A Peasant as Mother

Today is a very special day. It is my son's 48^th birthday, for me, it is my belief that the 40^th decade of the human lifespan is the beginning of adulthood. It seems to me it is the beginning of understanding that people you are surrounded by grow old and die That your own body is “growing” old with little twinges of pain occur unexpectedly with certain movements, where you remember doing cartwheels with longing, but can't image feeling that light and agile. For my son, it might be remembering when you wanted to show your mom your bicycle trick, where you stood with one foot on the bicycle seat and rode atop it with you hands in the air for a short seconds before going back to normal bicycle riding. I remember not being the proper mother, not shouting angrily at you “never do that again!' No I was a child again at that moment myself and laughed and clapped in delight at so magical a feat.

I finally woke up this morning with forgiveness towards his father for stealing my son from me. I remember so often the day of labor. Back in those days, nothing was really said about birth itself except horror stories, each mother vying for a more horrible, long and difficult labor. So as my belly expanded such that I could not take a breath of air because there was not enough room for my lungs to fill with a full breath of air where my stomach continued to bloat, but with relief, though breathless, I had finally stopped at 7 months the daily morning vomiting, whether I ate in the morning or not and after I tried all the suggestions without success, like eating saltine crackers. I enjoyed the hiccups I could feel my fetus having almost daily or hourly. I also remember a terrific lioness feeling of protecting you. Sitting in a cafeteria setting as I was taking courses at college, someone rudely slide back their chair pinching me between the back of his chair and a arm I had on the back of another chair. It hurt tremendously, but the feeling I had was not hurt for myself but the possibility of my fetus not having a pleasant environment, but one of perhaps pain from my pain. I was furious and began to be rather awed at my maternal feeling starting so soon. Recent research has showed that children born of protected, happy mothers, are born with normal psyche and development even if their fathers are abusive, whereas abused mothers and children are more likely to be the sociopaths with serial murdering.

But innocent of everything about mothering, fathering, pregnancy, and birth, I went to a medical doctor, not a specialist, as we were poor and he was someone somebody had recommended. I had the regular visits, but nothing about anything was never discussed. I just floated it seemed through 9 months of life continuing my pattern of drinking beer in the evenings since, at that time, there was nothing about alcohol not advised during pregnancy. We lived in a very low rent apartment duplex above a garage for the apartment house beside it. It was unbearably hot in the city and I spent sweating afternoons longingly staring at the unused swimming pool for the house next door longing for just 15 minutes in it. Our neighbors were a young couple like us and she was pregnant two, just slightly ahead of me and had labor first. She didn't talk to me anything about labor just the baby. One evening around 8 pm, I felt little twinges like the very rare, occasional menstrual cramps I had felt seemingly eons ago. I asked her about it and she assured me it was the beginning of labor that I had better get ready for the hospital. My husband worked the night shift and I had kept the car that day to take the items that had been given to me for the baby to the laundromat up the street, but I had unaccountably just spent the day sleeping as I felt so tired all day. I started getting cramping, closer together and more intense. I was then afraid to drive by myself so I knocked on the door of one of the neighbors in another apartment named Fletcher. Fletcher was watching a Japanese horror film and said, wait until this movie is over, I want to see the end of it. I shouted at him that I could not wait, that we had to go now. He reluctantly got in the car and when he went to tell my husband, Kurt, I was in labor, Kurt told him it was a pretty good joke and started back to unload another of Braniff's jets, but Fletcher finally convinced him he was not kidding. From that point all I remember is laughing hysterically because I was drunk with oxygen since the baby seemed to have let go of my lungs. I had had nothing alcoholic to drink that day.

When we got to the hospital, a Catholic one where my family doctor practiced, Kurt busied with the intake desk and I was whisked to a room and told to get into bed where I was given an enema for some reason and told to get up only to go to the bathroom right beside the room. I started the runs and found that when I was standing or sitting the labor pain intensity diminished and when I lay down, it increased. I also had that weird mother lioness feeling—that I knew I could do this and I could do it as my instincts told me to do. Nurse came back, my name for her is Nurse Ratchett because I don't remember her name. She told me not to be pacing back and forth in the room as I was to but to “get in there and don't get out of it.” I explained to her that the pain diminished and I knew I should be walking and I laid down, but as soon as she left I started my pacing again. Apparently Nurse Ratchett had approved my husband to visit me and he asked why I was not in bed and I explained to him that the pain diminished with pacing. I told him that I was having a baby with such a stupid woman around and I was leaving the hospital. Kurt panicked and ran to the nurse telling me that she was leaving and he knew me well enough that I would do it. Nurse Ratchett told him not to worry. She came back and gave me a shot of something I later learned was sodium pentathol. I was suddenly so whoozy that I had to lie down and was in some sort of dream world. From that point I can remember only three things. I remember seeing my doctor in a uniform that looked ridiculous and thinking I thought that thought where later I understood that I was actually speaking it. I remember a bead of sweat running down my forehead and feeling like I had been pushing a 200-pound rock up a hill and believing I would be totally unable to strain as I seem to be forced to do to expel the monstrously sized infant from my body I had no more resources, but once again, the pain would start and I would push with the exhausted body and the exhausted muscles. The bead of sweat felt like a gush that would blind and drown me. I remember the doctor saying why is she trying to break loose of my hands strapped to the bed rails with a nurse replying, as she gently wiped my forehead, that she just wanted to wipe her forehead. Then I experienced what my doctor assured me later I had not felt or remembered any pain. I remember when my belly suddenly had to expel a large watermelon from between my legs and it felt like the watermelon, suddenly a bomb, exploded in my vagina and I was wounded forever. My months afterwards I would awaken in terror at that moment of time. Later talking with a mother who had done both a standard drugged hospital birth and a birth without any pain medication, said that the natural birth without medication was less painful than the medicated one. The natural birth is much longer as nature allows the gradual opening of the birth canal and the pushing to expel the infant to be in sync whereas the medication seemed to force the contractions beyond the opening of the birth canal. So the medication is just for the doctor's convenience to get it over and on to the next victim, not to mention the pharmaceutical company's wanting their cut of the escalating human population and on to the higher priced comforts they allege to offer, and, in my case, getting back to buying beer as quickly as possible.

My son's head circumference was, as I remember, 18 inches in circumference and he weighed 8 lb 2 ½ ounces. My head circumference at my current age is 21 inches in circumference. After the baby I expelled and did not see was whisked away, I awakened hours later seemingly having passed out after the birthing, I was in a room where my roommate told me that I could see my baby first thing in the morning around 9 a.m. The time came and went and the day went by. Kurt visited, telling me the baby was doing fine and had brown eyes. On the third day, my baby at long last was brought to me and, by then, all I wanted to do was sleep, but I tried to nurse him as I wanted to, but was unsuccessful. Thinking what I had experienced was a normal and written in concrete, way to birth a child, I never wanted to go through any of it ever again and so I promptly asked the doctor to write a prescription for birth control pills when he came to check me for discharge.

The breastfeeding was unsuccessful with me feeding some kind of artificial formula with my baby screaming for 4 hours every midday as if in horrible pain and at the nighttime feeding. I remember a day of total despair, sitting on a curb in front of the apartment, hearing that horrible screaming into the fifth hour, and screamed myself as long and loud as I could, thinking my baby's screaming would cover my screaming. But it didn't, before long a city policeman cruised up and stopped, asking me from his car if I had heard a woman scream as someone had called in a scream. I told him I hadn't heard anything. As he drove away I laughed so hard it hurt, realizing that at least I still had a sense of humor.

Suddenly, here I was an unsuccessful mother and I had lost my husband. The only thing of interest to my husband other than having his first beer was holding the baby, who never screamed when he was around, who smiled and gushed with delight when his dad held him. I felt like I only existed for the two of them was to change the baby's diapers (and whose father never once changed one immediately handing him off to me whenever necessary). One day the baby slept quietly through the afternoon without screaming and I was so relieved I did not check on him. When I went in I found that instead of screaming for me to change his diaper, he had excavated some well-formed feces and had begun finger painting his crib, one of those old-fashioned kind with lots of crevices and scrolling whirls on each rib of the crib. That afternoon I spent crying as I put him in his playpen and began scrubbing.

I don't remember his first steps, but I do remember his first words as I had begun to believe he was retarded so delayed was his development milestone except for me seeing him in the nursery with his head lifted and looking around. The milestones I got from my one child-rearing book by Dr. Spock. His first word other than “dadda” was a sentence when we were waiting to pick up my husband from work. At three years of age , Eric was waiting and standing in the passenger's seat beside along with me in the MG with the top down. As we waited, he said, “Look, airplane flying.” My retarded son was suddenly a genius and I was very glad and happy.

I just recently I learned what happened to me and my son both nutritionally and emotionally. When pregnant, I did read a book about pregnancy itself and the nutritional needs of the mother. I knew that I needed calcium. My mother had told me that she lost all her teeth due to “milk fever.” I have asked lots of doctors what milk fever was and none of them knew. I now know in the 19^th century, milk fever during pregnancy was the lack of enough calcium so the baby gets first call on all the mother's calcium, including her teeth. So I was very concerned about getting enough milk. When I became a medical transcriptionist, I learned that the dreadful, furious crying of infancy, formerly known as colic was now called gastroesophageal reflux disease. I had it in my 40s and it was excruciatingly painful as the stomach acid refluxed into your mouth stinging in excruciating pain as it did so. So I forgave my son his colic after learning that it was my fault since learning it was the artificial ingredients of the formula and baby food jars that caused the acute indigestion and did, as mothers through the ages have done, chewed up natural foods and given the just chewed food to the infant there would have been no indigestion and lots of nutrition if the foods I gave had no artifical preservatives in them. I cured my own gastroesophageal reflux disease by eliminating all foods with preservatives listed as an ingredient because of learning that most digestion is done by bacteria in the digestive system and, when we swallow a preservative-laden food the preservative is still killing bacteria throughout the digestive system and hence our digestive bacteria. If I had breastfed him, or at least found a source of raw goat's milk, the cure of many infants known throughout time, then we could have enjoyed life instead of both of us, each in turn, dreading it. I believe it was the birth control pills lthat dried up my milk production and caused the acute soreness of my breasts such that I wanted to scream when I put him to feeding.

I also learned that nature gave mothers and infants a biological cocaine so to speak, a hormone that bound them to each other in a tremendous peace and joy. This hormone occurs at birth and for 3 hours afterwards in both mother and infant. Since my infant was taken away and not returned to me, not even the next morning, that window of bounding was lost forever This morning, thinking of my son's birthday and what his birth meant in my life, I suddenly understood in absolute understanding, though not proved in fact, what must have occurred. My son was born in a Catholic hospital, the faith most stuck in the image of God the Father and thus the Father in the family as ruler par excellence. A Catholic administration of a Catholic hospital would require presentation of the just-born infant to the human father in the waiting room instead of to the mother. The bounding for my son with its natural hormone was for his father forever and lost to me forever. It is a tragedy so acute in my life that it causes me to cry even now in my 68^th year and my son's 48^th. I don't know if he misses a maternal bonding, but I definitely and will forever miss a son's bonding. I blamed Kurt for my son's indifference to me, interpreting all the toys and clothes the father provided after our divorce, compared to my simple feeding, preparing and washing, my doing laundry and making the bed, etc. as the cause of it. Today I believe the reality that the son presented to the father in a Catholic hospital just after birth reinforced the patriarchal Catholic Church and relegated mothers permanently to the only function of being a servant to God the Father, the human father, and the human son. I don't socialize with Catholic women, but the next one I meet with a similar age and mother of a son born in a Catholic hospital, I am going to ask.

This line of thinking leads me to consider hindsight—the baine of human existence. If only I had known—is it the flaw of the individual's thinking or research or eduction or is it God's joke for giving us so-called consciousness and thus the though that says, “I wish I had....” I abhor the patriarchal god in the churches of the 21^st and their tomes of God's words, whatever they label themselves, Christian, Muslim, etc.; but I know there is an essential mystery of life and the environment we call the earth that is so delightful, mysterious, wonderful in every sense, interconnected, intelligent, breathtaking, i.e., all those things that the people pontificating religions ascribe to God—so where does that leave me? When I was acutely ill from my second occurrence of tuberculosis and given a 50% chance of recovery with the new treatments not yet tested, the tuberculosis the nutrition deficiency that occurs with the final stages of alcoholism, I did not want to die—I fought with every fiber of my body's natural defenses along with three experimental antibiotic regimens, to live so that I could meet the man someday my son would become. Listening to my instincts during this difficult process of finding my health and getting the 50% chance of living after my 1 in 10 chance of recovery from alcoholism, I am now very healthy at 68 with normal weight and energy, just going blind from cataracts and glaucoma. I can still hear the birdsong and, with my current prescription of glasses, see the incredible beauty of sunset.

The Present

I am now an old woman living as far from what is called "civilization" as I was able to find still in an ecosystem I knew.  I am now able to do as I please as I am what is called "retired."  I work very hard.  When my old body cries out in pain from my abnormal gait and stance, I can retreat to a comfortable chair and read without interruption from noises or neighbors (except if the dogs raise a ruckus).

I am reading a non-fiction book called "Dirt:  The Erosion of Civilizations" and find that humankind has spent most of its history on earth destroying it even before industrial activities.  The author, David R. Montgomery, speaks of the occasional saving of topsoil because some ancient farmer built an indestructible stone terrace.  I have thought of that constantly.  Here we have monuments cluttering the earth to so-called great men and actually none of what they supposedly contributed or created exists today.  There is a few areas of good food-growing soil in a few places in the world that preserved the only important thing to preserve as all food growers know and that is 8 to 12 inches of good arable soil.

So my career now is primarily one of a terrace builder and I am getting good at pickaxing the rocks that inhabit the land I live on.  It is drying worse each year because of climate change.  The only chance of a life-saving rain is a hurricane to blow some rain clouds inland.  I am learning more about water use and how to use it several times and how to garden with the least amount of water.  It took two days yesterday for the submersible pump powered with solar panels to fill my 3000 gallon water storage tank.  I am using only 5-gallons of water daily from the rain-harvest storage and bathing only once a week.  I have been filling a plastic mineral tub about 1 x 3 feet circular each day for the chickens.  Each day as I finish the morning's work, I wash my always dirty feet and legs in the mineral tub and then pour it onto the ground for the dog to lie on for cool earth under the juniper tree and to water the tree.  Then the tub is refilled.  I have found that the water is too hot to endure because it is 50 feet of hose lying in the sun from the pump house to the tub.  I do take a bath once a week inside and save that water to use to flush the toilet.

The city authorities 150 miles away are thinking about reducing the watering of lawns in city lots to 3 times a week.  I think the world is indeed crazy and glad I am in solitude and my own thoughts.  I have the company of animals who are rational and understand things we poor humans think we don't need to know with our arrogant mottled brains where we think we know better than the other species on earth when we actually know nothing.  However, the other species are very glad I know how to get water out of the ground.  If it stops flowing, they will think I am being cruel when it is really the billionaires who run the world.  How can I tell them it is not my fault?

The Most Awful Death

My great-grandmother was always an icon of strength and love to me.  She made me feel worthwhile and valuable in spite of my shame for my foot.  In fact, she was the midwife of the community when she was young.  As my mother went into labor and my father rushed off for the local doctor who returned with him, my great-grandmother asked him if he was going to birth me.  He said my mother had a long way to go, the fourth child for her to deliver.  My great-grandmother, Lillie, snapped, "Fine, sit there and smoke your cigarette and I will deliver the baby" and she did.  The first comment about me was made by her when she asked my mother if she saw the foot.  My mother said she did.  I was told the left foot was wrapped around the right foot.  Over the years, my elder sister who pointed out my shame told me that my mother had a hernia when she carried me from catching 100-pound oat sacks thrown to her by my father.  They did not have the money for surgery to correct it.  Also, my two older sisters had been staying with relatives in town to go to school and came home around the time my mother was carrying me with measles.

My great-grandmother dressed for burial all of her children who died as adults from tuberculosis.  I only have pictures of them, a family portrait of Lillie and her four children all in the same material.  Apparently a bolt was bought or all the flour sacks collected had the same design.  I never found out the reason why, but Lillie only had relations with 2 out of my mother's siblings, my mother and her eldest brother.

Lillie was ever the realist and she would come and stay with our family for several days and then return to her little two-room house in the nearby town with her living on old-age assistance from the state, the royal sum of $45 a month.  It allowed her to have a protein source of canned hominy and she grew her vegetables until she died at the age of 96.  All offers of food from my parents were politely declined, including meat.

When my parents had the dairy they kept 3 large barns filled with oats.  Thus about 30 cats were maintained on milk and mice.  When great-grandmother came to visit she usually told my mother that there were too many cats around and mysteriously litters of new-born kittens disappeared.  Thus, she kept our cat population  to the level of available nutrition.  After she died and no one culled the overpopulation, all the cats died from an infectious disease.

In the worst of the 1950s drought, the incidence of rabies became almost epidemic.  My dad's dog saved his life as a rabid fox attempted to bite him and his dog fought the fox to death, getting bit numerous times.  The brain of the fox was sent to the state and it confirmed the rabies.  My father was told to keep his lifesaving dog penned until the results were back.  My father had to shoot the dog that saved his life.

My great-grandmother was visiting one day during that fearful time.  My sister and I were outside playing some kind of pretend game and our play became a fight of wills, shouting, and anger.  I looked up to see my beloved great-grandmother standing there with a gun.  I had never seen her handle a gun and was amazed.  While she inside, I began to believe that she must have said to my mother hearing our vicious argument, "Dorothy, there are just too many children around here!"  Since I knew the youngest kittens always disappeared and I knew in my heart that she killed them, I knew I was the choice to go.  I was strangely calm knowing I was about to die, knowing in my heart that it was necessary, and waited for the gun's explosion.  But Lillie very quietly said, "Girls, I want you to walk slowly and get behind me.  Do not run, just walk, and get behind me, right now."  As soon as we were behind her, she shot and a fox where we had been dropped dead.

She died when I was 18.  She always said a person would always be alive if someone remembered them.  I will always remember her and love her.  I am crying now just thinking of her whereas I can think of many other persons in my birth family and not shed a tear.  She was the incarnation of how we used to be in the 19th century, strong, courageous, loving, adaptable, creative, and realistic.  The hard truths of the 19th century had taught her a great deal and I so wish she was here to continue to teach these truths to me.

Some religions speak of loved ones waiting at the end of the tunnel at our death.  I hope to see her and my father there if it is so as well as my first Siamese cat and the one I have now if I outlive her!  And my dogs, Smokey and Nellie and Bliss and Pro and Patches.  The do say that old age returns you to childhood too.

20th Century Work

So, at long last, I am in the city and the 20th century.  My father's mantra was, "If you want to have money, you have to go to the city."  Given my early viewpoint, I interpreted that to mean his approval of the desire for money and the city.  Now I look at the statement and realize no approval is implied, only cause and effect.  But I found that money may have been there in the city, but the conditions of life were such that money was essentially worthless.  My parents "rent" was payment of property taxes that increased over the years to ever higher amounts has county governance changed from rural to urban desires.  My rent was always a much higher percentage of what I was ever able to earn.  Dress requirements for work were expensive compared to working on your farm.  Utilities cost more.  Thus, although there was more money, there was not much left after the basic, minimal lifestyle my wages paid.

I got my first job after searching for weeks and weeks and being told I had no experience.  Then an employment agency sent me to the local insurance company for the military.  I got paid $50 a week.  The married women had money to buy the "special," meat and 2 vegetables with a dessert.  I only had money for the two vegetables.  I decided I had to get serious about finding a man to marry.  I also learned to eat fast because after traveling the escalator to the cafeteria floor, waiting in line, and finding a table, there was about 5 minutes to eat.  I still wolf down my food, seemingly unable to reverse this compulsion to get it done fast.

After a while, I did find someone who appeared to want me, perhaps not for sure, because it took the impending birth of our child that caused a church wedding 2 months before I entered the sanctified state of motherhood.  Regretfully, even with his college education, he only earned about $50 a week in a battery factory.

This man changed my view of the world from being a Republican to being a Democrat, back when Democrats were actually an alternative to greedy corporates.  My parents were divided, one Republican and one Democrat.  I don't remember who was which.

I checked books out of the library on being pregnant.  What I learned was that women needed a steady supply of calcium to ensure enough for the mother and the fetus.  My mother had lost all her teeth to something she called "milk fever."  The fetus needed calcium for strong bone development and always had the first call on calcium.  I was determined that I should have the required calcium and asked my husband for money for milk.  He said that he was buying beer and he did.  No money for milk began the deterioration of our marriage and the societal mantra that men were protectors was becoming questionable.  Perhaps it was just this man I hoped.  I just got a bad one, but what could you expect, a crippled woman who had never been overwhelmed with options in male companionship.  

From German peasant community to first city and 20th century

So with a little medical "care" from the 20th century to life away from the closed society of the German immigrant farming community, I slid into the 20th century in the 6th grade from lots of grades and one teacher to lots of students and one teacher all the same "grade" of human.  The only subject of real interest was geography.  The rest made not much sense to me.  I still was in my farming roots and what land grew what things seemed like important knowledge.  In fact, mathematics (other than adding and subtracting) seemed so unnecessary that I failed algebra because I could see nothing of importance there.  It caused me to lose my status as a majorette (in spite of my club foot) because of the pass/fail requirement.  I was never going to be a secretary and fell asleep in typing class until the teacher mentioned that the typewriter keyboard would be the same on the new invention called a computer.  I woke up with a start and, from then on, worked hard to be proficient in that skill.

When I went to the city in actuality, it was as a secretary/clerk/female slave to others words and actions, but eventually, at least, it was on the more interesting computer.

But that same typing teacher informed my mother that I was "college material" and should have a college education so at 18 with high school diploma in hand I was to be supported through one semester of community college.  But whether my genetics or modeling or my own inability to fit together my rural consciousness with the urban one, I found that in high school I had developed a taste for alcohol that kept accelerating year by year.  Along those lines, I felt doomed--as a strong person like my father could not win the battle between sobriety and drunkenness, I knew that I did not have a chance.  I envisioned the same life as his, struggling to endure the expected work of my societal level and battling the constant need to escape into the illegal and free world of the drunk.  No matter what I did, I would be different from the others, not just by background and early life, but by my crooked foot, my orthopedic shoes, my limited clothing stock, and, alas, the English teacher asking me what my first language was.  I told her it was English, but my father spoke German, although he did not teach us the language.  Oh, she says, you have sentence structure that is German then.  She then tried to teach me better sentence structure in my advanced English class that I had been placed (into!).

In my first semester, I rented a room in a 3 story private home where I was introduced to the joys of marital behavior as each night the couple who had been just married, living in the apartment above my room, lustily enjoyed each other with the bed thumping on the floor and the eventual crash as the whole thing crashed to the floor.  Just a pause and then the resumption.  This was very unlike what I heard growing up as three of us slept in the double bed next to the double bed of my parents in our 2-bedroom home.  For some reason, my mother felt the oldest needed her own room and we then slept in the parental bedroom where my mother would whisper, "Here, put this newspaper underneath so the sheet doesn't get dirty."  Then the tame crinkling of paper and complete silence otherwise.

So at last, I am in the city and learning the ways of the 20th century.  I have already been deflowered myself in a night of drunkenness by a much older man wise in the ways of seducing virgins.  It had almost happened a few years before when I was pinned to the ground by my first boyfriend and, in struggling to free myself, chipped my front teeth on a nearby rock.  So far I was not impregnated, but with my need to load up on alcohol how soon would that last?

My Life of Shame Begins

I remember standing with my 5-year-older sister in the screened in back porch beside the milk separator that my mother ran twice a day to separate the cream from the milk as we sold cream and fed the "nonfat" milk to the calves.  Mother was not there. I must have been around 5 because we had a new neighbor.  The new neighbor was rich from oil wells somewhere else and had bought the ranch across the road.  They had a television set.  We got to visit on Saturday and watch the cowboy movies.  It was a totally amazing experience.  We had been able to go to movies a little every once in a while, but to have a movie in your house?  That would be like living in heaven to us.  I remember my sister hissed with virulent hatred at me, "If it wasn't for you and your foot, we would have a TV set."  I felt a sense of shame that consumed me with sadness and it never stopped.  I hold it today.  I was a club foot and I cost my family more than it could stand.  Somehow I had to make up for that, somehow.  As an adult I called the hospital and asked for my admission dates.  I was born in 1944.  My first admission date was 1944.  I was born at home so it must have been my first "corrective" surgery.  I was admitted again in 1945, 1946, and 1947.  The few pictures there are of me are of me as a toddler, I am in a cast up to my knees and I am holding a cat.  The memories of the surgeries are gone at a conscious level, but the memory of twice weekly visits to the physical therapist are there and the intermittent visits to the orthopedic clinic are also there.  The discussion was always whether to operate again and how to "fix" the inward curved foot I had.  The pain was always a new pair of shoes required every 6 months.  It felt like a nail driven into the outermost curve of the foot and I could not cry because the shoes cost the family so much and I was the cause of all the problems of the family--my foot, my shoes, and my visits to physical therapy and doctors.

When I went to the county seat school in the sixth grade, I understood that there were other club footed children in the school.  One was retarded and had a club foot.  The other was a boy.  His was "uncorrected."  His walk was with a limp.  I did not limp I didn't think.  He was quiet, but the other, a female, was retarded and made fun of constantly.  I lived in fear that they would turn on me and do the same.  Since the female was retarded, I thought that I must be retarded too, maybe not as bad.

Why was there 3 club feet in a small community?  Although my generation had many cripples in it and the birth defect of a club foot was similar to the deforming limbs appearing from polio, all 3 of us were born with the defect.

The burden of shame that a handicapped person puts on families and society is a tragic one to carry for the individual, but it also carries something that non-handicapped people don't understand as fully.  It is the burden of empathy.  It was sorely needed then and even more so needed today.  The late 20th century appearance of empathy is surprising, but it is so misdirected.  It causes vegetarianism instead of people out in the streets demanding birth control, sex education, and the right of abortion.  It exhibits itself in pampered dogs and cats who have more medical attention than most poverty-stricken children in this country.  Misplaced empathy is worst than no empathy at all to one who has no future.

So my sister created me, the young adult, seeing a picture in the newspaper of a barefooted little dead man in a foreign country in Vietnam, understanding that I am being lied to in the 20th century.  A little man who has no shoes could not possibly be a threat to the well-dressed and well-shod Americans!  Why was my country lying to me?  And what other lies were being told?

First Memories in 19th century farm

I vaguely remember the light of kerosene lamps.  My memory is that it was like the light of a fireplace, subdued and warm, but steady and circular.  I also remember bathing in a round steel tub.  I also remember the dread of the outhouse and the fear that my behind would be bitten by a spider or a snake.  I would hold all in until there was absolutely no option.  Although we lived near a major city in Texas, electricity was not available until a government-funded program entitled rural electrification started our life to change dramatically with electricity.  At first it was only lighting that changed.  Then further changes occurred.  Now we were kind of in the 20th century, not financially, but a little bit psychologically.  My father now listened to the market reports on cattle prices.  We were still milking cows and that was our funding to pay property taxes and buy coffee, sugar, and white flour. In addition my mother bought store-bought bread.  I visited another German family next to us and that family had freshly-baked, white flour bread every day.  It was so good compared to the store-bought bread and I begged my mother to bake bread, but she never did.  I also remember vaguely the model-T Ford rushing off when my father's father was on his deathbed with my father rushing to get a doctor.

Although my father was a veteran US soldier in World War I, he understood the discrimination against German immigrants, so we were never taught German.  We were only to speak English and therefore later on, entering the main stream city school when Texas "consolidated" the school system and required the one-teacher to all the grades  to all eventually close, I could appear to be one of the sophisticated city people, i.e., white middle class, as compared to the German peers I abandoned now in my flight toward social acceptance and eventually the city.  My German-immigrant peers with their German accents could not flourish as I did in social acceptance.

Prior to the county seat city school, my social life was only that of city (and really hated) cousins whose parents appeared like a plague every weekend and, at school, the other children of the surrounding farm families.  Every weekend the brothers and sisters of my mother would appear, particularly during hunting season.  My father endured them, sometimes getting a bit of work out of them, but not much.  My mother fed them graciously from our numerous provisions toiling through 3 meals a day with the city females gossiping and rarely lifting a hand to help.  The males hunted deer to provide their families with meat.

As the nearby small town, attracted more residents, the property taxes increased.  My parents had to tell the maternal siblings that they would have to charge a fee for hunting to cover the increased property taxes.  All but one drove off in a huff and never returned.  The remaining brother of my mother agreed to pay and to find another hunter that would also pay so we survived the increasing taxes, not on the production of food, but on the urge of the urban male to maintain his manhood.  It is still the same today in most of the Texas ranch families, unless they sit on oil or gas.  

Growing up my mother related that rarely was her birth family able to go to bed with a full stomach unless the nearby grandmother yelled to come to supper.  What was the problem with food then?--alcoholism in the maternal family with no ability to go to the now ever-present aids of Alcoholics Anonymous.  The problem was hidden and the children went hungry.

My father had to quit school at 4th grade because his labor was needed on his father's ranching.  But he loved learning and our house was filled with some books, including a very basic dictionary.  He subscribed to numerous magazines.  Much later, he subscribed to the first issues of Rodale's first publication.  My mother was amazed that garden soil had to be replenished.  We were fed on her garden for all of us on soil that was essentially subsoil.  In spite of that, I don't remember the challenges that face the gardener today, i.e., plagues of disease and insects.  It was my job to water the garden, moving the hose from one row to the next and repair the irrigation ditches beside the rows.  Although we could play, my sister and I, we also had a daily load of chores that enabled us to eat, including watering and weeding the garden, gathering eggs, and going to pasture to bring in the herd of Jersey cows for milking.  

When the great economic forces wanted the food industry, they started by forcing all the small dairy farms out of business by buying the legislature and passing capital-intensive production requirements, so we no longer could make a living selling cream to the city creamery and the milk to the calves for eventual sale.  My father began buying registered Hereford bulls because he could not afford to replace his Jersey cows.  Over the years, all his cattle looked Hereford except for a few aged Jerseys that still survived after the changeover.  During the transition, he had to constantly monitor the birthing of the calves, due to the threat of natural birthing failing because of the slightly larger size of the Hereford males compared to the Jersey males causing calves too large for easy births.

I recall my father discussing the needs of the beef consumer and how they wanted the meat to be fat and then later on, when the desires changed, the lack of surrounding fat, but fat dotted throughout the animals muscle tissue.  As his were all grass-fed beef except for winter feeding of oats, his cattle sold anyways without the requirements.  Now I know he was feeding the feedlot industry, but we knew nothing of it back then.

I remember him talking about Earl Butz but I can't remember what he was saying about him, but he talked about him a lots.  Speculating now, I expect he was fearing that somehow the agricultural powers would eliminate his present method of feeding his family as they did his previous method.

So as my elder sisters married and went off to the wonderful city, I was left on the farm alone with 2 old parents and dreams of the future.  I was successful in many ways in the city school I attended, hiding my own father's alcoholism, my family's extreme poverty, my mother's increasing depression, and my envy of the comfortable lifestyle I saw my sister's lives.  But still as a child with the first sister married and my sister and I making a vacation week of staying with that sister, we got the real first taste of something now called suburbia.    As we walked through the vast acreages of lush, green, frequently watered lawns, my older sister was awed. I thought it was a terrible waste.  My sister said that we were going to have a lawn at home with that green grass.  I looked at her and said, "Are you crazy, you can't eat it!"  I am afraid I have never changed from that child even when I entered the 20th century at the age of 18 when I became a college student, the first one in my family to be one.  I went there to start my life in the 20th century and all I ever wanted to be was a farmer.  Mind you, not a farmer's wife as I saw that lifestyle, I wanted to be a farmer, but women were not farmers, only farmer's wives, with endless 24/7 toil and nothing but tears and too many babies to show for it and the ever-resent fear of another mouth to feed.