My mother’s story is different from my father’s because I had many more years with her. Her name was Marie Latimer Marshall. She was the daughter of Charlie and Tishie Latimer, and she grew up as part of that large Latimer family whose roots reached deeply into McCulloch County. She married Hardy Marshall, another child of a large McCulloch County family. In their marriage, the Latimers and Marshalls came together. Then life became difficult.
The Farm Years
Mother shared the farm years with my father. When we talk about the drought, it is easy to think first about the farmer standing in the field looking at crops that would not grow. But the farmer's wife lived through the drought too. She had children to feed. Clothes to wash. Meals to prepare. A household to maintain. Bills to worry about. And a husband carrying burdens she could see but could not remove. The drought did not stop at the edge of the field.
It came into the house. Year after year, the pressure continued. Eventually, my parents' marriage could not survive everything that had happened. After the divorce, her parents sheltered us briefly at their ranch before she moved us into Brady. Those moves changed my schooling, but they were also the beginning of her effort to build another home for us. Years later when my Grandparents were old, my mother moved back to Brady to take care of them.
Going to Work
Starting over meant finding a way to support her family. When Mother moved us to Brady, she went to work as a waitress. I remember some of the places where she worked. There was the Club Cafe on the square, and later the Brady Steak House. Waiting tables was honest work, and it brought money into the household, but eventually Mother found a job at the wool plant in Brady. That was a different kind of work altogether. The wool plant operated around the clock, which meant shift work.
Mother would stand for hours beside a conveyor belt as the wool traveled past her. Her job was to separate the wool that could not be used from the wool that could. Hour after hour. Standing on her feet. Watching the wool come down that belt. Sorting it. Then doing it again. It was hard work, particularly on her feet, but there was a family to support. There was food to put on the table. There was a roof to keep over our heads. So, Mother did it.
She worked at the wool plant for approximately four years. When I think about those years now, I realize that while I was going through junior high, entering Brady High School, playing my guitar, and becoming involved with the FFA band, Mother was working shifts at that plant to keep our family going. As a boy, I knew where Mother worked. At eighty, I understand better why she worked. She had left a marriage and a farm with children depending upon her. There was no career waiting for her. There was no easy solution.
First she waited tables. Then she stood beside a conveyor belt sorting wool. She did what was available. And she kept doing it. Eventually Charles moved Mother, Jim, and me to Lake Jackson, on the Texas Gulf Coast. For Mother, it meant leaving the county where her parents, relatives, farm life, and marriage had been rooted.
The Woman Behind the Word “Mother”
Children have a peculiar way of seeing their parents. When we are young, we rarely think of them as people who had lives before us. She was simply Mother. But Marie had once been a little girl in the Charlie and Tishie Latimer household. She had brothers and sisters. She had parents she depended upon. She had hopes for what her own life would become. She married Hardy and expected that marriage to have a future. She became a mother. She endured the drought years.
Then her marriage ended. She had to decide what to do next. As a boy, I experienced those events according to what they did to me. I had to leave Lohn. I changed schools. I lost the farm. My father was no longer living with us. But Mother was experiencing something very different. She had lost a marriage. And she still had children depending upon her. I understand that better today than I did then.
Hardy
Age has also changed the way I look at my parents' marriage. I don't believe I need to choose between my mother and father to tell their story. Hardy had burdens. Marie had burdens. The drought affected both of them. The marriage failed. And two people who had once expected to spend their lives together went their separate ways. I can feel compassion for my father without blaming my mother. And I can understand my mother's decision to leave without condemning my father. They were two human beings caught in circumstances that became larger than either of them.
I was their son. I loved them both.
Coming Back
Years passed. Mother grew older. Eventually, Wanda came back to Brady to help care for her. There is something fitting about that. Wanda had built a life elsewhere, but came home when Mother needed her. Just as mother had done when her parents were old and needed care. Marie lived to be eighty-seven years old. My father had died at fifty-two. Mother had more than three additional decades of life beyond the age Hardy reached. She saw her children grow up. She saw grandchildren. She watched the world change in ways Charlie and Tishie could hardly have imagined when she was a girl.
And through her, another piece of the Latimer story continued.
What I Understand Now
If I could go back and look at my mother during those difficult years, I would see her differently. I would not see only the woman who took me away from the farm. I would see a woman whose marriage had ended and who had to decide what came next. I would see a daughter returning to her parents because she needed somewhere to go. I would see a mother trying to create another home for her children. And I would understand something I could not understand as a sixth-grade boy:
Mother was starting over too. That may be the most important thing age has taught me about both of my parents. As children, we think our parents are the people who determine what happens to us. Only later do we discover that things were happening to them too. Hardy had his story. Marie had hers. And somewhere inside both of their stories were five children watching, remembering, and becoming who they would eventually be. I was one of them. My mother was not simply part of my childhood.
I was part of her life.