Between Opportunities
I interview my Mom and Dad about their experience with the virus, including their initial symptoms and the difference in the progression of their illness, their treatment at the hospital, the effect of prayers while they were in the hospital, the side effects of the anti-malarial drug and their thoughts about the economic shutdown.
So… What should Mom and Dad have done differently? I will weigh in later so my ideas don’t poison the well.
… Read the restIt was 1963 and I had just turned twelve.
I’d gotten my period a year before and was developing faster than most girls in my class. Where they were still short, rosy-cheeked, and flat-chested, I was six inches taller, growing into a B-cup, and getting acne. It was an awkward, confusing time for me.
Sadly, my mother was pre-occupied with her newest baby and my other eight siblings. Dad was mostly at work trying to make enough money to keep us all in parochial schools. I often felt alone and—like most kids that age–unable to share my feelings with my parents. Thank God for Celestine, our full-time housekeeper who was a sweet, second mother to me. She’d watched us kids outside playing and heard some of the neighborhood kids making comments. She promptly dragged me down to the five-and-dime to buy me my first bra.
“We don’t need those nasty boys looking down your blouse,” I remember her saying.
I know she was trying to protect me, but somehow, I got the message that there was something shameful about me in the word nasty and the fact that I had breasts.
Nonetheless, I knew I was “becoming a woman” and it was (for vague reasons) something special that should be celebrated, and something precious that should be safeguarded. I just wished I’d had an older sister or someone to