My mother, Evie Busk, was born in 1914. That means she was in grade school\u2014a one-room grade school\u2014in the twenties. She dropped out of school after seventh grade. Nonetheless, her grammar was perfect\u2014her 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t refuse. She told me if I would take six solids every semester, I wouldn\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 <\/em>was still a thing?) At the time, I also had a full-fledged case of youthful arrogance. That\u2019s when I wrote the following poem: <\/p>\n\n\n\n Strangers<\/p>\n\n\n\n My hopes and fears are alien to her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When we speak, it is as though our words<\/p>\n\n\n\n Come from two different languages<\/p>\n\n\n\n With no hope of finding an interpreter<\/p>\n\n\n\n To reconcile them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She has lived her life by the old rules \u2013<\/p>\n\n\n\n Spent her time cooking, cleaning, bearing children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My abandonment of the kitchen<\/p>\n\n\n\n She regards as the ultimate treachery,<\/p>\n\n\n\n A final defection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I see her as \u201cjust a housewife;\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n See her years as mother a waste<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of human potential, of intellect, of being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Until we both can look at one another<\/p>\n\n\n\n With minds washed clean of prejudice,<\/p>\n\n\n\n Until we can see the difference and the value<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of both separate lives, it will be<\/p>\n\n\n\n Impossible for my mother and me<\/p>\n\n\n\n To be sisters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t have ANY children! You\u2019d be surprised how much smarter my mother got as soon as I did, and that\u2019s when we stopped being strangers. When my mother was in our fifties and her \u201ckids\u201d 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\u2019t know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t 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, \u201cSt\u00e5 rakt upp!\u201d (Stand up straight.). Or if I was gazing open-mouthed at something, she\u2019d say, \u201cH\u00e5ll k\u00e4ften.\u201d (Shut your mouth.) That was our secret. Lots of people in Bisbee spoke Spanish, but hardly anybody else spoke Swedish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t big on handing out compliments, but that\u2019s when she gave me one I\u2019ve never forgotten. She\u2019d been with me when I\u2019d dropped my kids off at my sister\u2019s house. I walked up to the front porch wearing my dress-for-success outfit\u2014a ladies\u2019 suit with a pencil skirt, high heels, and No Nonsense panty-hose. When I got back in the car she said to me, \u201cYou know, you\u2019ve got good legs.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By then my mother and I weren\u2019t 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<\/em> exit until my father had a massive stroke and died, leaving my mother both behind and furious. \u201cNorman had no business going off and leaving me alone like that!\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n After Evie passed away, I didn\u2019t 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.<\/em> 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 <\/em>fashion? That was an author\u2019s way of grieving for my parents and an author\u2019s way of honoring them. I shed buckets of tears while I was writing that scene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But it\u2019s 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, <\/em>I once again came face to face with that poem from long ago, the one I wrote about my mother. And that\u2019s 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\u2019t exactly the same, but close enough that I recognized them. As for my mother\u2019s take on Eleanor Lathrop? She told me once, \u201cEleanor is the first character in fiction I ever met who really knows how the world works.\u201d Obviously I\u2019d done both of them justice!<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The truth is, I\u2019m living with some regrets as well. Over the years since my mother\u2019s passing, I\u2019ve come to recognize that what was going on with her\u2014what I thought of as a personality transplant\u2014was possibly some kind of undiagnosed dementia. If I could go back and change anything about that, I\u2019d counsel myself not to take those off-hand remarks so personally. After all, how many times did the old Evie tell me \u201cSticks and stones, etc., etc., etc?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unwittingly, you, my blog readers, have all been part of this years’-long process of healing and forgiveness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thank you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My mother, Evie Busk, was born in 1914. That means she was in grade school\u2014a one-room grade school\u2014in the twenties. She dropped out of school after seventh grade. Nonetheless, her grammar was perfect\u2014her subjects and predicates always agreed, and her verb tenses were right on, and she knew better than to end sentences with prepositions. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"A Journey of Forgiveness","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-SM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3396"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3397,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3396\/revisions\/3397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}