@beckyb1012 wrote:
I got the chicken pox right after my little brother and little sister came home from daycare with it back in 1968 and Mom had to stay home with us. I overheard her on the phone call her boss that first day I was home from school with the pox and should have been her first day back to work. She next called my Grandmother and I heard her say "Oh Mother, he fired me." This was many decades ago but she never thought he owed her her job since she was a divorced woman with three children and someone had to stay with them for sickness.
For myself I opted to be a stay at home Mom after being raised in daycare and gave up many material things over the years to stay home until my child was in high school. One income some years was very hard sometimes better.
Hearing my Mom cry over loosing her job because of my being sick was very hard and still is hard but it was life and she knew that and raised me accordingly.
I must admit when I told her as a grown-up I overheard those calls it crushed her.
@beckyb1012
I think life at times was very hard for your mother, and she is part of a breed that we don't see as much anymore. She took responsibility for what was hers. She was a strong and honorable and proud woman, it sounds like, and and I admire her strength.
And what I think many people fail to see, is that hard or not, your family came through. Somehow we now have the idea that we have to go to any length to make life easy for people, all people, regardless of the cost.
And not just the financial cost of things. But the cost of not learning lessons, not learning responsibility.
You learned from the hard times your mother faced (and you too as a child, because to hear and know what you did was a painful truth), to plan, sacrifice, and understand how 'unfair' life could be.
When people are constantly bailed out of their troubles, forgiven or given special favors, they don't learn to do for themselves, cope, figure it out, be strong.
My mom, in the 1970's worked for a man that was as uncooperative and lacked understanding like your mother's boss. I know she worried about loosing her job constantly (as after a point she was the only one working when my dad was sick and dying). It isn't a great place to be, but I honestly believe what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and we kids learned a lot from it. Everything from getting an education so you have choices (she really didn't have a lot of employment choices then because of lack of education, skills and my dad's illness), to planning as best you can, to building a community of support, to the fact that life is sometimes not fair, to being strong and doing what has to be done.
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