Agree. So how do you reach that hopeless single mom and inspire her to inspire her kids to do better?
I have a friend who just turned 70, so she's a few years older than I am. She grew up as the oldest of 13 kids to a sharecropper family in Mississippi before the Civil Rights Act was a thing. Their life and poverty is unimaginable to me. Their clothes were sewn by hand by their mother/g-mother out of feed sacks. The girls' feminine products were made of the same. There was no running water in the house; everything was hauled from a well. She taught me how to use the least amount of water possible to wash dishes, something that comes in handy when camping. Their food was grown and/or shot by them; the only store products bought were sugar and flour, tires and tractor parts, or bartered for. From earliest childhood she spent summers in the cotton fields, picking with the adults and other kids.
She escaped north when she was 15; lived with an aunt in St. Louis, worked as a cook and housekeeper. She has three kids. All of them have gone to college; the oldest is a nurse anesthetist. She owns her own home in the infamous Ferguson. It's a modest home but it's *hers.* She retired from the county where we both worked as cooks years ago, two years ago. Although she never made it through h.s. herself, she somehow inspired her kids to do better. I wish we could bottle Vera and sell her essence.
