I’m a day late this week because we had a graduation open house yesterday for our daughter, who earned her master’s degree this month.
In her memoir my great-grandma Gladys wrote, “I wanted to be a nurse, but father couldn’t stand having me away from home and I didn’t have the high school education.” A few sentences earlier, she had written, “I quit school and went to work in the grocery store when I was sixteen…” Gladys was sixteen in 1912. The grocery store to which she refers was more of a general store AND included the town post office, and she “was sworn in as assistant postmistress”. She earned a whole $5 a week (plus two meals a day) and the work she did was hectic and backbreaking. As a teenager, along with the usual business of sorting and handing out the mail and waiting on customers, she found a trove of old junk in the storeroom, products the store owners didn’t even know they owned. Gladys, it seems completely of her own volition, took on the task of disposing of this massive stock of random items. “I was full of enthusiasm and had counters put through the center of the store, dug out, washed, cleaned and prepared for a big sale.” While I have never done anything exactly like what Gladys did, this sounds like something I would do. I have always been excited to take on big tasks like this one – beginning with a random pile of stuff that most people would consider junk and ending with an organized system of disposal and storage, at profit if possible. When my paternal grandparents died, I scanned and digitized a century’s worth of photos, photographic slides, old letters and other documents. When my maternal grandmother died, I performed the task of listing some of her valuable (but not sentimentally valuable) items for sale on eBay…and again digitizing a century’s worth of photographs, letters and documents. I have done the same with a cardboard suitcase full of family mementos after my grandfather’s youngest sibling passed away, with old and dilapidated scrapbooks from my husband’s long deceased family members, and with decades of my cousin’s haphazard family history research. When I was closer to Gladys’ age, as an office clerk for an automotive supplier, I compiled random stacks of Material Safety Data Sheets into a coherent system. I developed (again from random stacks of papers through the factory’s offices) a training system for new employees. As an office clerk in a psychology clinic at my university, I cleaned out a century’s worth of records, organized the destruction of private patient papers, and using decades of handwritten notes from dozens of supervisors, compiled the training manual for the job I was doing. I can’t remember a time in my life when I was not able to break a task down into its component parts, assemble the tools I needed to do it, and get the job done efficiently with as little wasted effort as possible. This was modelled for me by both my parents, neither of whom ever let an obstacle get in the way of their completing a task they took for themselves. Some of this comes from Gladys. When she was denied the education and career she had imagined for herself, she made of herself everything she could with an able and discerning mind.
Gladys wrote next about meeting her future husband, about how her father tried to thwart their courtship, and about being a young married woman “far” from home – an entire eight miles from her parents’ home, but with no transportation surely it felt as far as the moon to her. Then a year later, “I had a baby of my own, but soon our trouble began. He cried and cried until we were all worn out. I was ill and exhausted. …In the fall we took our crying baby and went back to Ithaca where our furniture was in the house we had left. I felt my world had dropped out from under me again. I wasn’t very well and with a cross baby I didn’t see how I could ever manage.” I, too, had a crying baby, and after a difficult birth I, too, wasn’t very well, and with a cross baby I didn’t see how I could ever manage. When I first read those words of Gladys’, I felt I had validation for so much of the early years of my motherhood. When our son was born, we lived next door to my mother-in-law, who did what she could to help. I was breastfeeding though, and determined beyond all reason to make it work, and so I couldn’t leave him for very long at all, and even when I did leave him for a short time with my husband or my mother-in-law, the guilt I had manufactured in my head at being so miserable and feeling so trapped by the child I had so wanted was crippling.
In 1919, when Vergil was a student at the Fort Wayne International Business College, Gladys and baby Hubert (my grandpa) went to join him - in another state. “At noon my folks took Hubert, who was one, and myself to the train and started us off for our Fort Wayne home. My dad’s heart was broken. His daughter had moved far away. He could scarcely eat his lunch at noon. My brother and family come out to visit us late in the fall. It was wonderful until time came for them to leave. I shall never forget how I stood and watched them leave until they were out of sight. I thought my heart would break.” When our son was seven months old and the crying had abated a little, we moved to Kentucky, a five- or six-hour drive from everyone we knew. When my husband proposed the move, to take a new job with a better salary, I argued and argued. Like Gladys, I didn’t see how I could ever manage. Eventually I relented. After all, I had no income, no job prospects, and I was tethered to a screaming seven-month-old. I had nothing and no earning potential, and in the end, I had no choice. My parents and my brother and his wife helped us with the move, but just as it was for Gladys and her family, eventually they had to return to Michigan, leaving us in what I still think of as the hillbilly wasteland, where every task seemed like a Herculean struggle. Someone was always shooting off fireworks when we were trying to get our children to sleep. We had to have a radon abatement system installed. Getting groceries was a major hassle as there were no stores near enough that we could just “run out for a few things”. We were surrounded by freeways and there were no easy ways to go anywhere. The six years that we lived away from Michigan were difficult. We made a few new friends, the cross baby became a smart, sweet and adorable toddler, we had another baby (this one wasn’t quite so cross), built a new house, and it turned out that our family would still come to visit us, even though we were so far away. When we had the opportunity to come home, though, we did.
I believe I came across Gladys’ memoir after my grandmother (Gladys’ daughter-in-law) passed away in 2009, in one of those piles of random photos and documents that grandma had squirreled away in her house. I will always be glad that Gladys wrote those things down (and that the next two generations kept her papers safe) and that her record of her life as she saw it will exist for us to read. She was adorable and I wish I would have had the chance to know her. I hope that my children, my nieces and anyone else who reads her memoir will be able to relate to her story as much as I have.
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