Reply to comment

Conversations with my mother happen at the kitchen table. We sit at the corner, usually with a cup of coffee – my mother’s with some sugar, mine black. She tells me about work, her mother, and any news about people I used to go to school with. I don’t always know how much I can tell her about being at Haverford. It is hard a lot of the time, but I don’t want to burden her with more worry in addition to what she already has. Sometimes she will tell me a story, or share one of her worries with me.

 

I will never forget the day she told me she could not understand how my brother didn’t believe in God. She said that god had answered so many of her prayers. When she was young, she would pray every night that her dad would make it home from the bar. He had frequent trysts at the bar after work, and she would talk to God in hopes of helping her dad get home safely. I could see she was holding back tears (I have only seen my mother cry once or twice in my life), and the light coming in from the window over the sink made her look more tired than she usually does.

 

This might have been the most she has ever let me in. She, like all the other women in my family, refuses to be seen as weak. My mother’s mother was a poor 18 year old when she had my mother and was married to my grandfather. My grandfather had an 8^th grade education and worked in a factory for most of his life until he retired, while my grandmother had 3 daughters and also worked in a sewing factory for less than minimum wage. My mother was the first person in her family to go to college. She has a will like no other person I know, and I can only ever hope to be as strong as she is.

 

Conversations with my mother are never about trifling things. We don’t talk about “women” things and neither do the rest of the women in my family. We have seen too much and been through too much to let our guard down too much. This class makes me think of my conversations with my mother; I sometimes don’t always think of myself as a woman. I think of myself as a member of a line of people who have been saddled with worries for as long as they’ve been alive and who have worked to make life better for the next generation of the family. I came to this class as a person, from the working-class who can only hope to be able to provide for my mother in the future. Hopefully some day I can sit at the same table with my mother and our coffees (hers with some sugar, mine still black) and tell her that she doesn’t have to worry anymore; I’m going to take care of her.