Permit a short digression from a "humor" thread. Perhaps not so far afield, because at its deepest levels, humor draws from human pain and hurt and allows us to address the issues in a less-threatening manner.
Late in my Mom's life, when she was in her 80s, my Mom rather suddenly changed her relationship with me. She started interacting with me much more as an equal adult, and not a son who happened to be an adult. After that transition was made, she started telling much more about her life, things she had never shared before. As an example, and keeping with humor concept, we were able to joke on a new level. She shared a couple of ribald comments involving her and my father, enough that I knew that there was much more, which was better left untapped. But it was enough to add more humanity to their relationship.
In those conversations, she filled in gaps in her history, talked about boyfriends and beaus before she met my father, and sundry other issues. One area she filled in involved her stepmother. My grandmother died when my Mom was 11. My Mom was the second of six children, and the oldest daughter. Her father was a sharecropper wheat farmer in central North Dakota, and they were living on the economic margins, on the ragged edge of needing to go to the poor farm (literally), In that state, the household could not function without someone tending to the domestic matters. Cooking food, doing laundry, sewing and patching clothes, canning and preserving food for the winter, tending to the garden, rendering grease and fat to make soap, making sure household chores got done (feeding the animals and cleaning stalls, milking cows, being sure that someone was assisting when farm animals were birthing). And parenting the children.
Since my mother was the oldest daughter, those tasks fell to her. Until she was about 14, when her Dad remarried.
All of the above I knew previously. I also knew that there had never been a good relationship with her stepmother, and that my Mom eventually left home at 16 without ever going back to school.
*********
What I didn't know was some of the details, which I guess she decided I was now old enough to hear about and the she felt needed to be told. She talked about how emotionally in the space of one week she went from being an 11-year old school girl to a 30-year old mother of four children. Then, after her father remarried, she still carried most of the same duties, while her stepmother now "managed". There was a heart-breaking amount of physical abuse involved, including her stepmother using a nail-studded piece of wood as her disciplinary tool of choice.
Things ended with the stepmother on my Mother's 16th birthday, Feb. 3. My Mom came home to find all of her belongings boxed up on the porch, with a note saying that since she was now 16 years old, it was time to make her own way in life, that her room had been given to one of my Mom's stepbrother's (who had been sharing a room with one of the other boys). So in about five years, she emotionally went from being an 11-year old school girl, to a 30-year old mother, to a homeless 16-year old, in the dead of winter in the North Dakota prairie, with less than a 5th grade education.
***********
My Mom's anger was still palpable, ~ 70 years later. But she said she determined to direct that anger and rage positively - to be sure that she didn't pass that anger to her children, but to ensure that her children never went through anything like that. I was a bit floored; I knew nothing of that. And I later learned that none of my siblings had any inkling either.
Which makes that the most eloquent testimony possible as to how well she had fulfilled that vow to herself. She made a decision to stop a chain of violence and abuse, and she did.
Dave
