Interviewer’s Note

This anonymous speaker was a pleasure to hear from. I think she has a point about what family can look like, even with extended family. There was a time when we would really have that community together. I hope we can find a way to have more of that today.

Early Life

I’m grateful for my children, my family, my grandkids, nature, and good friends. These have been the constants that have carried me through everything. If I had to tell the story of my life in just a few words: my life has been sometimes scary. Sometimes sad. Lots of family and animals. Happiness. I enjoyed it. Different times of my life brought different challenges, but I’ve learned that you have to find joy where you can.

I remember as a kid, we always had family get-togethers. Not just my immediate family either. My mother’s brothers and sisters and my father’s brother. We used to all get together, and my aunt had a pool and it was a big house. In the winter we’d stay inside, and they would do square dancing or play cards. This was back in the old days, in the 60s, early 70s. We did this usually once every two weeks from when I was probably four until I was grown.

They all got along because of the way they were raised, with togetherness. You gotta help each other out. If one brother or sister didn’t have enough money to cover costs, then everybody pitched in and helped out. We were that close. My brothers and sisters are still like that today.

There were six of us kids. I have twin sisters that are older than me, and I’m the baby. I’ve got three older brothers. My parents were good church-going people. My mom was able to stay at home and take care of the kids while my father worked. He made a pretty good living. We were upper middle class. We had a nice house and a nice community in northeast Baltimore.

My father passed away when I was 14 from heart disease. Back then, they didn’t have the medicine they have today. My mother took it hard. She took it very hard. But she was still there for us, and we were there for her. She went back to work because finances kind of dwindled a little bit when my father wasn’t working. She still got money, but it wasn’t enough to keep the house payments going.

Freedom in Nature

Me, I’ve always loved animals. I was the kid that went around the neighborhood picking up cats, I didn’t care if they belonged to somebody or not, I took them home. I did this from probably age four or five until I was about 15. Throughout my life, I maybe had 20 different dogs and cats total. I was a mother figure to them.

I love being in nature. I used to go to the river hiking with the dogs. I used to get in the river and swim, go to the beaches, catch frogs, stay away from snakes. I did this from when I turned 16 and could drive until about seven years ago when I had my knees done and back surgery. I simply couldn’t do it anymore. But before that, I would just walk around and look for different flowers and animals and different formations of rocks. It just felt natural. It didn’t feel like I was cooped up. It was just kind of free out there.

I felt most alive when I was a teenager because we had a bigger circle of friends. We used to party and do crazy stuff in the back alleys. We’d drink beer, smoke pot, but never did anything hard. We used to play games and cards, and one guy’s house had a pool table where we’d hang out in the winter. In the summer, we used to go out in the woods at night and hike. Those were the safe days back then.

Hard Lessons About Love

I went to college for a year and then got pregnant, so I quit college. I was married twice. My first husband and I were both too young. I was only 19. I think he hadn’t done everything he wanted to do yet. I was finished doing my running around at 19 and was ready to get settled down, but most people aren’t.

I do think I made a positive impact on my first husband. When I met him, he was working at a chemical shop in a low-paying job. But after we met, he got more ambitious. He changed his whole attitude because he had a hard attitude against life, but he changed a lot of things about himself.

I met my second husband at a gas station where he worked. He was an auto body man and did painting cars and designing them. He was an alcoholic, which I kept thinking from the start I could change him, which I never could. He died about three years ago. My advice to others going through something similar is: good counseling, and if it doesn’t work, you can’t always change an alcoholic. An alcoholic is always an alcoholic, even if they stop drinking. They pick up that one drink and that’s it.

I think the most important roles I’ve played are as a mother and a daughter and a sister. I’d like to say a wife, but I don’t know how much of an impact I had on anybody as far as being a wife.

My Children Are Everything

My children are my greatest accomplishment. They’re everything to me. What I accomplished is raising them in an appropriate way, and they turned out to be wonderful people. One has a master’s degree from college and is an intelligence analyst at a police department. My other son works for a hospital in Oregon doing logistics. They both turned out to be very well-rounded, brought up kids.

My secret was paying attention to them and doing things that they wanted to do all the time. A lot of people criticized me for being too easy on them, for not punishing them enough or for letting them do things or buy things that other mothers wouldn’t. I could say to them now, “You all said I was such a bad mother back then. See what I’ve accomplished.” You don’t need to be hard on them. I felt that if you trusted them, they would trust you. They never got into any major trouble. Nothing like robbing places or stealing.

For my children, I hope they continue on this path and have an easy time and stay healthy and don’t have to go through too much pain in life.

Don’t Take Anything for Granted

Don’t take anything for granted. I learned this from things I did in the past that I didn’t appreciate what I had. Later on down the road, I realized I took my parents for granted, how good they were to me.

I remember one night when my friend and I met up with some guys who worked at a school and had keys. We went drinking in the school, and when we heard the boss coming, we had to climb out a window. My parents were hysterical. It was after midnight and we were only 14 or 15. They were looking in the bars and getting ready to call the police. I feel bad about that because my father had a heart condition, and I didn’t even think about that when I was doing what I was doing.

What shaped me most was watching how my family and extended family pulled together when somebody passed away, and how everybody was there for everybody else and continued to be for months and months after. Checking in on them, bringing them food, taking them places so they didn’t have to sit there alone.

This sounds old-fashioned, but stop and smell the roses. Pay attention to the people around you and do things that they want to do. Express yourself well to your loved ones. Don’t wait.

Rally for Peace

I hope the world would change and we’d realize that we’re all people, that we’re all in this together. All the wars and the starving people and the starving animals and the bombings and just what we’re doing to each other tears me apart. Just rally for peace, not fight literally, but rally for peace.

We need to remember that we’re all human beings trying to make it through this life, and we should help each other along the way, just like my family taught me all those years ago.