Day 28 - Maternal Roots Part I

I am named after both of my grandmothers.  Alberta Eugenia Schulke Rogers and Hazel Marie Lee Mayo.  This always made me feel special - connected. 

My mother's mother was born to German immigrants.  German was their primary language.  My mother tells stories about dinner time at her grandparents house.  The men ate first and visited as long as they cared to. When they were finished the children ate and finally the women.  This helps explain my grandparents marriage and my mom's and perhaps mine.

Mama as we called her, grew up in a family with some means (land) and after high school she went away to attend nursing school.  She was engaged to a service man, but when he returned he had a wife and it wasn't her.  She eventually had to drop out of school to take care of her ailing father.  Although she didn't bemoan this, it was clear that education was very important to her.

She married my Papa when she was 24 (practically an old maid in those days.)  They didn't tell her parents that they were married at first.  I believe she continued to live at home until they worked up the nerve to divulge their secret.  She was probably pregnant by that point.

My Papa was probably not the man they wished for her to marry.  He was uneducated.  As child #4 out of 19 he dropped out of school by 3rd grade to help support the family.  He couldn't read, but he knew how to work.  He was also divorced.  I don't know the circumstances but he walked out on his first wife when she was pregnant with their fourth child.  No matter how bad it was, it's hard to spin a story to account for that. He went to Colorado to search for gold.  He didn't find it.  When he came back, he met my grandmother.

Together they had 6 children and my mother was the second of those.  They lived on 36 acres of land provided by my Mama's parents.  They had food and shelter and lots of love, but there was little money for anything else.  They were poor and the ache of that has only left my mother in recent years.  My mother grew up working in cotton fields in the summer.  As the oldest girl, she bore a great deal of the responsibility of caring for the younger children.  When my Aunt Rita was born, my mother was 5, but that baby was her responsibility.  To this day my mother is both sister and mother to Rita.

There were two women in my mother's life that had a great impact on her.  The first was the school librarian who made sure she had books to read, even in the summer.  Reading was my mother's escape.  She loved her family, but life was hard and that produced many battles between her parents.  Books took her away.  My mother instilled that love of books in both my sister and I.  The second influential person was a woman who picked my mom up every Sunday and took her to church.  It would be years before she became a Christian, but this woman planted the seed.

What I remember most about my Mama was that she was always struggling to breathe and she could cook.  I got my asthma from her.  There was always a big garden out in the fields and that's where most of the vegetable for meals came from.  They also had a milk cow and animals that were slaughtered for meat.  In later years Mama bought chicken from the store but she was no stranger to grabbing a chicken from the yard, wringing and chopping off its neck, taking off the feathers and frying it up for dinner.  Mama always seemed kind of sad to me.  Maybe she was worn out.  She died when she was 61 years old from Congestive Heart Failure. 

My Papa worked his fields and others when he needed too.  I remember him with a chew in his mouth and dominoes or cards in his hand and a beer never far away.  He was a people person and what he lacked in education and sophistication, he made up for in personality.  He was a survivor.  He always seemed to be happy.  He didn't have to worry.  Mama did enough of that for both of them.

These are my people.  And their strengths and weaknesses are woven into my own.  I loved them and remember them often, sometimes with joy and sometimes with pain.