personal history

Mama’s Egg Money

A to Z of Personal History, Personal History

Women and Money for the Household

Perhaps this post is more properly put under Women’s Finance.

It isn’t Facebook fashionable to admit to less than sparkling, perfect for a photoshoot backdrop home. I grew up on a subsistence level farm, one of the last ones surviving outside of the corporate model that swept through mid-20th Century America. The sale of crops and livestock made enough to pay the taxes, feed the livestock, plant the next season’s crops, and keep the equipment running with “baling-wire and binder-wine” as the expression went.

Mom’s egg money from the 200 to a 1000 hens she raised and cared for at different times in my childhood was what kept groceries on the table and the little bit of liquidity we occasionally managed to have flowing through the checking account.

Chickens outside the brooder houses on my parent’s farm in the 1960s

I understand egg money, both first hand, and as women’s culture writer. Women ultimately have to deal with their children when bellies are not full, or good clothes wear out before Easter rolls around. The post WWII American economy lulled a lot of people into thinking there was more than there really was. Corporate salaries inflated, and managers and laborers began to live well beyond their means through credit and carbon footprints that we are now paying for. The concept of egg money brought in by a farm wife to help out a bit when needed turned into a full-time job away from home for every adult in a family unit. I personally am not sure that the prices we paid for our shiny surfaces and purported leisure activities were worth it all.

I think egg money existed for many people for millennia. We just called it life and doing what you had to.

With An Elder Woman’s Eyes

In my own family if I examine what the rural women who came before me in the last few generations actually did to keep their families fed and clothed, I know their lives were not easy. As I begin to look at family records with a elder woman’s eyes I see actions behind family stories.

When I was little the stories told about my mom’s mom, Edith, just seemed to signal the spunkiness of a woman who matured during the last of the land rushes and western expansion in the U.S. The story that most exemplifies this is that, “Grandma always carried a gun. You might never know when you would see supper.” There was also the story of oil on the water on their land in Oklahoma, in the 1910s, that prompted Grandma, to load up a flat-bed wagon with the household possessions while Grandpa was at work, and tell him when he got home that she was moving to Iowa where civilized folks and family lived and he could come if he wanted to.

I look at the briefest outline of her early married life and see a young woman who may not have taken any guff, but who was moving around a lot and probably had to shoot a lot of suppers or her kids would not have eaten.

TWO CENSUS PAGES SPEAK VOLUMES

Picking Cherries in Oklahoma, 1900, Nara archives

For Edith, my grandmother, there was a lot more moving around with kids in a horse and wagon than I would have been happy with.

She was born in Indiana in 1883
She was living in Oklahoma in 1907 with her parents (Newton and Amanda)
She married Harry in Oklahoma 1909, but her parents moved to Ft Smith Arkansas by 1910
gave birth to Carl in Oklahoma in 1910
gave birth to Donovan in Arkansa in 1912
gave birth to Fay in Iowa in 1914
her father Newton died in Indiana in 1919
gave birth to Grant in Indiana 1919
gave birth to Alice in Indiana 1921

Just this pattern of moves gives me perspective on how women’s lives were shaped by their husbands and fathers.

Newton was always described as a Horse Trader by my mother, though at times he was listed as a farmer. His last son was born in Indiana in 1890 one year after the Oklahoma Land Rush. Newton was at least a year late getting there for the land rush but I think that is why Newton and Amanda took their family and moved there in the 1890s. Within 17 or so years Amanda was back in Indiana with her husband Newton who was ill with diabetes; her daughter Edith was living near her mother in Indiana with her husband who worked as a Tinker (apparently he got in the wagon she had loaded way back in Oklahoma and followed her to Arkansas then Iowa) where she had two more children after trying to build a life in Oklahoma, then in Arkansas, then in Iowa. Both of these women, my grandmother and great grandmother, had apparently had enough of the men in their lives having wanderlust and less than stable professions.

My foremothers had gumption, as they called it back then, and made sure there was egg money.

Why write about Personal History? Because…

A TO Z, A to Z of Personal History

The theme of this A to Z challenge is personal history because I want to share some of the basic concepts of autoethnography and information that are pertinent to the Women’s Legacy Project and for any person writing about their own legacy, that of their family, or a community or cohort.

Many proponents of open information exchange believe the world would be a better place if human knowledge flowed freely between all groups of people. If individual knowledge, women’s history, and the personal knowledge of women’s lives were available for other women to draw upon and learn from, this would go a long way to clearing up centuries of the throttled flow and eventual loss of information.

The digital divide is real, social class and geography influence access to information. Women’s information has been constrained to the point that even the names of western women are lost with a couple generations.

The ability to share digital information has increased in both speed and quantity of exchange and flow, but we are now seeing a tendency to fall prey to the isolation and entrenchment of information which escalates when there is strife between demographic groups.

Anticipatory Imagination

One of the methods that can reopen flow of information lies in anticipatory imagination. I just discovered this phrase that captures an idea that has been floating around as an undistilled concept at the edge of my conscious thoughts. Slightly different from and more than visualization or intention, anticipatory imagination seems to be an extension of these concepts.

I read this bit in an abstract of chapter by M. Oziewicz, and the last few words jumped out that this is what the current generation of elders can leave as a legacy. We can show and teach, we can leave examples.

“Specifically, it reflects on the affordances of hope-oriented anticipatory imagination as a necessary precondition for disrupting ecocide and enabling meaningful change. Following a brief consideration of the dystopian mode, the chapter offers a programmatic exposition of the notion of planetarianism, or applied hope articulated through stories.”
Oziewicz, M. (2022). Planetarianism Now: On Anticipatory Imagination, Young People’s Literature, and Hope for the Planet. In: Paulsen, M., jagodzinski, j., M. Hawke, S. (eds) Pedagogy in the Anthropocene . Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90980-2_12. Print ISBN 978-3-030-90979-6 Online ISBN 978-3-030-90980-2

Applied hope articulated through stories!

This is why I am writing about personal history. Many folks have started writing family history blogs, and this is wonderful, but it is not the only way personal and family history can be preserved. Genealogy and place names are not the only fodder for elder blogs.

Throughout this month I will be covering the orthogonal, or as I like to call them, the interesting snippets of what we know about women’s culture, family culture, and local cultures that are often overlooked as worthy elements for preservation. Fact based stories are replete with context often lost in lists or governmental records. A post I wrote a few years ago illustrates this in a novel way, I think. It is called “Gathering the past for the future.”

This month’s focus came about because peering over edges and capturing sensorial essences touches us, connects us, and gives us hope.

Personal Curation

How To Curate

I like boxes. I enjoy categorization. And I have more stuff than storage.

A perfect storage area for me would be a room lined with shelves with breathable, acid free boxes that were so well labeled that no matter what I I am looking for, I can simply go to that storage area and retrieve the particular item or items.

Personal museums are for wealthy and serious collectors, but we all have our treasures.

Most of us need spaces that validate and support our journey through life. I like to have items to remind me of good times, meaningful times, and those people that have moved on from this world.

I have an extra room now my daughter is happily married. I have moved on from the building or nesting stage of my life in which creating home was energizing and central to my life. It seems much more difficult to dedicate time and energy to creative deconstruction.

I am however developing a basic, seemingly simple set of organizational principles and actions so that I can have what I need and want to surround myself with during the rest of my life here on Earth. If I live as long as my mother, that means I have a full one-third of my life still to live.

There are two things here that I need to mention. First, I have many of my mother’s things that are sentimental but not assigned a high monetary or cultural value by society. Second, I live in Southern Arizona where, traditionally, homes tend to have no attics, basements or garages.

My challenge is then, is how to have what I need at hand, and how to have other things neatly and compactly stored for less frequent but easy access.

I see this quandary as similar to the one in which contemporary society finds itself. The process is to determine what is important for humanity as a whole without tossing out babies with bath-water.

Men have written the histories and filled the museums and barrows with tribute to the power that they enforced and guarded for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. It was not that women did not have a material culture. We did. Our energies were directed into home and society more than territories and boundaries.

Stone and metal erode or wear away over time. Women’s efforts give voice to ideas through the generations, through the stories and teachings we share as we go about building and maintaining our lives. Our societal structure is the framework within which we support our tales, lessons, and truths. Our material structure is one in which we store the tools and toys. Women have always had places to store these items. Even in 5,000 year old Skara Brae on the east edge of Orkney in the northern Scottish Islands there are stone storage nooks.

An island in the middle of a body of water

Description automatically generated — Skara Brae | © grassrootsgroundswell / Flickr

Trunks and hope chests were the basic containers of my grandmother’s and her mother’s generations as in the late 1800s and early 1900s as they loaded up the buckboard with those treasured items and maybe a chair, table or dresser and moved around the US as the territories opened to American and European settlers after the opening of western lands.

This opening was actually the unethical to genocidal removal of indigenous peoples See Trail of Tears and the Oklahoma Land Rush. I am not proud of these actions that supported the travesty of policy. I am proud that my family did not deny the problems and taught me personal history with warts and all.

I try to always remember and mention the brutal context when mentioning that in the late 1800s my maternal family had left the Anabaptist community of the Old Northwest and were part of the land rush and migration through the territories and new states of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Iowa, ultimately returning to Indiana from where there parents had lived since that territory opened.

The miscellany surviving from those times which are now in my possession took a beating during those many moves and require careful attention if they are to survive. The stories also need tending if they are to survive as more than mere names and dates.

In 2017 I managed to retrieve some items that my mother intended me to have, and some which my parents wanted preserved, but which had been neglected and ill-treated as my brother’s mental and physical health and home deteriorated far across the country from where I live.

I have spent the last year and a half dealing with a moving van load of stuff and my already overstuffed house which complicated the paring down process. I tried to inform all my decisions by the preservation needs of items and my preservation abilities.

During that time I have learned a thing or three about stuff and myself. I did not start at zero, either, as I am a Masters level anthropologist, a genealogist, and have a couple of decades under my belt working in research libraries and museums.

All of this combines into valuable information I want to share with you.

I believe that if we as a species survive the climatic changes and the innumerable co-occurring cultural changes in all aspects of our society, we women must preserve our information base so it may be used to help establish more balanced behaviors and societal structures than the dynastic corporate one that has so abused our world and the majority of its inhabitants.

For the last decade I have taught women how to use social media and online platforms to tell their stories and market their businesses while remaining safe and up-to-date with rapidly evolving technologies. I focus on meaning not monetization. I am now bringing this approach to a larger sphere of women by offering expanded access to my methods.

There will be written materials and webinars, but for now, I am sharing basic information through the lens of what I have learned and accomplished this past year through dealing with the physical stuff of my family history.

New WLP Section Coming Soon

My Story

Only a few of you know that I endured a childhood filled with medical abuse that must have arisen from a factitious disorder from which my mother suffered. The situation is now colloquially referred to as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

I have written about my experience for the last thirteen years, during which time I finally put all the pieces together, at least I hope I have all the pieces collected, but I have shared little of the writing publicly.
I have grouped my writings into the shape of a book, but I’m not sure that I want to wait for a book to be published. My motivation for my belief that this book should be written stems only from the belief that my journey to this point in my life may help someone. I have made it through some rough spots in life in far better condition than most people who have dealt with the same situations. Over the years I have examined my own journey and managed to heal while noting the techniques that most helped me rebuild my understanding of my past and construct my current worldview with honesty and integrity. I want to share those methods and tools. I advocate no medical or therapeutic model and give no advice, but I do believe that talking about my life might give others insight into aspects of their own life journeys to do with as they wish.
In American Culture we have an adage that we claim is a Chinese saying, “May you live in interesting times.” The adage describes a supposed curse. So when I say, “I have lived an interesting life thus far,” many people think I am complaining. Along the way I have also learned that my life has been amazing and wonderful experience. As Jerry Garcia sang, “What a long strange trip its been.” I also want to share this perspective with people who choose to read my words or listen to my talks or stories.
A little over a year and a half ago, just after my brother, who was closest in age to me of all my siblings, passed away, I started this site, The Women’s Legacy Project, as my way of encouraging women to tell their stories so as to help the world heal through their needed wise touch. Eight months after that death, my eldest, and last living sibling, also passed away. I was barely into my late fifties, this did not speak well for my statistical odds of living a long and healthy life. I decided I had to get my own information into the layer of human information, and to do it as soon as possible. I had to be consistent with the site’s motto, “Live Your Legacy Now!”

Human culture is growing new informational niches, with astonishing rapidity, filled with essential but previous locally-constrained, often orally-disseminated, knowledge now that a global information sphere is accessed and readily added to digitally. This is good. It opens opportunities for sharing that were not previously possible.

So… I have decided a few things:

I love the concept of the women’s legacy project and want to move forward with it as is, but add another aspect to it.
I should share my own story here on WLP. I will do this as posts or small chapters released serially. These may in the future be formatted into a traditional, print on demand, or electronic book.
If I do not publish these writings immediately, as a book, I need to support myself in the mean time, and I also need to not give my story away without recouping what I will miss from book sales and book talks. This will require a pay wall.
Some of the information I will share needs to be behind a digital wall that limits reader access to adults.
Readers need to give explicit consent that they understand that my story will contain triggers for exploitation, assault, abuse, and neglect of various sorts before they enter this new part of the site.
It will take a couple of weeks for me to create and rearrange the site to accommodate a membership option.
I will put up a few background posts before full membership goes live.
My coaching services will also be accessed through this membership portal.

That is it for now. I would love to hear what your thoughts are as I start out on this new aspect of a woman’s legacy, my own.

Some Thoughts on Death and Mourning

Blogging & Writing, Creekside Commentary, Home & Family, Spirituality & Thought

My brother passed away last weekend. Roger left us forever at five minutes after midnight on Sunday November 9th, 2014. I was on my way to the All Soul’s Procession, a wonderful contemporary community sharing of celebration of people’s lives and supportive public sharing of grief when I got the news via text on Sunday night.
Needless to say perhaps, I am thinking a lot about death, death rituals, death culture, and my personal views of death.
Death is the most personal experience there is. Birth is shared, but death meets us alone.

file0001339838981 — Reaching toward nothingness.

NDE

I should say that I have not been all that concerned about what will happen to me after death since December of 1977. I was in college, my best friend from High School, Kim Marie Sanders, was in a horrific car crash on November 6th, 1977, seven days after her 21st birthday. Her brain stem was crushed. A few weeks later I was at home, a solid but worn, two story house, a rental on Greenbush Avenue in Lafayette, Indiana where I lived in Junior year of college when I had what I have to describe as a classic NDE experience.
As I walked into a bedroom I passed out, I guess. But it was different, quite distinct, from when I usually blacked out which I had some experience with as I had very low blood pressure back then. Normally, when I would pass out I would just have my vision narrow in as in the iris of a camera, as a circle, graying out.
But this time I did not see that, I saw a tunnel of light. As I began to travel in the tunnel or beam of light I felt as though my energy or essence was draining from my body through the back base of my skull. Then there was bright golden white light. At the end of the tunnel I knew there was just LOVE, complete accepting love. I did not see individuals although I felt like there was someone there. I did not consciously get to the end of the tunnel but I remember thinking, “Wow, this was death and it was not bad at all.”

I think I woke up about an hour later. I knew my friend had changed, but I wasn’t in touch with her family until a few weeks later. It was then that I found out that she had come out of the coma she had been in since the wreck on the same afternoon I had the encounter with the light. She was in the coma until mid-December, Friday December 16th I think. She died on Friday, January 13th, 1978.
I had a very difficult time with her death. I grieved for years. But I was not afraid. I have never been able to reconcile this disparity except that I can accept my own death, but not that of another person.
I think it is that I am selfish. I just do not want to be alone without my friends and family.

Something Amiss

I’ve always thought something was amiss with what people told me about death and how they really felt about it. I was three years and two months old when my mother came in to me in the morning, crying and obviously very upset. She said, “Grandma died during the night.” My analytical self was already present within me apparently as I distinctly remember being confused that I had been told that when you die, you will be with Jesus. From everything I had been told as a toddler, this Jesus guy was a really good guy and Heaven, with Jesus, was a good place. So what was up? Grandma was with Jesus. That was a good thing. Why was Mom crying? Incongruity. Someone was not telling the truth.

Selfish Loss

I think what I experience as grief, and thus mourning rituals, is an incredibly selfish indulgence. How does our grief add up to anything but our experience of loss. It really has very little to do with the person who died. It is all about the pain we the living experience. Everything we do, for the dead, is really for ourselves. I think I learned this from my dad. I think I have finally figured out that Dad viewed cemeteries as parks where you talk about the past, teach kinship, consider the impacts of life and living in various ways. This from a man who said that when he died we should just, “toss him over the fence to the hogs.” Historical markers were okay but the obsession with body preservation was over the top in his view.

Shift in Perspective

These are some of the things I’m thinking about today. I couldn’t wait any longer to grieve. I had to take today off to just feel, think, ponder, and cry. Normally I would tell stories of the person recently deceased with others who loved or knew him, but I’m 2000 miles away and the only one left in my generation of close family. My eldest brother Jim is 75 and has memory problems. So I’m having my own private remembrance.
Perhaps I am just being selfish, but I have a lot of information I need to share. I’ve decided that information exchange is the most important ritual. If I have information that might help someone with a question or concern or just to create an understanding, I need to get it out there. I have several years until I am 60, but much information would be lost if I died before I got it into the cultural information collective. These are the things that matter to me. Distilling lives into stories. I have much work to do.