There is One Day of The Year...

... that is called International Women's Day. Dr. Monkey wrote a beautiful post in his sister's honor and Blue Gal
sent out that wonderful link to some bloghers today. I'm not sure what the other 365 days (this year) are called, but the history in the link above does describe a day that is meant for the empowerment and advancement of women, so I will refrain from cynical comments about the low probability that no women will be genitally mutilated today, or the like and be a good wife, I mean woman, like I was taught.

Actually, I was taught no such thing and I know I have shared a bit about my mother with a few of you guys, but she is my female role-model extraordinaire. She rocks, and I love her, despite her flaws and mistakes. She's even the university faculty sponsor for the College Republicans at the school where she teaches, (But, herself, against the war.) I recently described some of my elementary school experiences that tell of some super shittinesses by the men in her life, namely her father and my father. I won't recount those, but do want to say that after growing up in a nearly migrant alcoholic family, and being made to marry my abusive sperm donor (by her father) when she became pregnant at the age of 16, she did the best she could for me and my younger brother, and maybe most importantly... herself. She never graduated from high school, but she did get her GED when I was young. Did I mention that my mother is one of the smartest people I know?

She put up with my dad's physical abusiveness and addictions until the week my brother started kindergarten, the day she had free childcare to work. Things are easier for women in some regards these days as far as being a single mother is concerned. The economy is far worse though and it is harder these days for a family to survive on a single income anymore. It just so happened that my grandfather died just before my brother started kindergarten and my mother moved back to my grandmother's house until she could get on her feet financially, which was about six months.

She became the manager of that Baskin Robbins and got us through a few tough years. I can't say that we were psychologically unscathed, as my brother and I have both blocked out our childhoods until that same day that she left our dad and my mother was not very good about talking about the past, herself having been diagnosed with PTSD from the deal, but we are alive. My father had begun to hit me towards the end as well, I am told. I have one or two flickering memories and one involves him busting a fist through a wall.

My mother married my step-father when I was almost eleven and had my youngest brother when I was twelve. Shortly after that, she started to go back to school. My mother had done some journalistic work and photography when married to my father, and began to major in sociology for a time. When I was in ninth grade, I took Honors Algebra, just one semester ahead of my mother's College Math and then College Algebra courses. I watched my mother do something strange when she was doing her math homework, something completely uncharacteristic of her (very much a know-it-all.) I saw her become very discouraged when doing her homework, which she did diligently at our kitchen island, our family's gathering spot. I heard her utter that she was "no good at math" and I adopted an attitude that will take me far in my own soon to come teaching career. I explained to her that of course she did not know these things, she had not yet learned them. I proceeded to help her little by little. It really didn't take much for her to be able to study on her own and with folks in her classes. She just needed a little scaffolding and confidence. She shared with me that her mother (and society) had told her and her two other sister that "girls aren't good at math," basically, their entire childhoods.

I did the Calculus tract in high school and won awards of achievement and ultimately an award of excellence in the National Math Exam in high school and entered my Freshman year in Cal. II. (Of course, I then flubbed it up and drank myself silly my freshman year and skipped nearly every class that first semester. I made a D in the class with a 28%, only because it seems everyone else must have sucked at it too. An A was was had by those with an average in the 60's.) At that time I never would have considered Math as a major, Journalism or something more liberal artsy was more to my liking.

My mother passed me up in her math courses around that time. She earned her BA in Math (the same degree I am now pursuing, not so coincidentally, I'm sure) with all kinds of honors I don't even know about because I screwed my GPA up so bad my first couple years of college back then. She then went on to pursue her Master's in Math Education. She got a job as the first female in the Math department at the community college in my home town and commuted to school in another city, the whole time earning excellent grades.

Sometime, a few years later, when she was going for her Ph.D., commuting all along the way still, that community college got annexed into the state university system and she became a professor for the university instead. My mother has won a number of prestigious teaching awards, she has fought to hire more and more female professors and has worked with women going back to school as mothers every chance she could, becoming the first math professor at her school to teach math courses that she developed online through the university system.

I'm not sure if my mother is pro-choice or not; she has been an atheist most of my life and does not do so out of religious convictions, but volunteers to counsel young women with unwanted pregnancies to give their children up for adoption to loving homes rather than abort them or raise them themselves, which I think is one of the most moral things that someone who is not pro-choice could do (besides maybe adopt children themselves.) And I am certainly glad my mother did not go to France to have the abortion her father insisted she have (being pre- Roe v. Wade,) even forcing her to marry my dad as a punishment of sorts for not doing so. While I am pro-choice myself, I have four children myself and can say that abortion was not something I could have done, even when my ex-husband (in desperation while we were divorcing) insisted that I have one. It doesn't always work out this way, but he is an extremely devoted father and co-parent, and still one of my best friends.

My mother smoked for many years and developed some lung problems in her twenties, quitting smoking when she became pregnant with my youngest brother once and for all. She had some curious lung conditions over the course of many years and then began to acquire pneumonia incessantly a few years ago, to the extent that she had to be on antibiotics for years, lest her lungs just bleed profusely. She went to lung specialists and even when she would be running a near constant fever for weeks at a time, because no one was able to diagnose her, she had doctors suggest her condition was psychological. I am not going to include her condition here, as I do not want to come up in google searches for her rare condition (email me if you have need to know) as I am not out as a blogger to my family, because I like to be a slut here online and such and women are not always thought of so well, particularly within their conservative families if they like to say things like Jesus is my hermaphroditic lover and other blasphemies you've heard if you know me here at all. Finally, she did have a lung specialist in Saint Louis diagnose her terminal, possibly genetic, auto-immune disease last year, but not before very much damage was done to her lungs. Because she is not able to manufacture her own antibodies, she receives monthly transfusions of an antibody cocktail and that has done wonders for the way she feels. It cannot reverse the damage to her lungs and she has had to be on antibiotics from time to time anyway. Unfortunately, I do not live too close to my mother, but I sure do wish she would live to get senile enough to be willing to live with me. That's what it would take for her to be willing even though we have assured her we will not do what my husband tells his mother he will do when she is senile and living with us in her advanced years, take her on a long hike in the woods and leave her, but more about that on Mother's Day.