My Mom’s Centenary

I don’t recall having posted the picture of my mom above previously.

Today is the centenary of my mother’s birth. Or not. We have three birth certificates for her: one showing the year of birth as 1921, another as 1922, the third as 1923. Let’s split the difference and say that she was born in 1922.

I’ve told a lot of anecdotes about my mom over the years. She had a hard, poor, uncertain childhood. She was born on the road, probably literally “born in a trunk” in show biz parlance, while her parents were in vaudeville. She was on stage from the time she was an infant. She could dance, sing, and recite and my siblings and I all learned to do the same. My siblings’ children carry on with that family tradition to a large degree.

When her parents split up she was shuttled back and forth between relatives—her father’s brother’s family, her father’s sister’s family, her dad, her mom, maybe others but those were the ones I know about. Sometimes she literally did not know where she was going to sleep that night.

Eventually, she lived with her mom and her mom’s boyfriend which seems like an odd arrangement. My mom never cared for her mom’s boyfriend—detested him in fact. I’m not sure of the whole story there. I have a $5 gold piece he gave her as a high school graduation present which I purchased from my mom. She seemed happy to get rid of it.

My mom was the first person in her family to graduate from high school, the first to graduate from college, and the first to get a post-graduate degree.

From that insecure childhood she grew up to become a secure, confident, and capable adult. She devoted her entire life to her family and to other kids who were growing up as poor and insecure as she had been.