MY MOTHER ON HER 92nd BIRTHDAY
My mother turned 92 years old today. She's in excellent health and lives by herself in the same house my parents bought 14 years ago in Temple, Texas. Mother was born in a Salvation Army home for unwed mothers in Kansas. My grandmother was only 16 years old and living with her parents in rural Oklahoma when she discovered she was pregnant by a young Cherokee man. When my great-grandfather found out who the father was, he ran him out of the state with a shotgun. Indians were not viewed as human for over 200 years and, in some places, even today. How we've treated Native Americans in this country is a shameful part of our history. My mother got a good dose of how Indians were treated when she was growing up. She was an exquisite young Indian maiden with long, straight black hair and beautiful olive skin. One of my mother's earliest and most bitter memories was being spat upon and called an "Indian bastard" as she walked along the sidewalk in her hometown.
Mother lived with her grandparents for four years until her mother married and had six more children. My mother describes her childhood as having to care for a constant stream of babies because her mother was frequently ill. Upon learning at age 17 that her mother was pregnant with another baby, Mother quit school and moved to Phillips, Texas, to find work while living with her aunt and uncle. She had had enough of taking care of babies.
Not long after my mother arrived in Phillips, she met my father while she was waitressing in a small café. My dad worked at the plant for a year after serving in WWII. They soon married and had a baby after 15 months. Another baby followed 17 months later. The youngest of her three children was born six years after the second child's birth. The irony of her trajectory into motherhood was never lost on my mother.
Mother was born only a few months after Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1928. When she was a year old, the US economy collapsed. Unlike most US citizens, my great-grandparents didn't suffer financially from The Great Depression due to operating a booming moonshine business that had been operational since 1920 and continued until Prohibition ended in 1933.
Mother eventually received a GED and attended college. She entered the advertising world when she was age 30 at the local radio station and continued working for the Borger News-Herald selling, designing, and typesetting ads until her retirement at age 64. Mother was the only woman in a professional role besides teachers and nurses in our town. She often describes what it was like to be much better at her job than her male colleagues and bosses, yet make significantly less money. Enduring and suffering from prejudice and discrimination created a woman who had to be fearless against all the odds.
Mother modeled womanhood for me. At a young age, I learned to depend on myself primarily, strive for excellence in everything I did, and that nothing is free. She taught me that being strong meant knowing your place in this world while continuing to reach for more and not ever accepting whatever role others had for me unless it was my choice. My mother's experience compelled me to use my strength to fight for those whose screams are drowned out by deafening white noise.
Mother has lived through WWII, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and the Middle East's ongoing conflicts. We viewed our first TV show in 1953, and I remember the countless times she swooned over Clint Eastwood in his role as Rowdy on Rawhide. The same TV brought us Walter Cronkite, as he removed his glasses while tears streamed down his face and told us about the assassination of President John Kennedy on a cold November day in 1963. Cronkite would again report the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, followed by Robert Kennedy's slaying later that same year.
My parents traveled to Florida in 1969 to watch as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were launched into space to walk on the moon. Mother saw two Presidents impeached and one forced from office, but she has yet to see the Equal Rights Amendment pass. With each mass murder, she grows more alarmed and saddened about our country's direction.
Today, I mentioned my political activities to turn around the injustices experienced today by many people. The end of discrimination in all its manifestations would be a dream come true for a beautiful brown Native American girl who was once called names and spat upon because of her skin color. She was proud to hear what I was doing and assured me she would be voting this year because of the injustices she experienced first-hand and has continued to witness.
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