I am especially grateful for the sacrifice my grandmother made. As a parent of two children, I can’t imagine the emotional toll of raising a family of this size. When you have a whole gaggle of children and a couple of grandkids thrown into the mix, I’m sure it was next to impossible to provide everybody with the personal attention that each longed for. There was always something to do around the house to make that whole operation work.
Doing laundry was an all-day affair on Saturday mornings, especially when you were using one of those old Maytag washing machines with the wringer at the top. The only dryer we had was yards of clothes lines in the backyard and the blazing Mississippi sun.
There were always meals to prepare, gardens to chop, quilts to make and children to whoop. The only time I remember my grandma really taking time for herself was to watch the Young and the Restless every day at eleven o’clock. That was the only time she insisted that the house was quiet so she could hear her stories.
I have such fond memories of the shenanigans that transpired in that house and the woods surrounding it. I remember listening for the sounds of my grandma stirring around in the early mornings on the weekends. I would jump up as soon as I heard her footsteps so I could steal some private time with her.
I would sit at the table with her, watch her read the Bible, and then we would talk and drink coffee together. Of course, she would give me milk with a splash of coffee, but it would still make me feel special. These were the few moments that I would manage to carve out some alone time with the lady who is still Superwoman in my eyes.
My grandmother has always been the one constant, grounding presence in my life. My grandfather was there too, but he was gone during the week because he worked for the railroad company and traveled with his job.
As wonderful as it was, growing up this way did make it harder for me to figure out my place in this world. My mom’s siblings each had a way to stand out. They were all super athletic and popular. And then there was me— the chubby, hypersensitive introverted nerd.
My aunts and uncles started collecting medals for baseball, track, basketball and football soon after they started walking. I was the type of kid who would lay around and read all day if allowed. Books became a way for me to escape from the chaos of a 1200 square foot house, bursting at the seams with four generations of people ranging from age five to seventy.
Privacy was non-existent. Every room had multiple persons assigned to it. Even the largest room—the girls’ room—contained a set of bunk beds and a full-size bed. There were generally four to five people sharing this room at any given time.
My great-grandma and my youngest aunt shared a room and the smallest of the bedrooms belonged to my grandparents. The boys slept in the living room (and sometimes the dining room depending on who lived there at the time).
Had it not been for counseling, I would still be hiding from the fact that I had fallen into a cycle of always performing in order to stand out from the crowd. I used my academic performance and being a “good girl” to carve out my place in this humongous family. I followed that pattern for years, earning academic accolades in both high school and college.
Don’t get the wrong idea: I am not saying that doing well in school is a bad thing. What I am saying is that one’s identity should not be 100% connected to how well you perform in anything.
Failure will come regardless of how hard you work or how good your intentions are. It’s a part of life. Not embracing failure as part of life’s process and striving for perfection gave me a superwoman complex, but I will share that with you later in this book.
Compassion: The Missing Element
My father was a student at Mississippi Industrial College (M.I.), one of the local colleges in Holly Springs, when he and my mother met. My relationship with my father has been complicated throughout the years. I remember running and hiding whenever he came to visit. In my eyes, he was a stranger and he scared me.
I remember seeing him pull up one time and me taking off running towards the woods. My uncle Bunny had to chase me down, pick me up and carry me back to the house for my “visit”. I was around six when the visits tapered off altogether.
As I was cleaning my bedroom years later, I remember running across a card that my father’s youngest sister had sent me. I had always maintained fond memories of my Aunt Cartella. She visited me fairly often. She too attended M.I., and my father would send her to check on me after he transferred to another school.
I took a chance and wrote her a letter to see if her address had remained the same and it had. Well, this letter started a chain of events that led to a reunion with my father when I was sixteen. By then, Aunt Cartella had graduated, married and moved to Gary, IN. Since she was no longer close, she called one of their older sisters that lived about 30 minutes away to connect with me.
My Aunt Earlean lived in Oxford, MS—the same little town where my mom attended college. I began to spend many weekends with her and her family. Aunt Earlean had a son and a daughter close to my age. I realized, even back then, that I resembled my paternal family in physical appearance and temperament. Spending time with this branch of
