Grace and Grit by Lilly Ledbetter Read Free Book Online Page B

morning when I showed up at work, my supervisor didn’t say a word. Back on the line, as I singed the two tiny threads together and tapped my foot pedal ever so slightly, I replayed telling him I’d be back in a week, feeling the satisfaction of speaking up, of having choices. After I returned from visiting Charles, my supervisor never picked on me again.
    T WO YEARS later, since I’d been the last one to be hired, I was the first one to go when GE went into layoff mode. Shortly afterward, I found out I was pregnant. Even though I wanted to look for a new job, Charles and I had always planned on having two kids, so it also felt natural to focus on building our family. I settled in at home, cooking, gardening, and tending to our new daughter, Vickie. It turned out that my mother was right. Home economics came in handy after all.
    She may not have come to my wedding, but every day my mother, dressed in a man’s jumpsuit, appeared on my doorstep. Charles begged me to ask her if she could please stay home a couple of days a week so we could have the house to ourselves. I was grateful for the fact that she slung that soiled pile of cloth diapers through the wringer washer on the porch daily. Nursing Vickie, I’d watch her through the window as she unpinned the frozen diapers off the clothesline, her hands stiff and red with cold.
    I was also grateful for how she doted on her granddaughter. It reminded me of how she took to Uncle Howard’s two boys, Billyand Buddy. When I was young, the boys, still toddlers, lived with us for several months. She rocked and loved those boys like I’d never seen. After their mother moved away with them, my mother grieved. Watching her care for Vickie, I knew she and Vickie would have the close relationship she and I never could.
    Three years after Vickie was born, Phillip came along. His birth was the first time I made headlines, when the
Anniston Star
read, JACKSONVILLE WOMAN BEATS THE STORK . As we sped to the hospital in the middle of the night, escorted by the policeman who’d stopped us for speeding, we had no idea that the strange screeching sound we heard was Vickie’s poor cat, who’d been asleep on the engine—after that, he didn’t stick around much longer. Seconds after Charles dropped me off at the emergency room—he hadn’t even parked the car—I delivered Phillip.
    Nothing I’d known had prepared me for motherhood, and as Vickie and Phillip grew I was scared not to go to the doctor at the slightest hint of sickness. Uncle Howard used to say that Papa killed my grandmother Lillie when she had cancer. Spending all his money on liquor, Papa neglected to take her to the doctor. He also crippled his son Leonard when he refused to get Leonard’s broken leg set. Like the cat sleeping on our warm engine, one day Leonard just took a notion and disappeared. So any time of day or night, if the children showed a sign of a fever or ear infection, I hauled them to the doctor, Edna sitting in the backseat of my car soothing the sick child in her lap.
    E VEN THOUGH I read Dr. Spock religiously, as a young mother I was overwhelmed by the fatigue and rawness of my emotions, spinning from tears to frustration in a second. And Phillip, allergic to everything he ate and even his baby blanket and sheets, cried through each night of his first two years. He never slept, despite the soy formula I had shipped on a Trailways bus and delivered to Crow Drugs each week.
    Throughout the night, I’d sit in the wooden rocking chair in his room, holding him in my arms. Otherwise, he screamed. Mute with exhaustion, I felt especially vulnerable, as tender as the soft spot on his newborn head. When Charles left for work in the morning, I listened to his car crank up and envisioned eighteen-wheeler trucks smashing into him on the way to work. Then I’d follow my imagined tragic scenario to a vision of me, alone, trying to raise Vickie and Phillip.
    Many mornings I brought myself back to reality by admiring