It’s Thursday, and time for another Writer’s Workshop with MamaKat. I really liked MamaKat’s first prompt:
1.) Grab your current read. Let the book fall open to a random page and share two “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
I thought about giving you a synopsis of the book, but because this is supposed to be a teaser, I decided against it (plus you can get a much better run-down of the book by clicking the link and reading about it on Amazon). Just know that it’s a memoir.
So here’s your random teaser (starting on line 7 of page 24…because I like to follow rules. Except, of course, for the fact that I shared 2 paragraphs instead of 2 sentences. Whatever!):
“We would have survived on the fifty-dollar welfare check the government decided our lives were worth. The family could have lived on the charity of our kin and the kindness of strangers. Pride pushed her out into the cotton field, in the same way the old terror, old pain squeezed my daddy into a prison of empty whiskey bottles.
I asked her, many years later, if the strap on the sack cut deeper into her back because I was there. “You wasn’t heavy,” she said. Having a baby with her made the long rows shorter, somehow, because when she felt like quitting, when she felt like her legs were going to buckle or her back would break in two, all she had to do was look behind her. It gave her reason to keep pulling.”
I heard my mom say something very similar to me. It’s interesting that I didn’t make that connection until I typed that paragraph out. After my dad died (when I was 2 1/2) my mom says that she felt so alone. I can’t even imagine being left a widow at 24 years old. She described to me a time that she was driving on the freeway and had the thought–the desire–to just keep driving. To leave, start over. But she didn’t because she had me. In the tough times, it was her baby that kept her going–that made going forward worth it, even when it hurt so much.
It makes me look back at my own life as a mother. How many times have I sucked it up and kept moving forward because of my kids? It’s amazing what a motivating force a mother’s love can be.
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