Women
On motherhood and growing up.
Hi Folks,
As today is mother’s day, and this is a newsletter designed to be about people and stories, I want to take some time to share with you a little bit about my mother. Plenty of people say their mother is their best friend, but I really do mean it when I say it. My mom raised me as a single parent and I didn’t grow up with siblings, so our relationship has always felt closer to a friendship than a traditional parent-child relationship. My mom likes to say she thinks of parenting like shepherding sheep: that your child isn’t designed to be yours, or an amalgamation of your relationship, but instead an independently functioning, independently thinking and feeling being, and your job is only to guide them through the world as best as you can. I like this idea of parenting— leaving room for your children to grow up in a way that allows them to explore themselves separate from expectations. At least in our case, I think it worked, and undoubtedly has led to a close and trusting relationship as adults. My mother knows nearly everything about me, a fact I am very grateful for.
My grandma was only eighteen when she had my mom, leaving her home in the mountains of North Carolina for the big city, where she hoped to provide better opportunities for her children. My grandma was born in an unwed mother’s home in Durham and raised as one of six children in Mount Airy, where our family dates back to as far as I can find records— which, it should be said, isn’t far, since most of our family lacks birth records. If one were to ask where we’re from, we just say North Carolina since it’s about all we’ve ever known.
My mom was both the first person in our family to both graduate college and to leave North Carolina, heading to New York City a week after she finished her undergrad at UNC. It was probably this fact that made me want to follow the same life path, and incidentally enough, I find myself now following it in reverse, going from New York City back to Carolina, where I live only an hour south of Chapel Hill. We are alike in so many ways, a theme that seems to run throughout our family. My grandma was raised first by the women in her family, then my mother, then myself. A sprawling group of great-aunts and sisters and stepmothers. At 19, my grandma gave birth to my mom’s sister and, unmarried, moved them down to Winston Salem, where she raised them on her own for much of their childhood before marrying my grandpa. Years later, my mom left California— where I was born— and moved us down the street from my grandparents, and I too grew up in the arms of southern women. Southern women get a lot of flack in the cultural media, but I truly believe that there is no group of people more caring, tough, tender, and full of grit.
I have never seen myself with children. Motherhood— and relationships, and marriage, and all the other things the world seems to lay out on a platter and tell me I am supposed to want— have always felt evasive and distant. I do not think I want children of my own, at least biologically. I do, however, crave closeness and family, community and love. I will likely reckon with this dissonance for the rest of my life. But I do know that I have been impossibly lucky to have been given the life I have, and to have been guided by the women who have shaped me. I grew up thinking I would spend my whole life wanting to be anything other than this, and it is only in the last year, moving back to North Carolina and taking on a teaching job, that I have understood the power of guidance, and especially the power of women.
This is a newsletter about stories (and I promise, will begin to feature more and more stories that are not mine), so I have asked my mother today to share a story about her childhood, and more importantly about the south. She offered me two things: the first an anecdote on her favorite meal, macaroni salad made by her grandma with produce fresh-picked from the neighbors’ gardens up in the hills, and the below story, which I have heard before, and always think of every time I think of who my mother is: a person with tenacity and grace, a person who knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to go out into the world and find it. Someone smart and quick-minded, who has gone through dark and difficult circumstances and yet, still, always, looks to find some sort of joy in the world.
“One of the funniest stories that I can remember about my mom is that I always rode in the front seat of her old Chevy Impala. This was the 70s. My sister always had to ride in the back and she didn’t like it so much. My mom had promised me that if I got certain grades on my report card that she would take me to get the Hi Ho Cheerio game. It had been all over TV and I had never wanted a game so badly in my life. And sure enough, my report card came and everything checked out. That day she picked us up from the Baptist Church daycare where we went to school and I sat in the front seat and looked at her and said, Today is the day we go to get the Hi Ho Cheerio game! To which she replied, Oh, not today, we will have to do that another day, there’s too much going on today, to which she likely meant that money was tight and promises were placating and that other day would never come.
And I looked straight at her across the seat of the Impala and said with a completely straight face, Thou hast lying lips and lying lips are an abomination unto the Lord. I had been studying in school, and I could recite any bible verse at will. I had even won all the competitions for having memorized the bible.
Needless to say she took me to get the game that day, and the next day my sister and I were pulled out of that school. We weren’t even Baptist. That was just where they had daycare, so we said we were so we could go. But I got the game, and I started at the school that put me in the gifted and talented program, and that led me on a path that changed my life. So I guess we thank the Lord.”
Do you have a story that you’d like published in Good Folk? Share it with us!
This week’s song is Moonlight Feels Right by Starbuck. My mother loves this song, and all 70s music, and raised me on it (seriously, I wasn’t allowed to listen to any modern radio station growing up). This song came on in the car this weekend when I was visiting her in Charleston, South Carolina, and we both found ourselves laughing at the lyrics, “We'll lay back and observe the constellations / And watch the moon smilin' bright / 'll play the radio on southern stations / 'Cause southern belles are hell at night…”
Starbuck was a band from the 70’s out of Atlanta, Georgia, who reached fame with this song thanks to a radio DJ in Birmingham, Alabama, eventually reaching the top two spot on the Billboard pop chart.