Grandma, Loretta and Maude

I've been wanting to blog about Maude. For anyone stumbling across this, Maude is a book we read for this class, by Doona Mabry. The thing with the book is, well, it's badly written. Self published for one thing, which generally tells me all I need to know about a book, i.e. that no one would buy it. It's the memoir of Donna Mabry's grandmother; based on stories her grandma told her growing up. I think if you're going to write a story, write a story. If you want to make a book out of it for friends and family heave-ho and get to it, but if you're going to write a story, write one. There are also typos in the preface. Editors exist for a reason. Had I been given this book for a look-see, I would have said, excellent, you wrote that, now bury it and write the story you want to tell.

This, however, is not an English class; it's Human Development and Family Studies. So having said my piece let me tell you about how I got into Maude. In spite of myself.

That's my Grandmother up there on the left. Mom on the right. I think that’s me getting out of the pool there, possibly 7 years old, so that would make Mom 28 and Grandma 47-ish. They look pretty awesome, I have to say. The photo tho is so old that I couldn’t get it out of the photo book to scan it. This was taken a long time ago. 1969, I’m thinking. Mom was born in 1940, and Grandma in 1921, she was just 19, and hadn’t been married very long.

Maude, in the book, was born in 1892, which makes her pretty much the same age as my Grandmothers parents. I saw a lot of parallels, or at any rate, thought a lot about my Grandmother while I was reading it. Also about Loretta Lynn, but we’ll get to her. Grandma’s first husband was a drunk, and she left him and took her baby girl (my mom) and went home to her parents. She said, Daddy, he drinks all the time and beats me. Her father said: Go back to your husband, if you were a better wife, he wouldn’t have to do that. Grandma wasn’t having it, and went off to support herself, which she did working in a nice Jewish temple, though she was Catholic through and through. You did what you had to, back in those days, to survive. She didn’t care if it wasn’t done, no one was going to treat her that way.

Now Loretta Lynn, she’s about 10 years older than my grandmother was, though you’d better not ever say it to her face. She can still muster up some Fist City when she gets riled, I hear. She got married at 14 to a man who drank, and ran around with other women. She was luckier than my Grandma in that her parents took her back, married and pregnant, but they told her: You made this bed, you lie in it. Loretta, if you’ve ever read her books, surely did, she was married to an alcoholic her entire life, to the day he died from it. You stayed. She didn’t stay quietly, though. And let it be known in no uncertain terms she wasn’t happy with all the drinking that went on. She was from the same part of the country as Maude, and many times her story parallels Maude’s. Both married young, both dirt poor, both having babies, both husbands drank, both moved away around the depression. And both made do with what they had. They survived, kind of like my Grandma, come to think on it. We had kin in those hills too.

Mostly reading Maude I kept thinking: Maude, you gots to grow some balls. I wonder exactly what the actual Maude would have had to say? Sure, she told the stories, but we’re reading them as written from memory, by a granddaughter. We know what color memories are, for the most part.

I wonder if my perspective is wrong. There’s Maude, just little and she comes home to find her parents dead and the house burned down. She moves in with her sister and pretty much takes care of her sister, the baby and house, until she’s 14 and kin decides she needs to marry the boy down the street. That’s all fine, and Maude finds the one thing I think people are always searching for: someone to love and feel safe with. Sadly for her, he dies, and enter the second husband.

Maude knew what she was doing when she went riding with him. She even says “I don’t know what I was thinking”. She wasn’t all surprised when the town told her she needed to get married. She knew that town, and the town figured young widows needed to be married.

‘Ol George wasn’t evil but there wasn’t much character going on with him, and hard work wasn’t something he cozied up to often. Once he started drinking Maude was pretty much on her own. With all those babies. Babies back then came when they did, and there wasn’t much a poor woman could do about them. Maude didn’t even know just what the heck caused those babies in the first place. After her first, she thought she was dying, and needed to have her womb put back in. Loretta too, I remember asked the doctor for something to stop her from having babies, she had four, before she was 18. My Grandma just had one, and I always wondered if she knew something she wasn’t letting onto. Maude did what she had to, to survive. She even started her own boarding house, and worked until she died. Loretta sang. My Grandma worked in the temple.

Maybe Maude had more balls than I give her credit for.

She worked hard to improve wherever it was she was living. I remember the part where she decides she wants to re-do the bedroom, and doesn’t get my help or validation from George, but stands up and does it anyway. She’s also the one, for a whole lot of the time that is supporting the family. A family where the men all drank. Like Loretta.

I’m thinking about Maude, and Loretta, who both married young and stayed with men who drank, and I’m thinking about my Grandma, who didn’t. I’m thinking about my own Mom who married at 21, had three babies, and then when the fairy tale wasn’t what she expected, started drinking herself. I’m not being entirely fair to my Mom here, because no one sets out to become alcoholic, and it’s harder than you might think to stop. I was surprised as hell when it happened to me.

Maude, Loretta and my Grandma had something in common besides the fact that their men all drank. They lived in a time when society had certain expectations about what women could and could not do. Also about what love was, sure, you could marry for love, but this was that transitional period. It was transitional in that women were marrying for love, but there were women who also had to go out and work. The depression and the wars had a lot to do with that. They were the first women who kind of straddled the line. More than chattel, but less than men, and with far fewer options. They survived, however they could.

Nowadays marriage is a choice. Being part of a couple is a choice. Women make up their own minds about marrying, or not, having babies, or not. Pretty much everyone works and the idea of the stay at home mom is that it’s a choice and a couple is lucky if they have the option of one staying home. Relationships are worked on, and women don’t generally stay in abusive ones. Or the alcoholic ones.

Mostly. I see some that do, at work. And I wonder why. I talked to one today about her options, now that her husband was drinking again, and what she could do. Not something available to Maude. Or Loretta. Or my Grandma.

Maude had balls. She survived.