With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir Read Free Page A

be at the stable almost every day to ride it and later take care of it, so I learned what it meant to be responsible for another living creature. I also learned about doing physical work in all kinds of weather, because no matter the weather, you still had to take care of your horse. And I really liked the other kids who hung around at the stable. It was great being around a big gang of people who were all working on the same thing.
    Ellen had her own horse when she was little, too. My parents, in a typically well-meaning but ill-informed fashion, had bought her a failed racehorse. The horse was so small my parents called her Little One. Actually, if you shaved her hooves, she was just a big pony. Racehorses are trained to run, not to carry little girls, so the first thing Ellen’s horse did was buck her off and break her nose. Ellen had that small horse—or pony—for quite a while.
    You might think my father was making an executive salary to be able to afford all these lessons and extras for his daughters. That wasn’t the case. My mother’s family subsidized much of it. My mother’s sister, Julia, lived with her parents (until she moved into our house, along with my grandmother, when I was in fourth grade). She was a bookkeeper at a department store, and since she lived at home she didn’t have to pay rent, buy food, or pay a lot of bills, so she used her money to splurge on Ellen and me.
    Ellen and I had more lessons than the rest of the kids in the neighborhood, but as I was growing up, my mother began to apologize because I didn’t get as many lessons as Ellen did. She worried that I was not well-enough prepared for life because of that. I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. I remember thinking, “More lessons? There aren’t enough hours in the day!” That was before I knew she was ill.
    I always wondered what my mother’s obsession with lessons was all about. She would pick me up and drive me around from place to place even when she was clearly not feeling well or was very tired. When I was six, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Ellen just recently told me that after the diagnosis, our mother’s primary goal was to see me through grammar school. I wonder if she ran herself ragged because she knew she didn’t have much time. Perhaps that was part of it. But it’s hard to know because she had done the same thing with Ellen. My mother was determined that her daughters would succeed at whatever we decided to do.
    Her mission in life was to make her daughters well-rounded, independent women: women who would have many skills and lots of experiences. This made it possible for us to have conversations with all kinds of people about all kinds of things. I’m grateful for that gift to this day.
    She had been a career woman before Ellen was born, working for Catholic Charities as a social worker, a job she loved. She majored in biology in college at Mount St. Vincent’s, and her plan was to become a doctor. But that wasn’t possible. The demand for places in medical schools from veterans returning from the war made it improbable that a woman like my mother would be admitted. This was a time when working women of all sorts stayed home, and many of them moved to new houses in the suburbs. Despite this disappointment, my mother respected doctors and held them in high regard, making sure we always had the best medical care. To this end, she developed an interview, or grilling, technique that allowed her to find out everything about a doctor—from their college GPA through the ins and outs of their specialty training. It served her well.
    Mommy left work in 1956, when Ellen was born. My father’s job was to provide for the family, and he took great pride in that role. My mother’s job was to be a mother and take care of the house. But she didn’t give up on trying to have an impact on the world around her, even if it was limited to helping people in the neighborhood. She believed strongly in the