Things Mom Lost Along the Way

When I was a little girl, my pretty young mother used to go to parent-teacher meetings at my elementary school. To the best of my knowledge, Dad never accompanied her. Those were different times and children were primarily the mother’s responsibility. I know those meetings intimidated her: she had to quit school in her mid-teens so she could leave home and start making her way in the world and – although she later acquired her high school diploma by correspondence courses – her lack of a formal education always embarrassed her. I am sure she would have been grateful for my Dad’s company, but men didn’t ‘do’ those sorts of things back in the 60s and 70s.

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The Unbearable Heaviness of ‘Stuff’

The collection of ‘stuff’ has been an ongoing theme in my life, and it all started with my mother. A baby born at the end of the Great Depression, Mom was a collector of everything. Born into an extremely poor rural French Catholic family, she had to leave home at age 15 to get a job and to make a way for herself in the world. Education was (and is) a luxury that the poor could simply not afford.