The Hankins Girls Remember

The mother-daughter relationship is complicated enough on its own. Add siblings to the conversation, and things get really interesting.

In this episode, Susan sits down with three of four sisters to explore how one woman shaped each of them differently, and what that has meant for the relationships they have with each other. Shared memories, different experiences, and the mother who lives in all of them.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

She got the most out of life she could. You know, she squeezed life. She wanted to be in with what was going on, even if she didn't feel good. If we were in the kitchen, she wanted to be in the kitchen. If we had something going on with uh at Mississippi State, she wanted to be here in Starkle. If there was something going on with the grandkids, she was all in.

SPEAKER_03 0:32

Hello everyone, I'm Susan Steele, and this is A Daughter's Inheritance, a podcast about the complex relationships between mothers and daughters. And today it's going to get even more complicated because we have a group of sisters with us. I believe I've mentioned before that I have one brother, so I wasn't the only child in the home, but I didn't have any sisters. So I'm really looking forward to our discussion today because I would assume had I had other sisters, the relationship with my mother would have been even more complicated. So we have three of the four Hankin sisters with us today. Hankin' Sisters sounds a little bit like a singing group to me, but I'm assuming it is not.

SPEAKER_01 1:16

Oh no, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_03 1:18

Please do not make us sing. Okay, I won't make you sing, but I am going to make you talk. But before we do that, let me introduce everyone first. We've got Sybil Hankins Powell, who is the eldest of the sisters. And uh then there's Brenda Hankins, who is not with us today, and we'll talk a little bit about that later. Beverly Hankins Stanley is with us, and she is the third daughter and uh one of the middle children, right? And then we've got the baby, Melanie Hankins Booth. So thank you all for being here today. I'm really looking forward to uh our conversation. And what we're gonna do is we're just gonna talk about your relationship with your mother, how that impacted and impacts uh your relationship with each other. Okay, who wants to tell us a little bit about your mom, who she was, uh a little bit about her story and her life?

SPEAKER_01 2:19

Well, first of all, Susan, let me say thank you so much for inviting us to do this because our identity as the Hankins sisters has always been such a big part of our lives. So, our mother, Catherine Lucille Harris Hankins, she was born in 1925 in rural Mississippi, and she was the oldest of only two daughters, and she was raised by two uh really hardworking and loving parents. She grew up in the Great Depression, and she graduated from high school right in the middle of World War II. So, in that world, she worked really hard, she saved everything, she learned to be grateful for what she had. And then after high school, she did something that was pretty crazy, kind of pretty remarkable for a young woman from rural Mississippi at the time. She went to Mobile, Alabama to work in the shipyards. Now, I don't know if you remember, but those jobs back in the day had traditionally been done by the men, but the men had gone off to war. So the women stepped in to build the ships that actually supported the war effort.

SPEAKER_03 3:35

Oh wow. So that's really interesting. So how what was her involvement in that?

SPEAKER_01 3:41

Well, if you've ever seen the poster, that famous poster, Rosie the Riveter, uh, where the woman has her sleeves rolled up and she's flexing her muscles and it says, we can do it across the top. I always like to imagine that that could have been our mom because she had that spirit of strength and that determination that it it really, even then, you know, that really describes who she was. Um and she was very proud of that time in her life because uh one of her favorite stories that she used to tell us was that she used her first paycheck that she got from working in the shipyards to buy her daddy a wedding band. And that was something that he had never had, even though they had been married for 20 years. Um and I just think that story, I think that tells a lot about her heart.

SPEAKER_03 4:29

Oh yeah, that's cool. She's flexing her muscles uh and uh showing her gentle side as well, huh?

SPEAKER_01 4:35

Absolutely. And then not not long after that, she married our father, and he was a logger, and he had also worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps here in Mississippi, and then together they moved to uh Jackson. They moved to the city where our dad worked in construction, and mother began doing her favorite and best life's work, and that was uh raising us, raising her family. Um, a few years later, they moved to Madison County, where she raised all of us in the same house, right next door to our grandparents.

SPEAKER_03 5:13

Oh, yeah. We grew up that way too. Uh my mom lived on one side and our family, lived on one side of our grandparents, and then her brother and their family uh lived on the other side. So we kind of grew up as all one big family. So yeah, that's that makes for a great childhood, I think. Uh having those relationships close by.

SPEAKER_01 5:34

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And my grandparents were always there if I needed her, and my mom, uh, she she did not work outside the home except for one short time in my life where she uh worked processing school pictures. Now that may not sound like a big thing today, but for her, that was just another moment where she stepped out and she just, well, she just did what she what she needed to. She did what needed to be done. And then uh she faced some very serious health challenges in her life. She had the first of two open heart surgeries when she was only 56 years old, and then she lived with congestive heart failure until she was 74. You know, that that and other things led to the fact that life wasn't always easy. She stayed with our dad for more than 40 years, and then in her last years, she declared a little independence of her own, uh, living in a small community with kind neighbors and pretty birds and cute little squirrels that always were very entertaining to her.

SPEAKER_03 6:44

Well, she had four daughters, so y'all were probably part of her difficult times in her life and well as well as the pure joy of her life, too, right? I mean, then that that's part of what we're talking about, the mothers and daughters' relationships.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

Absolutely, absolutely. And uh uh she lived that full life. Uh, she passed away right before her 75th birthday. But the thing that's so significant, and I'm sure we'll talk about it more as we go along, but the thing that was so significant was that she always said that her greatest joy in life were her four girls, her daughters. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 7:25

Yep. That's great. I mean, that's a that gives us a great kind of synopsis of of who your mother was as we uh kind of delve into the relationship that each of you had with her and each other. So thank you for that. All right, so who was the favorite? Or was there a favorite? I mean, do the mothers, y'all are all mothers. Was it the uh oldest child, Sybil?

SPEAKER_02 7:57

The oldest child was a favorite?

SPEAKER_03 8:00

No, was Melanie was the baby was the favorite.

SPEAKER_02 8:05

Yeah, for one reason, probably when mother had me, she didn't know what she was doing. Okay, and that would be just like most new mothers would be, because mother was only 22 when I was born. And so, I mean, I don't know. That's just what I'm thinking. If I'd asked her, she probably would have said, said, Well, you know I didn't know what I was doing, I wouldn't have done it. I said, Well, okay. But I do, I do feel that Millie was the favorite.

SPEAKER_03 8:33

Yeah, I had a brother, so there was no doubt, you know. Was your brother the favorite? The brother's often the mother's favorite. Let's talk about this age difference.

SPEAKER_02 8:43

I'm 79.

SPEAKER_03 8:45

Well, you didn't have to tell me your age, but that's okay. Just the difference between you. So how old were you when Brenda was born?

SPEAKER_02 8:55

Uh 23 months between us.

SPEAKER_03 8:57

And then how long how long between Brenda and Bev?

SPEAKER_01 9:01

Well, I'm not really good with math. So let me let me just start from the top and go down. When someone asks me why I'm the baby, I always say it's because I have three older sisters. My oldest sister, Sybil, was 17 years older than I am. My sister next to Sybil was 15 years older than I am. Beverly is nine years older than I am. And then, like we've established, I am the baby coming along when mother was later in life. Now, mother never said I was an accident, she never called me a mistake, she just always jokingly said that I was her second crop by her first husband.

SPEAKER_00 9:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 9:50

And it takes a second, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:51

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_03 9:52

I don't know. You were babied by your mother and your sisters?

SPEAKER_01 9:58

Most definitely, and I am happy to say that that is still the case today.

SPEAKER_03 10:03

Okay, so as often is the case, the eldest child has talked and the baby has talked, and the one in the middle we have not heard from at all.

SPEAKER_02 10:15

As middle children, both Brenda and I just tried to keep peace and wanted to protect mother. That that was that was our goal.

SPEAKER_01 10:27

Uh Susan, can we take a minute to talk about our sister Brenda? Yes, please do. So, our amazing sister Brenda, uh, who is 15 years older than I am, great influence on all of our lives, unfortunately was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's when she was 66. And so she uh is at uh St. Catharines in the Alzheimer's unit there and doing very well for her disease. Uh, but her legacy lives in all of us and is a very big part of the sisters. We miss her, but we're so thankful that she has her good care. And that was certainly a uh it was certainly a traumatic part of our life when she received her diagnosis, but uh we are thankful for her then, now and in the future still.

SPEAKER_03 11:25

So Beb, I'll pitch this to you. How do you see because you're in the middle, you can see both both sides. Uh how do you see that y'all, the four of you, are similar? Things that you maybe got from your mother, and then maybe some things that um are different.

SPEAKER_02 11:45

Different characteristics that we learn from my mother, you we we look at differently as we age. One thing uh that we all family is really important. And my mother lived that every day. She probably got that from her mother and from her sister. Very important. As I was thinking about this podcast, I was thinking, well, what's really something I didn't realize at the moment, but now I do. Mother was very competitive. And she uh you know, she did it in a very southern sweet magnolia way, but she was very competitive. As in this is cards, not love. And uh the games that we would play. I think she initiated card games and board games uh because that helped the family do something good together and and learn from one another. And uh So I I I see that all of us. Sybil probably plays more games than any of us, but we all still love group activities like that and we all still love cards.

SPEAKER_03 12:57

Sybil, you were you were talking about that that your your mother was young and didn't know what she was doing when she was uh when you were born. So did you as the as the eldest sister did you have to kind of be the mother sometime?

SPEAKER_02 13:14

Of course with Molly I did. She jumped in the backseat of my car at my wedding and going on the honeymoon with me. So what do you think? It was like mugs and dogs. She didn't tell me about me. No, I didn't take it. I couldn't. I mean Bob Powell wanted me to. You know, I think we all just, you know, were so happy, you know, that we had Melanie and we were all old enough to appreciate that that we just fell in and everything we could do for her, we did. Um having Melanie uh was a uh tremendous physical labor for mother at her age. She actually um thought something else might be going on in her early late 30s and early forties. And when the nurse told her she was pregnant, she's like, No, I I can't be pregnant. But I think we all saw Mother lay flat on her back for like seven months, and um and we saw how much she wanted Nani, and and of course we wanted we wanted her and Nani both, so it was an appreciation that I don't I doubt if Sibyl and Brenda had when I was born. But it was when she was just a special gift we had.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

Well, we can just say it because this is a podcast for daughters, and menopause is a real thing, and apparently mother thought that's what was going on, and instead she learns that she's got a baby on the way, and uh it's the story I heard is that Beverly heard about it from the neighbor child, and I can only imagine how Brenda and Sybil felt uh when they got the news being a junior and a senior in high school. So uh good trauma, maybe good drama?

SPEAKER_03 15:01

I don't know how with being 17 years different. Let me Mel, you've talked, you've heard Sybil talk about it, and I'm sure your your life about uh what your mother was like maybe when she was younger. How is that different? Because she was a different woman 17 years later. I mean, we look back at our own lives, uh, you know, we're not the same as we were 17 years ago. You each of you have um children, and even if they're close in age, you may still be a little bit different uh when the second one's born than the first one. How do you feel that you're the mother that you had as a baby was different from the mother that Beverly or Brenda or Sybil might have had?

SPEAKER_01 15:52

Well, I I truly feel that um I was so well taken care of. My older sisters, even though Beverly was only nine years older than I am, that's a significant age difference there. All three of them took great care of me. But I joke sometimes and I say, mother was tired by the time I I came along. She had already done room mother and PTO and you know, she had already uh done everything. Not that she didn't support me, and uh the whole family supported me in all my athletic endeavors and my school things, but you know, I joke and I say if if uh we could do it at the school, then I got to participate. But if it was something extra, you know, I my friends did baton baton. Now I don't know if it was because I was clumsy and I couldn't uh twirl a baton and or or not, but you know, 4H and those kinds of things, you know, Sybil was already gone by the time that um, you know, they Sybil was gone, then Brenda was gone, and then Beverly, I was only in third grade when she went to college, and so I was kind of an only child, and I tease and say that mother was tired, and so um she was a wonderful mother, but yes, I would think she was uh a lot different with me than than she was when she was younger. But again, Beverly's right, she was 38 when I was born, and that was old um back in the day to even be uh trying to have a child.

SPEAKER_03 17:12

Is there something that each of you look back on, maybe some event or some circumstance that you saw differently because of the stage of life that you were in as a child or a young woman, uh, as well as the stage of life of where your mother was.

SPEAKER_01 17:35

So we probably need to talk about the fact that I had mentioned earlier uh that mother had heart issues my entire adult life. When I was only 18, mother had her first heart attack. And then the day that I moved into the dorm at Mississippi State, she had her first open heart surgery. Then 10 years later, she had another heart attack and another very traumatic surgery, and then she battled that congestive heart failure until she passed away, which was eight years later. I was only 36 then, I had two small children. So certainly I saw things differently. I I I saw mother in a different way, and I mean, good grief. I wasn't even present for her first heart surgery. I was moving into the dorm. I was I was only 18, but still, really.

SPEAKER_02 18:30

And she and she insisted on that for you. That's what she wanted. However, as that middle child, uh I had this that it that even made more of me wanting to protect mother. You know, I was I got to take her to a lot of doctors' appointments. So Raymond and I when she had her heart at her second heart attack in um Shreveport, we were the ones that drove her from the emergency room in Shreveport to the Baptist Hospital. Um so you know, that was just all part of me wanting to do what I could to take care of her because I continually saw how she devoted everything to us. And I I've often felt uh guilty that um you know I could see other mothers uh working outside the home, others other mothers, you know, being in different organizations and running around and going places and mother had never even been to the beach. So I wanted to I wanted her to have fun herself sometimes instead of always take care of us.

SPEAKER_03 19:46

In another episode that might have been about my mother, uh, we talked about guilt and that sometimes mothers use guilt to manipulate their children to get them to do what they want them to do. Now, I know all of you are mothers and you would never do that, but uh, did your mother use guilt as as kind of a tool to get you to do what she wanted you to?

SPEAKER_02 20:12

So you're you're asking us if mother was passive aggressive. If she was passive. Okay, that's a way to say it as well. She was passive aggressive, uh it wasn't uh in a manipulative way. Uh things were important to her, and she wanted that to be important to us. And sometimes she would try to uh drive home the point that this should be important to you.

SPEAKER_03 20:41

Sibyl, what do you uh what do you think about that? Did you ever see uh your your your mom being passive aggressive or using guilt?

SPEAKER_02 20:56

No, I don't remember that. But you uh the the way I look at it, it's hard for me to remember. Mother was great. She loved us. She did for us. But you know, just fun things that I remember and things about mother. Beverly and Melanie don't have Melanie especially has no idea. I remember m you know, I went to kindergarten and that was back when you did not have to go to kindergarten. You didn't nobody got to go to kindergarten, but I did. You know, and Brenda was a baby then too. She was young enough with those twenty-four months, you know. You know, she went with me along with me. There were so many times that I went places and Brenda was right there with me, and that was great. I never I don't ever remember feeling why does she have to come or or she's not supposed to be there. Never felt that way.

SPEAKER_03 21:52

Did you see um when Mel was talking about that uh your mother was sick for a good bit of her life? So did you see was that different for you? Did you see her more as a I mean, obviously she was a younger woman. Was she healthier?

SPEAKER_02 22:10

Yes, yes. I remember she did a lot more activities at school. She did a she was always, you know, a room mother for me and for Brenda. They played uh basketball against the the the different school teams. You know, mother was real energetic in that because she had played at a high s you know in high school. And and you know, and stuff like that. We would have spend the night parties, we would have birthday parties, we'd have surprise parties. And, you know, it was just it was just, you know, fun things that, you know, that she would do. And then see when she had her now what year did she have her first heart attack? What'd you say, Melanie? 1981. That was I'd been gone a long time, you know, 'cause I got married in sixty-eight. So I mean, you know, there was just a lot that Melanie and Beverly and Brenda wasn't there because Brenda was always gone off to college or going to be a counselor at North Carolina or doing something like that, that Melanie and Beverly saw a lot more of that than than I did.

SPEAKER_01 23:21

Yeah, Susan, I sort of had I was the baby, but because at, you know, like I said, third grade, everyone was out of the house but me, so then I sort of turned into the oldest child as well, or the only child. I've got some identity issues because I'm either the baby or the only or the oldest or or whatever. So the family dynamics changed, but the good thing was that we all stayed very, very close. Sybil and Beverly both lived within eyesight of mother's house, and then my sister Brenda, she just lived across town, and so the family was really close, um, even though the the older sisters were already out of the house. And you know, I call my brother-in-laws my brothers, which confuses a lot of people because my brother-in-law Bob, Sybil's husband, got in the family when I was a year and a half, and my brother-in-law Raymond got in the family when I was in well, younger than third grade, but when Beverly went off to college, they were a serious thing. Uh, they started dating when she was 13. I'm not good at math, but you know how young I was then. So I have the my brother-in-laws that I consider my brothers, they took good care of me too. Um, so we stayed close, even though we were we were very scattered in age and not so much in geography, but in age especially, but we stayed very close. And mother wanted it that way, like Beverly just said. That's what was important to her.

SPEAKER_02 24:50

Yeah, mother was very gutsy. Mother was very gutsy. Uh, she had been thrown into an old pond when she was young and almost drowned, and she was in her 50s, I guess. She and her good friend went to the YMCA in downtown Jackson and took swimming lessons. This is a woman out of the water. And on her last day, she had to log off the diving board into the deep water. And she and she did it.

SPEAKER_01 25:24

She took the bull by the horns. And and it reminds me of after her first heart surgery, the doctor told her that she had to walk six miles a day and diet, of course. But the six miles a day. Now she did whatever her doctors told her to do. So she bought a treadmill, and every morning she walked those six miles. Now, I had never seen her exercise before. I guess she probably never had time to. But no, she wasn't walking before then. Oh no, no. But now, in her late 50s, it just became part of her life. And she had that same tenacity for the rest of her years, you know, just getting things done the best way she could. For example, you know, she always enjoyed baking MM cookies and sharing with everybody. So in her later years, in her limitations, she baked those cookies for everybody, but she had to do it six cookies at a time in a toaster oven. Now she wanted to give them to her grandkids, she wanted to give them to all of us, but she especially loved baking them and then delivering them to her doctors and her nurses and her pharmacists and all those people that she was so appreciative of. She just she just always found a way to accomplish whatever it is that was in her heart. And then she she had the tenacity to just follow through and do it.

SPEAKER_02 26:54

But see, her she she always had her mother as an example. Women are a product of their time period. Her mother, Lucille Harris, never drove. She was in, she was like in her 60s, and she decided that she needed a driver's license. And so she went and got her driver's license. She could drive around in her 98-oh small bill. And I I had a neat time because I was able, I was always the I got to drive the both around, and it was a really nice gift that I had.

SPEAKER_03 27:33

Yeah, talking about her resilience. Uh looking back at my own mom who had dementia, I've mentioned that before, that she had dementia in her later years. And as we age, we get more fragile, right? I mean, just physically, we get more fragile. But one of the things that I really worried about was can she handle this time of life? I mean, is she gonna be okay? Um, but then I would I would think back and I'm like, you know, she's been through a lot in in different, you know, different aspects of her life. Some of this, it's really helpful to as we look back and think about the tenacity, the resilience, that that really does carry carry them through even those later years that they were able to to deal with those things.

SPEAKER_02 28:18

Mother made choices, and I didn't always agree with her choices. But even at the end of her life, when daily she would mark off which pills she had taken and how much she weighed because of her congested heart failure, she would say a prayer on the end of the sheet. And she always thanked God for her life, for her family, and for her wonderful daughters. So she made those choices and she was happy with them. So I needed to be happy with them also.

SPEAKER_03 28:52

Yeah. As the three of you have gotten older and going through some of those phases in life that as a girl or a younger woman, uh, you watched her go through and probably didn't understand at the time. And are are there some things that you look back on that you just understand more now, or or or maybe things that you disagreed with then that make more sense now, or that you're like, you know what?

SPEAKER_01 29:20

She was actually right about that. Well, mother always told me, you better slow down or God will slow you down. She was always looking in on us, saying, Y'all are doing too much, slow down, enjoy life, be in the moment. Now, she didn't always use those exact words, but she would say, Um, you know, take care of yourself, take care of your family, y'all spend more time together, uh, slow down. At the time, I was like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. And now I look at my own daughter, and and we have daughters, a lot of daughters uh between us. We look at, I look at my own daughter and I say, Bradley, you got to slow down. I mean, you've got a lot on your plate. Are you taking care of yourself? Are you this? Are you that? And so the words of mother just keep coming back to me of how important it is to try to make the main things the main thing. And that's what she was trying to tell us. And at the time, I was like, I'm fine, mom, what's the deal? I I can do this, yeah, sure. Let's add one more thing. But now I understand when she would say slow down that she really wanted us to enjoy that day and be in that moment.

SPEAKER_02 30:30

Sybil, uh, we after mother died, we had sisters because mother would have wanted that and wanted us to all be so close. And one year at Sisters, Sybil gave us a mirror that had written on it, mirror, mirror on the wall. I am my mother after all.

SPEAKER_03 30:47

We all just laughed because all right, Beverly, tell us what what sisters, what are you talking about?

SPEAKER_02 30:55

Well, once it was that uh the greatest gift you can give someone is your time. And mother, mother knew that, and and mother was always available to us. Uh I taught high school English and I I didn't always um I spent too much time at school. And that's what mother was trying to tell me. So after we lost her, we you start processing, you're like, oh my goodness, she was right. We need to at set aside a time each year to go somewhere. Now, this wasn't going to New York City and going to the theater or in shopping. This was in a remote place, often in the Mississippi State Parks, so that we had to look at one another and be with one another. And um, we did that, it was wonderful. We later on we included other females that were uh like our sisters, and that turned out great too. Uh sadly. Uh after Brenda's illness, we have not continued this, and um, I really miss it. It was a time for all of us to get together and talk about old memories and make new ones.

SPEAKER_01 32:06

I've reflected on that some too in thinking about this podcast about how important it was for the four of us to get away and just to be together. And one of the things that I realized is that when we were there together, we didn't talk about the bad things or the bad times. We talked about the good things and the good times. But I mean, the reality is that every family has its dynamics. And Bev has alluded several times already that um we stuck together and that we wanted to protect mother. Because as I'm afraid, maybe was all too common. We had a father that was an abusive alcoholic. Now, I guess he did the best that he could. He was the product of the depression, he was the oldest of 13 children, and you know, maybe that's that was just part of the culture or just part of those times. But mother had it rough, and we each got to experience mother dealing with the difficulties that came from that situation, and then we all had to deal with all our experiences with it ourselves. Um now, even after mother was gone, we had to deal with our dad. And I will say that we got a lot of um tenacity and maybe stubbornness and maybe our uh sense of responsibility and all that. But the point is when we got together just us at Sisters Weekend, we didn't focus on that. We just knew and we still know that it was us four girls and mother, and we were the team and we had the love and we had the strength for each other, and that actually is what mother wanted us to focus on, and that's what mom wanted us to protect. And above all, she wanted us to keep that closeness and to remember that importance of family. Yep. And so you probably don't remember saying this, but you told me one time, you you told all of us at Sisters Weekend, you said Mama made us all feel like she loved us most. That's right. Yep. What a gift from a mother to be able to make their girl to make their children or or their daughters, who are so different and so different in age, actually feel like each one of them she loved them the most. What a legacy for us.

SPEAKER_02 34:56

You know, I was I was uh I was looking at the the good stuff I learned from mom and the bad stuff. Um and certainly I I'm here to say that the bad thing I learned from my mother was worrying. Well, I worry so much about my my two girls. And I'm sure mother mother worried about us the same way. She just uh you know, I never realized that, but I'm sure she did.

SPEAKER_03 35:25

Did your relationships with each other change after she passed away?

SPEAKER_02 35:34

I would say they did. We just got closer and we depended on each other. That was what I would think. Because we realized what she was trying to tell us that's right. Yep. And was too I was too stubborn to listen. I was too busy to listen. I was too I had too much to do. But that's true. Well, you had your own well, I had my own family, I had to worry about that. You know what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_03 36:06

So how how does some of this that you're talking about with her, you know, you're too busy, different phases of your life, you had your own family, how do you now, and Bev, you talking about worrying, how do you now look at your daughters, your daughters or sons family, um, and understand some of where your mother was. Or or where you were. You know, can you look at your kids and and say, well, it's not that they don't love me or they don't, whatever. They're in that phase of life I was in. They're going, they've got young kids or whatever. So have you picked up some of that of looking back both at her and also yourself at that time? Is that helpful?

SPEAKER_02 36:55

I'm thinking that when she would tell us, now you know this is earth, not heaven, she was probably thinking about our actions, our lack of actions, and coming to visit her or so well, and you look back and you think, well, there's a lot of times me and the oldest that I think about stuff like that. And I wanted and this is not the thing to say, but I want to take my two children and shake them. Do you realize why you always be like this? Because I was the same way with mother. You don't ever think about losing your well, you don't ever think about losing your mother at the age that we lost I was and the age we lost mama. We'd already been through that with mama. But but you don't do it and they can't realize, you know why? Because I didn't realize at that age. I was in I was in the same shoes. I did the same thing. My mother will always be down there and I can go see her. My mama will always be right there. But it's just like that. Life's not meant to be like that. You know, mother taught us don't live with regrets. Don't don't live with regrets. And you know, and I and I think that's a good thing to do because you know, I mean, do everything you can for somebody when they're alive because they will always be there. And don't have any regrets when you lay your head on that pillow at night.

SPEAKER_01 38:36

And mother used to say, she would say, Oh, I want you to bring me my flowers while I'm alive. Oh, yes, of course. Don't wait to send me flowers after I'm gone. Don't send flowers in my funeral. Just bring me flowers while I'm alive. And what she was saying is, come spend time with me. Or uh and then the example like Sybil was talking about, she would take uh food and she would do things for people when there was that need or there was that opportunity, not the wait, well, I'm gonna do that later, or we had a great example, like Sybil just referred to, of doing things for other people and being involved in other people's lives. She loved us as the immediate family. She loved her grandchildren, but she loved extended family. We would just adopt all our best friends became her children, and as adults, we adopted other families. She just had so much love, and that's the thing that I keep going back to. And and back to your question, Susan, about how do you see things different with with your kids? You know, I have two new grandchildren, I have a four-year-old and I have a nine-month-old, and I have enjoyed watching my daughter uh be such a wonderful mom. And I realized how hard it was for our mother to be the grandmother and watch and let us be the moms that we were becoming. And um, and I'm just trying to pass on to the daughters and the granddaughters that love that she had. She had unconditional love. She loved my father until the day she died, no matter what. She loved us no matter what. And my grandmother had that unconditional love. And she loved, oh my goodness, she loved her nurses and her doctors and her pharmacists, and she loved her server at the restaurant. I mean, it was just this oozing love that if we didn't get anything else, we should have got that love one another, and love unconditionally, and give grace and um and and just love.

SPEAKER_02 40:44

Forgiveness. Yeah. Mother was able to choose joy in any situation. Yeah, that's that's that's something that I looked back and thought, oh, I need to do more of that. You know, you just learn so much. And I look back and then I think about mother had that um that jovel side, she had that serious side, she had that love side, she had I don't know what you would call when she made she was stern. I mean, you know, we picked up on all of that. But now she one fun thing that I remembered that would always happen. And it may be that's why I'm that I love snow so much. You know, Beverly had a we had a freak lived up the road. And every time it snowed, neither one of y'all remember what Hilda Boy did. Yeah, I remember. She'd come down the street and and she'd have this big old snowball and she'd ring the doorbell and knock on the door, mama would open it, she'd just plaster it with it. And she would plow that snowball in that house, it didn't matter what, because she knew my mother was not coming out in that snow. But uh, but that was just a fun thing. You saw, and oh, she wouldn't laugh about that, and he'll the boy would laugh about that. She got her sense of humor, and what you do, you can see some good and all bad in Melanie.

SPEAKER_01 42:13

Y'all all of y'all taught me that. That's what I was saying a minute ago. I'm the baby. I got the positivity because because y'all taught me that.

SPEAKER_02 42:20

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 42:21

All of y'all taught me that.

SPEAKER_02 42:22

Yes, yes. And they had the most fun. She had so many dear friends. And I think at that time they took more time with their friends. Where now, even, you know, you don't have that much time. Melanie's too busy working, she's too and and I'm too busy doing this, and blah blah this. You don't take the time to enjoy life like mother wanted us to.

SPEAKER_03 42:47

So Sybil, that's a great story. And uh one thing that I think about too is that it it was a slower time then. I mean, times are just different now. My mom would get upset with us because we didn't stay as long as she wanted us to for holidays, or you know, we didn't do some of those things that she wanted us to do. And she would always say, you know, when I was a girl, we would go and stay at my grandmother's house and everybody was there, all the cousins, all her, you know, uh and so that's the way she wanted it to be with us too. Yeah. But everybody lived in the community, and a lot of those people didn't work. And so I think sometimes we have to give ourselves a little bit of grace because this is just a different time. Uh things move faster, we're all busier, we don't all live in the same community like we used to. Um, so I I think it is important to think about that the times are not the same.

SPEAKER_02 43:47

Oh, they they really are, and I've thought about that too.

SPEAKER_03 43:50

So, what did y'all do that drove her crazy? Like I used to talk back to my mother. My mother got very good at driving Driving and extending her hand to pop me in the mouth. Typically when I was about thirteen or fourteen. Maybe most people are that way, I don't know, but uh she would get and I'm pretty sure I got some of that from her. So that's probably what made her so mad about it.

SPEAKER_02 44:15

I always wanted to keep up with the Joneses. And I always wanted to bore me, and I always liked the boys. And she hadn't had no boys around, so that was um probably one thing that really bothered her.

SPEAKER_03 44:32

Okay, let's talk a little bit about traditions. Uh in my family, traditions have always been important uh right down to the food that we ate. But I think that's probably true of a lot of southern families that traditions really um revolve around uh the different food. But Bev has mentioned cards as being something that a simple thing, but something that kind of does get passed down as a tradition. So what are some other traditions that your mom passed down to you all?

SPEAKER_02 45:05

Well, we still have the same Thanksgiving dinner, we still have the same Christmas dinner, and you know, stuff like that has just been handed down from generation to generation. One year our daughters got a divorce and was gonna take care of everything. They took care of it while they were here talking, and that was the last we heard about it.

SPEAKER_03 45:26

So are you do you keep that going as the as the oldest child or do you kind of all Well, I think we depend on people.

SPEAKER_02 45:36

We depend on um I know what Beverly's gonna do for Christmas, you know, and and she knows what I'm gonna do. I was even sick this year and made dressing and sent it over to her. You know, it's just got Thanksgiving and Christmas if you don't have dressing. And and what's so bad is I got two children. Now Robert will need some I don't care about no dressing. Maybe we're doing it for ourselves, hoping that our children will pick it up. I I think mother really wanted us all to be together and the food was the the the glue that that brought us together and something we could be safe in a safe environment that we could do. You know, Brenda, don't you remember the when it Christmas? It wasn't Thanksgiving, it was Christmas that we had spaghetti. Just being together. You know, I think that's what she wanted so much. You know, her one of her favorite moments uh her last Christmas in 1998. I don't know how it worked out. But we had a wonderful we had steak and lobster. Remember that? Oh yeah. We all stayed in the same house. And I remember her coming to me that next morning and she said, What a gift. Because we we had not all of us been literally in the same house. She said, You know, what a gift y'all have given me to all of us be in the same house. And that was that's her last Christmas day. It was very special.

SPEAKER_01 47:12

Well, and you know, we haven't talked about another thing that she passed down to us was her faith. You know, mother, she she would say, you know, I'm I'm praying for you. Uh you know, she she read that uh she read her Bible, she loved her church family, she listened to sermons on on the radio. She listened to sermons on the radio, and and but she prayed for us. And I remember, you know, her saying when I was in college, you know, she would say, Well, I'm I'm praying for you. And so she she she taught us her faith. And then the other thing, and I catch myself doing this with my children, mother was always so encouraging, but she meant it. Mother would say, I'm proud of you. Did she tell y'all I'm proud of you? She would say, Oh, yeah, you're doing such a good job at that. You just keep up the good work, you're working so hard, I'm so proud of you. And I feel this overwhelming, I am so proud of both my daughter and my son. And just about every time I talk with them, in addition to saying I love you, I say I'm proud of you. And I remember mother being proud of me.

SPEAKER_03 48:23

Okay, that's a great example of a legacy that she gave you that you have now passed down to the next generation. So as we start wrapping up, I want us to uh think about and I want to ask each of you what is an inheritance as a daughter that you have passed down and not necessarily to your own, just just your children, but to this next generation. Beverly, you talked about your school teacher, so there are other children that that you influence as well, and um maybe how she treated people. But what is something that she has given to you that you have now passed down?

SPEAKER_02 49:08

Yeah, fairness. Mother was fair. It didn't matter who you were, where you came from, you might be the the governor. It didn't matter. She treated everyone the same. And I I always did that in the classroom. I always try to do that with my children and my niece and nephews. You know, if if I do something for one, I want, you know, everybody's equal. We're all we're all the same. Treat everybody the same.

SPEAKER_03 49:37

Sybil, what about you?

SPEAKER_02 49:39

I guess was just trying to keep families together. Traditions, you know, that's a big thing in our house and in our family. Right now that's all I can think of because she gave us so much.

SPEAKER_03 49:51

What about you, baby?

SPEAKER_01 49:53

Well, mother always loved. And I think that she taught me that love. You know, our grandmother had that unconditional love, mother had that unconditional love. And so, as hokey as it sounds, I really think that I just love everybody. Everybody loves you. I see the positive, I see the good. Um, now when I'm proven wrong, boy, it's crushing. Um, and I'm kind of kidding because I don't like everybody, but the bottom line for me is that she taught me, uh, barely said it earlier, you know, this is earth, not heaven. And that was her way of saying that we we make the best of things, we we see the good in people, we do our best, and and we love each other. And um the other thing for me is that she was such a great example all the way through to the very end. Uh she got the most out of life she could. You know, she squeezed life. She wanted to be in with what was going on, even if she didn't feel good. If we were in the kitchen, she wanted to be in the kitchen. If we had something going on with uh at Mississippi State, she wanted to be here in Startville. If there was something going on with the grandkids, she was all in. She gave it her best and just squeezed it hard until the very end. And I think that I'm like that too. Man, I just I I I just I love and I go and I do and I squeeze it really hard. So thanks, Mother.

SPEAKER_02 51:30

Mother always had her suitcase ready to pack. And Melanie is a perfect example.

SPEAKER_01 51:39

She told me I had a go-knot on my head. That's what she said. You have a go-knot on your head. And I'm like, Well, where did I get that? Right. So thanks, Bev. You're right. You reminded me that mother used to say, I have a go-knot on my head.

SPEAKER_03 51:51

Well, in in our family, uh, my mother used to quote her grandmother, which was always, if somebody said, Hey, do you want to go somewhere? She would kind of brush off the front of her dress and say, Well, let me get my purse. She was ready to go.

SPEAKER_02 52:08

And I bet this too, my mother's purse weighed at least five pounds.

SPEAKER_01 52:15

Oh, yes. Everything was in that purse. Everything so she would be ready to go.

SPEAKER_03 52:20

Thank you all for doing this today. I really do appreciate it. Well, thank you so much. You bet. Let's do it again sometime. And thank you for listening to A Daughter's Inheritance. I hope you found something in this conversation. Comfort, connection, recognition, maybe even a laugh or two. If this resonated with you, please follow the show so you don't miss the next daughter's story. And if you want to share your inheritance with me, I'd love to hear from you. So, in the words of my mother, be patient, kind, and famous.