Day of Caring

Virginia Dare Jones Freve

So...I am going to try to keep in a chronological order, the events of my life....but cannot guarantee it will work that way.  Like Billy Pilgrim I am  kinda "unstuck in time" and like Mary Daly, I tend to spiral back and forth from  places and people to others.  I rather like this for several reasons:  I don't have to say "goodbye" as much because I am always spiraling back to things unfinished; if I am not finished processing things, I can explore alternative solutions, thus gaining further insight from  the experience; I can avoid unpleasant  situations until I am ready to deal with them (or I find an acceptable  rationalization for my mistakes); there is a sense of freedom in not being held to a linear timeline, unwavering and rigid, and making up my own where I can be whatever age I am feeling at the time and can pretend to have had whatever life experience fits into the characteristic I am exploring.  None of this may make sense to you, but that's the way it is for me.  One thing  about getting older is you give up the fight on a few things about yourself...I am beginning to care less about what others think.
But I am supposed to be writing about my toddlerhood here.

Only picture of Yvonne as an infant.

My earliest memories are when I was sick with whooping cough.  My mother had moved us to a house in Morehead City and I was confined to my bed most of the time.  As I gained strength, I would sneak over to the window or the screen door and watch my sister and brother run and play outside, but if I laughed or got too excited watching the intrigues of hide-and-seek, I would break into an unstoppable cough and my mother would come running in admonishing me to return to the prison  of blankets and immobility.  She had purchased a small record player and some little yellow children's records for me to listen to and sing along with and I spent many many hours with the tunes of "Alexander's Ragtime Band", "I'm called Little Buttercup", "I'm Gonna Make a Paper Doll", and my favorite:  "Whenever I Have to Stay in Bed".   Despite the pleasure I found in all those songs and the fantasies they stimulated, I remember feelings of loneliness and isolation.  My mother was busy with household chores and baking trays and trays of dinner rolls that she would sell to restaurants frequented by tourists along the crowded  summer beaches.
As I have reviewed what I know of this  time and all the things my mother did to cope with a sick child, the loss of a husband, and the limited resources  she  had; I am amazed that we fared as well as we did.  My mother cultivated a small garden; kept some chickens for eggs; and worked long, tiring hours baking items to sell to the restaurants.  Many years later I learned that she was under pressure from some of her family members to give her children up for adoption.  In post war North Carolina, single women with children were less likely to find a husband and without an education or opportunity for employment, her economic future and that of her children was bleak indeed.  My mother had an 8th grade education (more than many) and had worked as a waitress for a short time as a teenager.  Other than that, she was trained to keep house and care for others....to be a homemaker.  She was ill-prepared for what life had presented to her.  I like to  think that it was the joy of her time with my father that sustained her.  It matters if you have known joy.  It makes it easier to survive fear and oppression and chaos.  None of us knew how much of that would come into our lives in  the years ahead.  We thought we just had to survive this.  We all believed that the end was just around the corner.