TRAPPED IN THE BEDROOM"

 “TRAPPED IN THE BEDROOM!”

I mused in last year’s Mother’s day blog that I was thinking of doing a memoir on my mother raising me as a single mom in the 1940’s and 50’s.  I have been working on that memoir in the year since, and here is the beginning of that book, as a tribute to my mother and as a tribute, to all people, women and men, who have nurtured us and loved us into adulthood, who have given us mothering love.

    “It is one of my earliest memories.  I am trapped in our bedroom in our small home on Porter Street  in Helena, Arkansas.  I say that I was “trapped” because it felt like that to me at a young age of four.  It was in a hot, sticky room on a Sunday afternoon, with both doors  shut.  It was summer in the Mississippi River delta in 1951 – hot and muggy, no air conditioning, only a small rotating fan, whirring on the dresser, trying to draw me some cool air.  I had been ordered by my mother to take a nap, and failing that, ordered to lie there quietly until she opened the door to tell me that I could get up and play.  At least I had open windows on three sides of the room – to the east was the Mississippi River a mile away.  To the south was our backyard, where I longed to go and play in the fifty yards or so of ground before the steep climb began to Crowley’s Ridge;  to the north was a window to the screen porch, where we would often go sit in the evenings to seek to cool off and get relief from the stifling heat.

    On this particular afternoon, though, these windows were not welcome entries into relief but rather reminders that I was trapped by my tyrannical mother, who refused to allow me to get up and play until she gave me permission.  I fumed and tossed and turned, waiting for the excruciating time to be ended.  In my fuming on that hot Sunday afternoon in 1951,  I had no idea of the depth of the story that underlay my confinement.  It would take me decades to learn the depths and nuances of that story, but for now I will say that my mother worked six days a week as a beautician in someone else’s shop.  The only time that she had to take a nap and rest during those grinding days was on Sunday afternoons, after attending church and Sunday school and eating Sunday dinner.  

    I grew up fatherless in a patriarchal world.  My father, for whom I was named, had abandoned me (and my mother) for another woman before I was a year old.  I was born in Memphis, and after my father left, we lived there for a time.  We lived with an Irish woman, and she kept me while my mother worked as a beauty operator.  This Irish woman nicknamed me “Nibs,” using  an Irish word for the British aristocracy, who consider themselves to be the center of the world – “his Nibs” and “her Nibs.”  That appellation is even heard on occasion now to refer to the Queen of England in an affectionate way.  I have come to use “Nibs” as my primary name – one of the great ironies of that development is that I don’t know the name of the Irish woman who named me.  My mother told me, but I have simply forgotten it.

    I may be projecting onto to my mother a sense of shock and loss in my father’s departure – for reasons that will become clearer, we never talked much about him or his departure.  Undoubtedly, she felt loss, and undoubtedly, we were poor.  She was looking for shelter.  She would find shelter with her grandmother’s sister, Bernice Brown Higgins, who had recently been widowed, and Mrs. Higgins needed fiscal and physical companionship in her small home on Porter Street in Helena.  

    It is not surprising that these two women, my mother and Mrs. Higgins (whom I called “Gran”) pooled their resources in Helena to create a new household.  We moved from Memphis sometime in my second year to live with Gran on Porter Street in a green clapboard house facing the north.  That small home - two bedrooms, one small bath, a combined living and dining room, an average sized kitchen and a wonderful back porch and spacious side porch – would become my constant and stable home until I left for college in 1964.  It was in the east bedroom of that house where I would find myself confined on that hot, sticky afternoon in 1951, fidgeting while my mother sought some rest from the grind of her life, on the couch in the living/dining area.  I would come back often to this home until my mother’s death in 2004.

  I was raised by these two women, who taught me perseverance, humor and compassion.  I am writing this book in praise of my mother, who raised me and formed me and gave me my character.  Two women stand out in this pantheon: Gran, who became grandmother to me even though she was my great-grandmother’s sister.. And most of all, my powerful and determined mother, Mary Elizabeth Armour Stroupe, who dedicated her life to me so that I might find life.  She stood no taller than five feet at her tallest, but she was a giant in my life, and as I later found out, in the lives of others."