Unsolicited Testimony

Growing up, my mom was always home with us. My dad would leave for work, and my mom would be there, taking care of us. She stayed home until I was old enough to drive and take my little brother around. I use the term “little” loosely; he outgrew me when I was about twelve, and he was ten.

I always wondered about my mom, but not in the ways people might think.

My mom got married at eighteen. She told me once that she didn’t go to her prom because she was too busy planning her June 1976 wedding to my dad. Somehow, that made me sad for her.

My maternal grandmother told me, when I was younger, that she was fifteen when she married my grandpa. He had just retired from the Air Force and was nine years older than she was. She had children soon after. By all accounts, she was very happy about this.

It wasn’t until later that I realized I was fifteen when she told me that.

My paternal grandmother shared something similar: a story about my grandfather, who wanted to marry her so badly that he pulled her off a school bus when she was also fifteen. I had always vaguely known this story. While she loved to talk, she didn’t often talk about her younger self.

I remember she came to Thanksgiving at my parents’ house a few years ago, before her health significantly declined. She was tickled watching my brothers play Wheel of Fortune, delighted that Pat Sajak on the screen looked just like the real one. She was comfortable just watching, guessing at the phrase, giggling like a little girl. It was sweet to see her like that. She talked about how much she loved games like that in school, but she had gotten married so young.

When she retold the story of being pulled off the school bus, I found myself reflecting on what things were really like in the 1940s and 1950s. It wasn’t abnormal then. It would be unthinkable now.

I thought about my mom again. What would have happened if she had gone to university? She was a good student. She loved to read, loved to learn. She still does. I’m self-aware enough to know that if my mom had gone to college, I probably wouldn’t exist. And my mom is likely very satisfied with her life; she wanted to be a wife and a mother.

That was never the life I wanted, which makes it hard for me to fully understand the happiness she may have genuinely felt.

But it never stops me from wondering what could have been — for her, for my grandmothers. What would have happened if they had what I had?