Beech Tree News Network

My father had an eighth-grade education, so did my stepmom.  My dad was proud of that fact.  My stepmom was embarrassed about it.  My father was proud of his lack of education because of everything he accomplished in spite of that fact.  My stepmom was embarrassed about her lack of education, because that lack got her very little in life. 
    My stepmom was the oldest of five children in a farm family.  It fell to her to learn how to plow the team of mules and help with the harvesting.  Because she was often pulled from school to help with the crops, there were great gaps in her education.  She often misread and mispronounced many words when we were children, but because we were afraid of her, we never offered corrections that could have helped her.
 My dad got the full utility of his eight years in school.  His mom made sure he was there every day.  My dad had the prettiest handwriting of anybody I’ve ever known.  He was very articulate and a wiz with numbers.  At 6 feet, 200 pounds, my dad was also a very physical man.  It didn’t take a high school education to turn cedar post, which is what he did for years. 
During my early years with my stepmom, she was a homemaker.  She cooked the meals, washed the clothes, kept us clean and made sure we got to school and church.  She was very frustrated during those years, often harsh and irritable toward us kids.  I didn’t understand until much later in life that it was because she was a fish out of water.  She was trying to do what was expected of her as a woman, but it just didn’t fit.
    When we moved to Taylorsville, Dad bought his own sawmill and Mom saw an opportunity to get out of the house, so she took it.  Dad was able to buy a few acres of farmland adjoining the mill, so Mom turned posts at the mill during the day then tended to cows and pigs in the evenings (we kids also got in on the cow/pig tending). 
    The farm and mill combination was a hard way of life, but you could tell Mom was in her element there.  She didn’t operate the crawler Dad eventually bought to take the place of the mules he used to pull logs from the woods, but she did drive a log truck from time to time.  She was the one who taught my youngest brother, Mark, how to operate a skidder when he decided to go off on his own away from Dad and my brother, Carl.
    I have many regrets involving that period of my life, but my greatest is that my stepmom didn’t teach me what she knew.  She didn’t teach any of us girls what she knew about work outside the home.  We grew up watching her, fearing her, admiring her, but never knowing what it took to be like her.  It’s not hard to learn how to do house work.  Once you’ve got down how to wash and dry a dish, you won’t find many variations on the activity; but to be able to drive a log truck or operate a dozier or plow a team of mules even, do you realize the self-esteem it would have given us girls? 
    The one thing my stepmom did instill in us was the desire for an education.  She always encouraged us to continue.  I was horrified when my dad told my brother, Carl, it was ok for him to drop out of school when he was sixteen—thank God, he didn’t.  Mom wanted better for all of us. 
During my first year at Western, my stepmom wrote me a letter.  She didn’t know to capitalize the first letter of each new sentence, she didn’t know where periods went, and she misspelled most words.  I cried.  I cried because this woman who valued education did so because she didn’t have one.  I cried because this same woman wasn’t resentful of my having the opportunity to obtain one.  I cried because she had carried that shame for all those years.  And I realized the reason she didn’t teach me how to drive a log truck or run a dozier or plow a team of mules was because those weren’t the things she valued.  It’s not that we couldn’t have done both—lots of women do every day—but in her mind, the two were incongruous.
        When our granddaughter, Sabria, was two years old, my husband, Garey put her in his lap and let her steer the farm tractor while he drove through an open field.  If she started to veer too far to the left or right, Garey would reach up and grab the wheel.  Sabria would immediately slap his hand away.  I believe she is going to have what it takes to operate our backhoe.  I hope my stepmom lives to see it.