Anything For Her Daughter

My mother was born in the year 1950, a time so completely apart from the time I grew up in, I can scarcely fathom it. Before the Civil Rights Movement, before the Vietnam Conflict, before JFK, even before Woodstock.

In the year 2017, she decided it was time for her to go back to college. She never got to finish because she was raising her 5 children since the time the first was born to her at the age of 16, her last—me—being born when she was 43.

I was so proud of her for going back to school and following her dreams and not letting something silly like her age get in the way of it. She is the one who taught me to follow my dreams, no matter how big or small, and always encouraged me. Now it was my turn to encourage her dreams.

For her Freshman English Composition II class she had to write a story based on the prompt: Something Someone Did for You That Was Meaningful. Since I have been an avid writer since childhood, she asked me to edit the story for her. I wanted to continue encouraging her efforts in following her dream of completing her education, but little did I know how big an impact her story would have on me.

My mother has regaled me with stories of her childhood my entire life, but this one was different, this story is how I learned of the amazing love my grandmother had for her daughter.

It was the summer of 1951, my mother was almost a year old, and her biological father had just disowned her and left my grandmother, Ruth. Ruth decided to take her daughter, as her now ex-husband had taken her two sons to live with him and his new girlfriend, and move to a new town to start over.

She had no family where she lived and no family where she was going. She had no trade and no education, so she went looking for a job at all the usual places people with her background try: Service stations, grocery stores, restaurants, etc. and eventually, she found her way to a bar.

The bar owner said she could have the job and stay in the one room apartment above the bar if she learned to smoke and drink so she could socialize with the customers. Ruth looked at her infant daughter, my mom, knowing she needed a job and knowing she needed somewhere to stay and knowing she had found no other prospects, and, with all the love a mother can have for their child, said yes.

So, she practiced smoking and drinking and worked at the bar. She worked at the bar for two years, drinking and smoking the whole while, and eventually she moved on, but, the addiction to nicotine was set in stone and she smoked for the rest of her life.

It was in 1986, seven years before my birth, that my grandmother, Ruth, died from emphysema caused from years of heavy smoking. I never got to meet the woman who loved her daughter enough to ruin her lungs so that she could provide for her.

In December of 2020, I was blessed with a baby boy, and now am beginning to understand the type of love that would drive a woman to destroy her own body for her child’s sake.

I am not advocating for smoking of any kind and neither myself nor my mother have ever touched a cigarette, both having been warned by Ruth not to, myself by my mother on her mother’s behalf, but I will never forget the kind of love demonstrated by the grandmother I never got to meet.