RE_5539

As I read this chapter, just as many of my other classmates, I really began to identify with childhoods of these women. I found it interesting how each of the woman's memories about her childhood significantly involved her mother. I am interested to read memories of a woman who grew up without a mother, because my mother spent much of her childhood without her mother. I am interested to see if the stories of their "girlhoods" would be similar to my mother's or if these women's "girlhoods" would be different than mine.

I bring this up in my blog, because I believe that my childhood was directly affected by my mother's childhood experiences. My mother's mother passed away of cancer when my mother was in elementary school. She was the youngest of three children, and her stories often break my heart. She says growing up they didn't have books, and her father was often consumed in other activites and so there was very little emphasis on school at home. Not too long after my mother's mother died, my grandfather began dating again. He later remarried, a woman who was cruel to my mother, leaving my mother more alone than ever. My mother really struggled in school, and she often told me this as a child. She was miserable in high school, and told me she was the student that would hide during lunch and eat in the bathroom. Academically she did not do well, and when I was younger I remember that she showed me her report card. School was hard for her, and I could tell she did not want it to be hard for me. Thus, my mother emphasized learning, reading, and books. My childhood was consumed with trips to the library and the bookstore. I feel my mother wanted everything for me that she didn't have. As Hicks writes in her book about the mentality of the "good girl", this made me think about myself. I wanted to please my mother so much I often think it came from the fact that I wanted to live and be everything my mother wasn't able to be as a child. I wanted to live her dreams. I didn't want her to "suffer" again with my school experience, as she did when she was a child, so I achieved and was successful. I made good grades, loved school, and was the "good girl" to the teachers.

My mother is a teacher, and now always tells me, " I always knew you would be a teacher". Sometimes I wonder if I would have become one if it wasn't drilled into me during my childhood. I never wanted to disappoint my parents, thus I always did well in school. In my mind, it was what I was "supposed to do". Frame says she" connected to desires voiced by her mother". I felt my mother's desires were not necessarily voiced as her desires, but instead she was showing me the things she wasn't, so that I could do those things. This instilled in me the idea that I had to achieve those things, first for my mother, then for myself. Now, as an adult, I wonder if I would have worked just as hard to achieve my successes for my father, as I did for my mother. For my father I was successful athletically, for my mother I was successful academically. I wanted to make both my parents proud, but primarily my mother. I wonder again, how do the "girlhoods" of girls without mothers differ from those girlhoods of girls with mothers? How would this girlhood experience then shape literacy learning?

Sarah McMillan