mother in law

Marie was Miriam’s mother.

She was short though not as short as Miriam will insist. She was about 5’ 3” and was always very thin. She was also very bright, though it was hard to recognize at times.

My memory is that she graduated from high school at about 14 or 15 and put in a year or two at business school by the time she was 17. She needed a job. She had a somewhat abrasive personality and had no luck finding employment in anything she had been trained to do.

She did get a job a housekeeper for a 35 year old widower who had three young sons. The boy’s mother had died not long after the younger was born.

For some odd reason (we always knew it was weird) she could never remember her wedding anniversary. When asked she would say “I don’t remember.”

The real story, we put together after she died was that the young widower had pressed his affection and she was pregnant when they married. And, rather than admit any shortcoming on her part (a lifelong characteristic) she “forgot” the date, hoping to keep her secret.

Of course kids were not dumb, but actual proof was not seen until after Marie died.

Miriam was born when Marie was 18, and in the next few year she had 3 more babies: one boy and three girls.

She was the step-mother of 3 rambunctious boys, and regularly bore more children. It was a busy time. She was not a particularly good cook and I am not sure she really enjoyed being a mother as much as her husband enjoyed providing her with babies.

When the last of her kids were out of the home, she went to college. Scholarship was easy for her and she graduated from the local state college. She taught grade school, high school a year or two and even college one year.

Somewhere along the line she picked up a Masters Degree.

But she was not a good teacher. She knew her material, but she did not work very well with children and she was not at all good at classroom discipline. Her teaching jobs would run a year or two and she would move on. She always finished the school year then was not rehired.

In the middle her last teaching gig she was fired. She took it very hard, but decided she would make a better nurse. She could have gone to a two year RN program, but instead she got a one year LPN, with the plan of going on to get her RN, while she was working.

Meanwhile her husband had retired because of Parkinsons, and while they had some money from the sale of their farm, she did need to work.

The trauma of getting fired was devastating. That next year, soon after she finished her LPN classes she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. The cancer spread quite fast and within a short time she was gone.

Marie was not a good teacher, as I have said, but she might have been a good nurse. She worked at it a very short time before the cancer made her retire. When her illness becme acute Miriam (who was an LPN) stayed with her and took care of her until she died.

She was 57.