My mother, Evie Busk, was born in 1914.  That means she was in grade school—a one-room grade school—in the twenties.  She dropped out of school after seventh grade. Nonetheless, her grammar was perfect—her subjects and predicates always agreed, and her verb tenses were right on, and she knew better than to end sentences with prepositions. (Please disregard the one at the end of the previous sentence!) And well into her eighties, she could still whip out NYTimes Crossword puzzles with wild abandon.  Clearly a seventh grade education from those twenties is different from current iterations of seventh grade.

I was six years younger than my oldest sister and four years younger than the other. The first married within weeks of high school graduation.  The second dropped out of school after her sophomore year, married, and had both her children by the time she was seventeen.  She was also a card-carrying member of Mensa.  If my mother had taken the test, she probably could have done the same thing.

But when it was time for me to enter high school, my mother wanted a different result, so she made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.  She told me if I would take six solids every semester, I wouldn’t have to do the kind of housework my older sisters had had to do.  Between homework or housework?  No contest!  I chose door number one.  That choice put me on an academic track that lead to a college scholarship, a BA, Masters of Education, an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, and ultimately a successful career in writing. 

My serious writing started in my mid-twenties while I was teaching on the reservation.  By then I had the first two degrees in hand.  I ended up being caught up in that mid-seventies version of feminism.  (Remember when Ms. Magazine was still a thing?)  At the time, I also had a full-fledged case of youthful arrogance.  That’s when I wrote the following poem: 

Strangers

My hopes and fears are alien to her.

When we speak, it is as though our words

Come from two different languages

With no hope of finding an interpreter

To reconcile them.

She has lived her life by the old rules –

Spent her time cooking, cleaning, bearing children.

My abandonment of the kitchen

She regards as the ultimate treachery,

A final defection.

I see her as “just a housewife;”

See her years as mother a waste

Of human potential, of intellect, of being.

Until we both can look at one another

With minds washed clean of prejudice,

Until we can see the difference and the value

Of both separate lives, it will be

Impossible for my mother and me

To be sisters.

Talk about sounding like a know-it-all!  By the time I wrote that, my mother had successfully raised seven children, none of whom ever ended up in jail.  I didn’t have ANY children!  You’d be surprised how much smarter my mother got as soon as I did, and that’s when we stopped being strangers.  When my mother was in our fifties and her “kids” came home with jobs and kids of their own, my mother, with the help of a babysitter named Dolores Decker, ran a family-only, unofficial daycare with five kids under the age of five.  How she managed that, I still don’t know.

I was always tall.  Back in the Fifties before the time of school headshots, annual school photos consisted of having classrooms of kids line up on risers.  I was always in the middle of the top row, along with Mike Marusich and Harley Hiett.  I don’t know what became of Mike, but Harley and I remain friends to this day.  When I started hunching over to make myself shorter, my mother would tell me, “Stå rakt upp!” (Stand up straight.). Or if I was gazing open-mouthed at something, she’d say, “Håll käften.” (Shut your mouth.) That was our secret.  Lots of people in Bisbee spoke Spanish, but hardly anybody else spoke Swedish.

As I said that was back in the seventies.  I was selling life-insurance then at a time when wearing pantsuits were still a no-no in the business world. My mother wasn’t big on handing out compliments, but that’s when she gave me one I’ve never forgotten.  She’d been with me when I’d  dropped my kids off at my sister’s house.  I walked up to the front porch wearing my dress-for-success outfit—a ladies’ suit with a pencil skirt, high heels, and No Nonsense panty-hose.  When I got back in the car she said to me, “You know, you’ve got good legs.”  No one had ever told me that before, and no one has since, so I still remember it, and today writing this has reminded me of that bright jewel of a comment.

By then my mother and I weren’t strangers any more and we stayed that way for a long time until decades later when suddenly we were.  My parents were married for 68 years. They had more or less counted on a Thelma and Louise exit until my father had a massive stroke and died, leaving my mother both behind and furious.  “Norman had no business going off and leaving me alone like that!” 

They had been living in an assisted living facility, but at that point she insisted on moving in with my younger sister.  Over the course of the next several years, it was as though Evie underwent a personality transplant.  This woman who had once been a positive, forward-looking influence on all of our lives became mean-spirited, angry, and manipulative.  When she came to stay with us in Tucson for a time, her sarcastic remarks could have me in tears by the time I made it from the bedroom to the family room.  Bill and I lasted for three weeks.  My sister managed for five years.  

After Evie passed away, I didn’t shed a tear at her funeral.  She wanted to be with my dad, and now she was, but the next book I wrote was Exit Wounds. Remember the scene where the little old couple pack up their forenoon coffee picnic, load it in their Buick, and then go screaming off the mountainside in full Thelma and Louise fashion?  That was an author’s way of grieving for my parents and an author’s way of honoring them. I shed buckets of tears while I was writing that scene.

But it’s funny how pieces of my real life sneak into the pages of my books without my even noticing.  In 2013, when I was doing the audio version of After the Fire, I once again came face to face with that poem from long ago, the one I wrote about my mother.  And that’s when it suddenly came into focus, that the conflicts I’d had with my mother back in my twenties were the same kinds of issues Joanna was having with her own mother, Eleanor. They weren’t exactly the same, but close enough that I recognized them. As for my mother’s take on Eleanor Lathrop?  She told me once, “Eleanor is the first character in fiction I ever met who really knows how the world works.” Obviously I’d done both of them justice!

Over the years and over the books, Joanna and Eleanor were beginning to understand each other, but then, before they had a chance to finally put all their differences aside, Eleanor and her husband were murdered.  Now Joanna is living with the regrets of never having reconciled the issues that separated them. 

The truth is, I’m living with some regrets as well.  Over the years since my mother’s passing, I’ve come to recognize that what was going on with her—what I thought of as a personality transplant—was possibly some kind of undiagnosed dementia.  If I could go back and change anything about that, I’d counsel myself not to take those off-hand remarks so personally.  After all, how many times did the old Evie tell me “Sticks and stones, etc., etc., etc?”

Being able to remember the wonderful Evie, the vibrant woman who once was, and to share her with my readers has allowed me to stop remembering all the unkind words and hurts at the end.

Unwittingly, you, my blog readers, have all been part of this years’-long process of healing and forgiveness.

Thank you.