Interview with Dorothy Jean

Interview with Dorothy Jean

                        When I was twenty, I was so glad to move on with my life and get my own apartment. I was the oldest girl of seven children and had a lot of family responsibility. Little did I know how this would help and mold me to become the strong women that I have been now for sixty years.  So I thank my mother, and it is true that when you are a mother and older you respect your own mother for all she was and did for you and your family while growing up. However, she is unable to say those words about her mother.

            I only knew bits and pieces of my moms childhood until I had a career, was on my own and married. Sharing her childhood memories with her own children was something she never allowed herself to do. We did not know her deep secrets or even suspect any parts of her life were to dark to share. Mom, with a heart of gold and a laugh so spontaneous she would make you start laughing just watching her. She was an only child; left by her own mother at the age of eleven with a man she thought was her father. Turned out he was not. Eighty years old now. She will never know who her father was. This really bothers her. She forgave her mother when she showed up in her life when I was a baby and took care of her until she passed away. I loved my grandma, until I knew how she had deserted and treated my mother as a child. My grandma was from a family of twelve children, born to German immigrants. Her father wanted the girls of the family out the house early, being of no use to him in their family business. He did not care what became of them and her mother was too busy and had no choices, like Dorothy Allison quoted her mother saying in A Question Of Class (79). That’s the way my mom tells the story anyway. I am the only child in our family that knows this story. Hate is exhausting and my mother has chosen love, even though I believe she learned it from my dad and his family. They have been married for sixty-six years. That’s right, she was fourteen when they got married. They took a train down South and then returned to Michigan to tell my father’s family. My grandparents took them in and gave them their own space even with their own family of six children. They finished school and my father worked hard at Greenfield Village where he eventually became the glassblower. My mom graduated valedictorian of her class and they started a family soon after. Happy ending after as they soak up the sun in Arizona this February 2012.

            My mom wishes she had gone to college. The story speaks for itself as to why this wasn’t possible. It was also an era when women pursuing an education were frowned upon. My mom was happy, and did not really think about an education or job for years to come. Her plate was full in every way. More than she had ever imagined as she stood outside in the cold rain in only her nightgown, a few years before this time. Pushed out of the house one night and the door locked behind her as she was told that she was a burden that no one wanted anymore. She ran to her neighbors, my grandparent’s house. They took her in and she never returned to a house that had never wanted her. You don’t know that when you “live” there. It isn’t until you witness life in a home that reality stuns you, and you begin over.

            My mom taught herself shorthand and read as often as she could while raising seven children. Her English grammar is impeccable and my siblings and I mock how she is always correcting us and other people. It is our inside joke, but actually when she is not around, we find ourselves correcting each other’s children. When her last two children were home and in high school, she became employed as a secretary for an Intermediate School. It is one of the highlights of her life. When she has to write down her occupation on a form, she is proud to list Secretary rather than retired or housewife. The word regret will not be used when wishing her education could have extended beyond high school, but she made sure that all of her children went to college and claimed their right to an education and followed our passions. (23) I actually read her that paragraph from our reading and she loved it. I obtained my Associate’s Degree early on and she still proudly tells people how I had my degree by the age of twenty. You can only imagine how proud she of me now. Preaching to all her grandchildren about college is at the top of her list, but never making it about herself. Her past and that house are not relevant to the life she chose to never look back upon. Life for my mom is living for the day and being all you can right now. I believe she is a feminist who has beat the system of inequality for women not protected by their own mother’s or society.

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Rich Adrienne, “Claiming an Education”, 1979. Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions, 2012

Allison Dorothy, “A Question of Class”. Identities and Social Locations: Who Am I, Who Are My People?          

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