My Beginnings

Blanche and Lulu 1895

I think I was seven years old when I began to learn about the power of true stories. During the summers, I would lie in a featherbed beside my great-grandmother, Blanche. She was the mother of my grandmother who was raising me instead of my mother, and I loved to listen to her craggy wisdom–she was eighty and I was eight. (She is in the photo on the left with my grandmother as a baby.)

Blanche, her teeth in a jar beside the bed, whispered to me the stories of her life—crying wtih joy the first time she heard a voice on the telephone; friends in covered wagons stopping to say goodbye before setting off to settle in the wilds of Kansas.

She told me about feeding fourteen farm hands and seven children, working in the garden to grow the food to can for the long, cold winters. Her young husband Lewis died two months after the wedding when s he was twenty-one years old, and pregnant with my grandmother.

I learned how the past shapes the future. In my late thirties I began my career as a psychotherapist, tracing the threads of people’s hurt places, learning the power of their family stories. I helped them to weave together the missing pieces.

My secret dream had always been to write the stories that Blanche gave me, as well as to tell about three generations of mothers who had abandoned their daughters. Determined to learn about myself and to heal this pattern, I worked on it in therapy, and began to write what became my prize-winning memoir Don’t Call Me Mother.

Write Your Story!