Lessons From Our Family Boarding House

The flow of guests in and out of our house was endless. There was rarely a month, week, or day when we weren't hosting some relative or acquaintance at our house all year long.  Mama and Daddy came from large families; Mama had nine siblings; Daddy had six and both were among the first born in their families. As with most families the older children got placed in a 'nurturing role' to younger siblings by default. Mama, Daddy, and Aunt Ruby parented all the later born children in their families. I also should include the many neighbors and friends who dropped in at our house unpredictably.


 I arrived on the scene when Mama was 40, Aunt Ruby was 42 and Daddy was 50. By this time Mama, Aunt Ruby and Daddy were the established 'home base' for 20 or more people because all the grandparents had died. I honestly knew little difference between my own siblings and my first cousins.  All total I had 33 first cousins!  Aunt Ruby and Mama lived across the road from each other and had daily contact.  When out of town relatives came to visit they always visited at both houses, but no one ever stayed or ate at Aunt Ruby's house. She loved everybody and she wanted to be a good hostess, but she was not good at it.  She had a small house, an unpleasant husband, unlike Mama, and even though she loved to cook, she burned everything she cooked.  None of her siblings wanted to eat it.  Mama ended up feeding most of them and bedding down as many as she could for the night. This ebb and flow of relatives presented me with unique situations and constant contact with a variety of personalities and dilemmas.


I often served as a babysitter for cousins, doing potty training, napping, diaper changing, entertaining, and teaching them about farm life. I was a waitress, cook, farm hand, storyteller, medic, and teacher. I remember the year cousin Linda got mumps during her visit. I was her companion and was expected to 'catch' her mumps as well, but for some strange reason I did not. I learned to do hair, manicures, sewing, embroidery, and clothing repair. All of these skills were learned by necessity, not choice.  It seemed that Mama and her sisters assumed that I should learn these skills as part of my hostess duties for relatives.  Cousin Ralph, Aunt Ruby's youngest son, taught me lessons about sexuality until Mama figured out what he was doing.

I remember loving to swap clothes with my visiting city cousins and being jealous of their city experiences and knowledge. I considered myself inferior to them because I was a country girl and believed that my knowledge of farm life, birthing calves, bailing hay, milking, being able to catch Nell, the mare who hated riders, and growing crops always paled when compared to the city life I imagined they had. I also remember a few fights with these cousins and every time Mama got wind of it she assumed I caused it. 


What I didn't learn from my family clan I learned from my community.  There was the neighbor who had 'spells' that I later learned in college that she probably suffered from schizophrenia. There were several neighbor families with a variety of disabilities in speech, movement, intelligence, each of which got explained to me with Mama's limited vocabulary for these types of things. Then there was Liddie, the hypochondriac, who could drive Mama out of the house on a hot afternoon to hoe the taters just to escape her visit. Of course, I didn't know what was wrong with her until my freshman introductory course in psychology.  At least, I though it was hypochondriasis. Finally, there was Daddy's sister, Nell, who had a birth defect which did not allow her to speak above a whisper. As far as I know she never saw a doctor about the condition so I never had a name for it.  She, as Mama explained, was "just made that way." Adding to this mixture of personalities was Daddy, an outgoing friendly man who often sat on his front porch reading the newspaper while Mama finished dinner.  If anyone walked past our house near mealtime Daddy welcomed them to our front porch for a visit and invited them to dinner. Mama never knew who was coming to dinner.  She handled that by making extra amounts of food to cover whoever showed up, and she rarely complained about our many invited or uninvited guests.


I used to wonder how I ended up with my fascination for psychology because I had no role models and no encouragement to pursue the field.  But after I finished college I finally connected my career choice with my experiences growing up in our accidental boarding house. I suppose it was the best training I could have had for learning about people, their many issues, and learning how to explain human behavior. Also the stories of these people are very rich.