No Walls For The Small

I grew up with a mother who worked between 45 and 60 hours a week.  It was a different home life than what many of my friends had growing up, and I look back on it and wonder how she did it all.  

Recently I was reading the forward in Edna Lewis's epic cookbook The Taste of Country Cooking.  Her grandparents were slaves, who after emancipation founded Freetown, Virginia with other freed slave families.  She shares in the forward a very different picture of what it meant to be a mother working outside the home.

"My grandmother had been a brick mason as a slave - purchased for the sum of $950 by a rich landowner who had several tracts of land and wanted to build two imposing houses on different locations.  Grandmother was put to work molding the bricks, then carrying them and laying them (one of the houses she worked on still stands today, owned and restored by a college professor, the other was destroyed in the Civil War.) It was a job that caused my grandmother great anguish because she would have to go off all day to work on the big house, leaving her babies in their cribs and not returning until late in the evening to feed and care for them.  The fact that years later, after her children had grown up and were living in Freetown, she would still take her kerosene lamp and go upstairs to make sure they were there and all right is a measure of the pain she bore."

I read this and it almost brought me to tears.  I could not even imagine the fear her grandmother must have held in her heart all day long while  as she counted the hours to return to her babies.  In this country, times have changed, thank goodness, but I know that most women who have to return to the work force after having a child do so with mixed feelings.  For many it is not a choice, but necessary for the needed income. 

I want to kick off the New Year by giving props to all mothers who work outside the home.  As a mom who works from home, who will one day undoubtedly join your ranks, I just want to say it takes courage and strength to do what you do.  Thank you.