For this Personal profile piece, I am going to conduct an interview with my mother. There is no one else I would rather interview. My children and I are blessed to have her in our lives. She is still working, healthy, and strong. Last week my mother turned 68 years old. As I think back to my childhood, and witnessing my mother getting older, I remember when my mom was a young vibrant woman in her 30's. It seemed like yesterday as I was combing through her wardrobe and trying on her shoes. Can you guess where I developed my love of shoes? It can be dearly described more so as shoegasms!!! Anyway, being an only child from my parents, my mother and I are very close. My mother and father's marriage was very short lived didn't last very long. It was my mother who decided to exit stage left when she was pregnant with me. Turned out that my father wasn't the ideal type of marrying man. I don't doubt that he loved her; they had their grown up reasons. But "yay" it's good to know that I was conceived through marriage. My father thought my mother would conform to his cultural ways. That wasn't going to happen--not from "spitfire Rose". My father was Puerto Rican, born in San Turce Puerto Rico. You would have never known when you looked at him because he looked more like a light-skinned Black man. He didn't reveal this to my mother when they met because my family was in mourning from the death of my late cousin David. He was killed by a Puerto Rican man who stabbed him to death. So at this point my mother hated Puerto Ricans and made it vocal and very clear. My father was scared to tell her, so he rolled with what worked. I am the seventh of eight children from my father and the only one conceived from marriage.
My maternal grandparents played a big role in raising me too. We lived with them as long as I can remember. We moved several times back and forth in my younger years, but we always found our way back to Mama's and Daddy's house. I won't talk about them because the loss hurts way way too much and the sorrow is maddening. I love them very much and if it weren't for them my family wouldn't exist.
My mother always told stories about her childhood. The stories intrigued me because I was learning that my grandparents as parents were the bomb then too. I kno what my mother's life was like after she married my father and became pregnant with me. She took the time to reveal her story to me when I was old enough to understand and filled in the gaps when we heard through the grapevine that my father had passed away, just a matter of weeks before my 18th birthday. What really hurt about his death was that I mourned the loss not knowing the man with no closure.
The part of my mother's life I'm interested in is the life she had before me growing up as a teenager into a young adult. I guess the questions I would ask would be those stated below....
1. What did you want to be when you grow up?
2. What was the best memory of your childhood?
3. Did you meet your own expectations in any of your life's decisions?
4. Moving forward, what do you anticipate the most in the second half of your life?
These questions may be subject to change as I continue to put this project in motion.
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