks so that the whatever blood had not been lost would have be sent to the areas of the body which most needed it.  The parts of the story I most enjoyed were the ones where each aunt told her version of the joy that was expressed when the news was first reported that the baby who was thought to be dead was actually living.  Not just barely living, but living and breathing and kicking, and doing everything that newborn babies are expected to do.  The nuns called it a miracle for sure.  But those who lacked that same religious connection also called it a miracle.  And suddenly, all the prayers which had been divided between a dying baby and a dying mother became directed to the mother, just a 17 year old girl, who still was in that comatose state between life and death.  She remained there for two days. Many many stories grew out of those two days.  There was no lack of hyperbole from women who were born with southern story telling in their genes.  Oddly enough, there appeared to be no males in this story, with the exception of the obstetrician.  The girl’s father, the grandfather, who was there, of course, was the epitome of the stoic.  Silently smoking Lucky Strike after Lucky Strike, keeping all his prayers, worries, and thoughts to himself.  Not once in my life did he ever talk about those dark days.  But many many times he broke through his upbringing to tell me how much he loved me and how happy he was that I was his.

"Those same fates must have seen the challenges that were to come..."

I believe that the fates knew how difficult it was going to be to fit me into a family with very mixed emotions about my arrival.  So the easiest way to ensure my acceptance would be to make my head the right size, make my eyes expressive, and make my cooing sound as though it was directed to whoever happened to be holding me at the time.  Those same fates must have seen the challenges that were to come so they went overboard in one area – they made me a beautiful baby.  Beautiful to the point where strangers would stop and remark on my loveliness.  And I was sweet natured.  To hear the memories, I rarely cried.  The Good Sister, who became the Good Aunt at my birth, was only 15 when I entered the family.  In a real sense, she then gave up her position of being the baby.  Her reality was that she became one of my mothers. Each “mother” took a role in my development.  Sadly, the biggest role of my actual genetic mother, was just that.  She went through the difficult pregnancy and horrific birth to get me to this realm.  Then her job became receiving compliments I generated.  That went on for the largest part of my life.  The Good Aunt became just that – a good aunt.  She was the one I waited on each day to come through the door.  My first words were her name.  It was her back that nearly broke from bending over to hold my hands while I practiced the act of walking.  She hovered when I was with my mother as she was always fearful that something bad would happen to me.  She projected the events of her life onto my life.  And she never, ever stopped doing that.

(Aunt Beth on the left, Evelyn on the right and the overexposed baby Cathy.)

But the biggest role was the mother who did the mothering things.  And that fell to my grandmother.  She was only 34 when I was born, and that was certainly more the age to be a mother than a grandmother.  But she didn’t fight to make her daughter assume the role of mother.  I think that it worked out just as she wanted it to in her heart.  She became my mother.  She prepared my food and she fed me.  She washed my clothes and she dressed me.  She bought my books and she read to me.  She filled every need I had, and in some cases, she created a need for the only reason of filling it for me.  She would have denied that, of course, but all those who were close enough knew it.  The greatest thing she did was to tell me every day – most often several times a day – that I was loved.

My Mom's three mothers: 

Me-Maw, Aunt Beth, Evelyn