I was supposed to be the Keeper in my family. My maternal grandmother took care of my mother her whole life, and I was groomed to take care of her after Nana died. However, I can just about take care of one person, not two. I left my mother’s house after being told everyday how worthless I was, how I couldn’t get along with people or get a decent job, etc. etc. etc. It’s been a haul, but I do take care of myself and don’t rely on anyone.
She wasn’t Moolah, but she did know her briefly.
Heh. You too, huh?
I just turned 29. One of my very few memories from 1979 is of my Dad walking with his older half-brother to a bus stop one night and being held while waving goodbye to my uncle as he gets on the bus never to be seen again. Later I learned that he was fleeing the US because there were warrants out on him for being married in two states (at the same time) and there lots of other cousins whose mothers he didn’t marry…
The book will have to wait until after my folks die, though. This thread makes me sad, Sampiro . My mother was a keeper and it clearly screwed up her life too. So much so she’s made Vynce and I promise never to take care of her or my father the way she did my great-grandmother, but to find them a nice home if it comes to that. Me, I’m just a semi-keeper and I hope it stays that way.
My mother has tried to hand me the title of Keeper. I have always refused to accept the repsonsibility. When I briefly moved back to my home town in 2001, her eyes twinkled at the thought I was coming home to accept my role as Keeper. I left town again in 2004 and will never return. I haven’t even been back for a visit. She is her family Keeper and loves to tell me how much time she’s spent taking old folks to doctor visits and then waiting, expectantly, for me to praise her efforts and commit to doing the same for her. I usually use those times to point out how adept nursing homes and assisted living homes can be. I pointedly tell her that she might want visit a few and check them out for the older folks and, just to be sure, see if she’d like it there too.
Since I refuse to accept the duties, she’s tried to foist them onto my brother’s wife. She and my brother live on adjacent property to my parents so she’ll pitch in when necessary; but they’re fooling themselves if they think she’s going to be the Keeper. Hell, she’s saving her paycheck right now making plans to divorce my brother once she gets enough money saved. After that happens, I’ll probably be in deep shit in the family because I’ll take her side in any battles.
When I saw a thread title with “Jocasta” in it, I didn’t have to look to know who wrote it. 
Hah! In my family, it was great-uncle Brac who was notorious for leaving illegitimate children up and down the South. He was a very, very handsome man and the ladies loved him, which wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t loved 'em back. Frequently. Every couple of years, another previously unknown child will call us up, saying, “You’re not going to believe me, but my mama always told me my real daddy was named Brac…” and we’re like, “Don’t worry, we’re used to this.” I look at it this way, he gave a lot of lonely ladies companionship. And is that so wrong?
Uncle Brac was married four times, but he was only really in love with the third wife, probably the only woman he was ever true to. They never had any children and she died of cancer.
My great-grandmother (maternal line all the way) had a half sister, Della, who gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, Rhodie Lynn, fathered by a married man (nobody remembered who) when she was about 20 years old. This was around 1872, two years before my great-grandmother was born (due to the age spread in large families where women had their first child in their teens and last in their forties, it was very common for women to be able to wet nurse their oldest grandchildren [or their youngest siblings if they were among the older children in the family]). Rhodie Lynn was raised by my grandparents, lived a relatively blameless life, married, had children, and died of old age years before I was born (as did my great-grandmother). More than 110 years after she was born, however, her birth was still being used as a morality warning to my sister and cousins. “Della was just ruined- had to leave the community, ended up marrying a man three times her age cause he was the only one would have her and then she died of consumption all cause she couldn’t keep her legs together.”
My father probably had an illegitimate son when he was a teenager. He didn’t know about him until the kid was grown and had children of his own and contacted my father because the birth mother said she believed he was the father. (She was a “loose woman” whose husband was away in WW2 and who took it as her pleasure and duty to initiate the teenaged boys in the county; she “left to take a job with the war effort”, had the baby, gave it to older well to do distant relatives to raise and nobody was the wiser for many years.) A blood test indicated that my father was his dad (though it wasn’t conclusive like a DNA test would be), and the reason he contacted him was because he needed his family medical history due to a health problem with one of his own children. Afterwards my father occasionally attempted to contact him but was basically given absolution by the kid (“the man who raised me is my father, no offense”) and accepted it. Ironically the possible older son’s name was the same as my older (full) brother’s; he sent a sympathy card some while after my father died and that was the last we heard of him, though I did not Internet search for his name once and he was still alive and living in Oklahoma.
My grandfather is rumored to have been the father of a kid who did in fact look a lot like my father, but I’ve no idea if he is. My maternal grandfather could have had children up and down the Gulf, Mobile & Ohio railroad tracks as he was gone 6 days per week, LOVED the ladies, had my grandmother’s permission and blessing to fool around (she wasn’t carried away with sex and particularly hated pregnancy; her own mother [the family bastard’s aunt] lost a baby and almost died when my grandmother was about 2 and then another one during the Influenza epidemic of 1918 when my grandmother was a teenager and her mother in her 40s, and I think between the two they terrified her of dying in childbirth). To the best of my knowledge Mustang didn’t leave any foals out there but it wouldn’t surprise me (and I’m pretty sure he’d have acknowledged them in his will if not before).
There were several men in my family (not in my direct line) who had black mistresses with whom they had children. This was almost a status symbol in some places; the relationships were usually consentual and sometimes loving. One was my grandfather’s cousin who had a monogamous relationship with a black woman for years and years, had several children with her whom he at least privately acknowledged and paid to educate, but whose estate was contested by his nephews and nieces when he dared to leave his land to them in his will.
Yeah, it was always worse for the women birthing the illegitimate youngins then it was for the men who sired them. One of my GGgrandmothers was born in wedlock, but only by about five months. When her parents were standing at the altar, I’m sure the bride’s Irish pappy had a shotgun pressed against the groom’s lower vertebrae. The stigma was still strong as of the late seventies, when one of my aunts gave birth to my cousin out of wedlock, and my mother jumped all over her sister for bringing shame upon the family by bearing a bastard child. Of course, a few years later she then gave birth to me out of wedlock, so eat crow, mom!
I am the youngest and refuse to be the Keeper–although I doubt I was groomed for it, anyway. My one sister might have been the one tapped, unfortunately, she is dead, so she’s out of the running. That leaves my oldest sister and my brother)not likely). I bet oldest will do it–she likes to micro-manage everyone any way. Plus she has no kids, can fly anywhere at any time (she has millions of frequent flyer miles) and enough clout in her job to just go for a bit and come back etc.
As for my inlaws, they may live less than a mile away, but I have already told my SIL that when the time comes, her mother is all hers. I will not take care of a woman who did her best to ruin my marriage etc.
Sadly, though–I think my hsuband is the Keeper. He spent every Sunday, and I mean every Sunday, in Michigan helping out his godmother, who lived to be 99. She was a Jewish woman, turned Christian Scientist (sounds like someone right out of sampiro’s stories!) and she was a bitter, mean old cuss. But I digress.
So, when the time comes (my Dad is still teaching at 75), there will be some jockeying for positions. It doesn’t help that they live currently in Memphis; I live near Chicago, my sister in CA, my brother in Texas, and my parents are retiring to Washington DC. I think I’ll go lay down now…
There was a lot of that in my family. My mother’s maternal grandparents had the first of their fifteen children about five months after the marriage, my paternal (straight line) grandparents about 7 months later* and his mother had her first child about three months after her marriage**.
My maternal grandparents had their nine months (and a few days) after they were married, then she had another just under a year later (Irish twins, as they’re called- single birth siblings with less than one year between them). This could have a lot to do with why she told her husband to cheat. The second child died in infancy and she had a third, which is when she gave him his orders, admitting that the third was to atone for the second; ten years later my mother was born during the Depression when he was laid off the railroad and she didn’t want him fooling around in town; for the rest of her life she told people that my mother was a change-of-life baby and it was literally not until my mother was grown with three kids of her own that she did the math and realized her mother was thirty-three when she was born (earlier than the age at which many women today start their families). Of course MeeMaw was a bit of a malinguerer.
*Kitty & Carrie used to mention their brother John’s seven-month birth and how he was “so tiny you could put him in a breadpan” and so premature he didn’t have any fingers below the knuckles- they grew in later (?!). This was apparently to prove their mother was a virgin bride. It’s possible that he was premature but it’s still doubful a two months premature baby in 1881 Alabama would have survived (especially since he survived for 100 years).
**This woman, called “Gam Susan” by Kitty & Carrie (and who figures heavily into what I’m currently writing even though it’s set in 1981, almost a century after her death) was numerically interesting. She was 32 when she married, six months pregnant, and her husband was 18. As my father observed “there’s an interesting story there, but alas it’s sunk into the swamps of respectability before I could hear it”. Her father, wealthy by the standards of time/place, clearly disliked his son-in-law and gave them an extremely complicated dowry in which everything (slaves & cows [and it’s impossible to tell which is which] and land) was clearly established as for their use but ownership was to be his until their oldest surviving son was 25. This was pretty clearly a way of saying “you’re not getting your hands on a damned thing” to his son-in-law. Had he given it to his daughter then her husband would under the laws of Alabama (laws that existed late into the 20th century) have had ownership of it as well. As it was he was financially destroyed by the Civil War and they lost everything.
Another interesting thing about that marriage: all my life I heard that “Gam Susan’s” husband, whose given names were John West, died of dysentery (or as my father put it “shat his all for old Jeff Davis”) at the Siege of Vicksburg. I found his Civil War records online: he was with the 47th Alabama Infantry and later with the 16th Alabama Infantry, neither of which ever were deployed to Vicksburg. In 1880 a man with the same name and within a couple of years of the same age appears in the Arkansas census with a wife (no children) and then again in the 1890 and 1900 Oklahoma censuses (different wife in those two, still no children). I’ve wondered if it was him- if marital troubles caused him to just keep walking during or after the war. Whatever the case, by the end of the war she was remarried (to a man old easily enough to be her first husband’s father) and had another child.
Another ancestress who appears several times on my family tree because of the odd intermarriages of her children was my maternal grandfather’s paternal grandmother Amanda Roy (1830-1915). Her first husband, George (Deramus or de Ramus or Diramas, depending on the record), was a rich old planter (estate estimated at $60,000 in the 1860 census, which was really good) who was, depending on the record, between 39 and 45 years her senior. They had several children, including a daughter named Becky in 1857. He died in 1862, a few months later in November 1862 she gave birth to his (?) posthumous twin sons, and in January 1864 she gave birth to a son by a new husband. This son, born 14 months after his mom had last whelped from her previous husband, was my grandfather’s father.
Meanwhile, Amanda’s daughter Becky married a farmer named John Rawlinson (spellings vary) whose dead first wife was the granddaughter of Becky’s father, Old George D., which means that the first wife, who was 20 years Becky’s senior, was also Becky’s niece. Rawlinson’s daughter from his first marriage married Becky’s brother, the one born in 1864, and with him had my grandfather and 14 other kids. Meanwhile Becky and John R. had about 13 children of their own (John R. had 20 altogether), all of whom were my grandfather’s uncles/aunts and first cousins. It also made Amanda my grandfather’s grandmother (she was his father’s mother) and step-greatgrandmother (because she was his stepmother’s mother) and his step-great-great-grandmother (because her first husband was his great-great-grandfather). There were other alliances like this that made people have uncles who were also their nephews and first cousins who were also their second and third and fourth cousins, etc etc., until it literally required a family tree to figure out who was related to you and whether it was okay to date them.
We moved from New York to Florida in June 1991 and Grandma followed us six months later. Maybe you should pick another state. 
I was meant to be the Keeper in my family. I was too, was raised by my grandparents. If one lisened to their own children, I was spoiled rotten. I don’t agree, fully, as my grandmother was crazy, and abusive, but my grandfather did spoil me.
I think I was the expost-facto Keeper, because my mother left me with them and ran away at age 30.
But, I fooled them all. I ran away too, at age 18. I did so with my grandfather’s full consent. He knew what lay ahead if I didn’t go.
Sampiro, as always, thanks for you wonderful Williamsesque stories.
My granddaddy said I was keep the first time he held me.
I was a fishermen’s reference though
My husband’s biological mother is the Keeper. Her 89-year-old mother was at home up until just a few years ago, and it all but ruined Mamaw’s life.
I suppose I’ll be the Keeper, but I live so far away. It’ll mean moving back to Canada. Thankfully there’s a lot of years before any keeping will need doing.
Yanno, Sampiro, you should count your blessings: I think you’d rather deal with a Jocasta complex than a Medea complex.
Jest sayin’, is all.
Thanks for the stories. And you’ve got another guaranteed sale with me.
Reasons to Live:
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Children
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Husband
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Cats & family
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Sampiro’s book!
Every time I read a **Sampiro **story, I just want to give you a hug. For any number of reasons - you pick your favorite. You be sure to tell us when your book comes out and we’ll make it a bestseller for you. You, sir, deserve that success in every way.
I don’t think I’m the keeper, although I am the youngest. I can see it falling to me, however, since I’m definitely the most responsible of my siblings and I’m not planning on having any kids. My parents (and parents-in-law) likely won’t need much keeping, though, and that’s a good thing.
Another keeper here. Although not to the degree of Sampiro or his father, I did have serious fears of that for a few years.
My Mom was the Keeper. Some of her siblings would help out and my uncle handled the finances, but Mom was the one who visited and talked and that the nurses always knew best.
I’ll be the Keeper. My brother will long since have kids to watch out for and perhaps put through school by the time my parents need a Keeper, and I have the double whammy of being the youngest and the only daughter. But as long as I don’t have to change adult diapers, I’m okay with it. My parents more than spoil me and set me up for the future. They’ve taken on debt to send me and my brother to school so we won’t have student loans - I’ll do the same to send them to a good nursing home. When it comes to that, I’ll move heaven and earth to make sure they don’t end up in the craptastic home in town.
On the fly cover of the book you need to put a flow chart of who is who. From Mustang on down it seems pretty straightforward but before that is just damn.