Last week I made an announcement on my site that I was going to start a new feature highlighting, each week or so, some aspect of motherhood in history, or a particular mother in history. I know my throngs of readers (all three of you–sis, mom, and MIL) have been waiting, all agog, (couldn’t resist throwing that word in) and the only reason you haven’t flooded me with e-mails asking why it has taken me so long to start this feature is that you are holding your collective breath.
Seriously though, I’ve been hesitating because I haven’t been sure how to approach it. There is not a lot written about the history of motherhood. Since the blogosphere is a place where all this journaling is done, I think it will be fun to take a look (each week) at an excerpt from a journal, letter, or the like. This is a trial run. Bear with me. Here I go.
I have this journal that my maternal grandmother wrote for me in the early nineties. I was living in Scotland at the time and sent the blank journal to her with a book of questions. A year or two later I received it back in the mail, full of her writing and with little envelopes of pictures and momentoes. I’ve been looking through it this week again.. It makes me laugh and tear-up on each page now, probably because now I’m a mother myself. There is so much I want to say about it, but I will just post a few excerpts that speak directly to the issue of motherhood.
Background: My grandmother was born in 1918 and into a third-generation German-American farming family in Minnesota. She and my grandfather had six children. She herself grew up in a large family. Her Memoir documents her childhood with descriptions of things like butchering day on the farm, kids sewing their own clothes, knitting, bringing wood in, using a wash board to scrub clothes, threshing grain. It reads just like the Little House books. She still has an amazing work ethic. At the end of the day when it is time to sit down her knees bounce because it is so hard for her to be still.
My grandpa was in the army and later the navy and for sixteen months during 1944 and 1945. My grandmother didn’t write much about that time, but it is clear that was a difficult time for her. “So I was left alone with three small children. P__ wasn’t quite five, B__ was three, and A___ was just one. That was a hard time for me….I wrote a couple of times a week and waited for the mail carrier to bring me a letter. It was quite a lonesome time for me.”
At that time they were renting a house that didn’t have water and used only a wood stove for heat. They had to carry water from the neighbors houses. When my grandpa came back from the war, they bought a house. She talks a bit about sewing , keeping busy in their big garden (which they continued to keep up until a couple of years ago), sewing clothes for the kids, and the draftiness of their house.
The longest paragraph about parenting is about her kids illnesses and injuries:
“We went through a number of illnesses and cuts and broken bones. M____ had Pneumonia when he was 14 months old–that was when the other children had Measles and M___got them, too. He couldn’t breathe lying down so I had to sit up holding him for a few nights. Not much sleep for me as I had the care of the other four. The doctor came to the house each day for a few days. M___ used to get cruop when he was just months old. J____got Bronchitis at eleven months and stopped breathing a couple of times. Very scary for me. P____ swallowed a bottle of baby aspirin when he was three. That was a trip to the doctor. B___got a broken arm playing football and another time had a head injury. K___ ran into a stopped truck with his new bike he got for his birthday, his eighth.
This is such a powerful paragraph for me knowing my grandmother. She hardly complains at all in this journal, but as long as I remember she has been chronic worrier, suffering from ulcers. It strikes me that she remembers each of these illnesses and injuries so vividly. ( I might add, though, that she didn’t mention the fact that my mom once broke her arm when it went through the wringer on one those old-fashioned washing machines).
What do you think you will remember about being a mother 20-30-40 years from now? And/ or (here’s a question for non-mothers, too) do you have stories from your grandparents about what it was like to raise children in their time? (This paragraph is my lame attempt to get a discussion going. If you have more interesting things to reflect on, please do.)
