Peggy's prompt---this she knew for certain

Peggy’s Prompt    “this she knew for certain”

This she knew for certain, as she’d repeated it to me numerous times during my adolescence. “Have your fun BEFORE you get married.” Coming from Mama, there was no mistake about what that implied. Getting married was going to be the end of the fun. That’s when responsibilities, duties, obligations, respectability took over, and that was no fun. Mama never laid out specifically what she meant by fun, but I assumed she meant the freedom that comes from spending your money on yourself, the unlimitless opportunities to do what a later generation would call “doing your own thing.” “Don’t be in a rush to get married,” Mama would say. You’ve got plenty of time. Look at us (meaning herself and her sisters). I was 26, and Martha and Bet were nearly 30. Live a little.

Later on, when I married (for the first time) at 23, I think Mama was disappointed that I married, in her view, so young. Of course, in her experience, once a young woman married, she immediately became a full-time housewife and baby-maker, even if the babies stoped after two. Wives only worked if their husbands couldn’t fully support them, and my father, even as a poor commercial fisherman, was determined to be seen as a man who supported his family. And thanks to my mother’s cooperation—her sewing all of our clothes, her incredible thriftiness, and her willingness to sacrifice her own desires, and even needs, or order to help provide for the family, he managed to hold hid head high as the “sole provider.” But it took its toll on my mother, who although she derived some satisfaction from her successes as a frugal housewife, was never happy with her situation. She felt that she had gone from the hard work and financial struggles of a farmer’s daughter too quickly through a relatively affluent self-sufficiency, right back to a lifetime of hard work and financial struggle as a fisherman’s wife. How she cherished, almost grieved for those days of independence when she had had a good job where she was well-respected, an apartment that she shared with either her sisters or other working girls her age, a white Ford roadster convertible (ooh-la-la) and a closet full of dresses and high heels, ready to look glamorous at work or when she stepped out on the town—which, I gather, was frequently.

Anyhow, she was determined to pass along to me the wisdom she’d gained since getting married, and that was to have as many years as possible for yourself before getting married. This she knew for certain.