WOMENS’ JOURNEY

(AN EXCERPT)

©2013

By

 Ruie MULLINS

I guess you could say  I raised myself ,. The child of show people living on the outside of what we call a community, a month here and a month there, wherever the wind blows so to speak, always the new kid in school. One year I went to fourteen schools from September to December and finally balked and told my mother I would not go to one more new school, fortunately. My mother needed help taking care of my little sister, We had arrived in Dallas and she couldn’t find a sitter so I got the job. Not long after that we went back to my Grandmother’s place in St. Joseph. Missouri and I finished the 8^th grade at a familiar school. I had been there off and on during the early years while living with my Grandmother while my parents looked for jobs in different shows that could use good singers and dancers, My father was a musician , he wrote songs and sang and my mother was a dancer. I went on to summer school and was passed to the 9^th grade. Mine was a fairly lonely kind of childhood, my playmates were other show people, every now and then  I would find a kindred soul and I would have a best friend for a while, then it was time to move again. My schooling was a bit shattered with always being on the move. It was in the middle of the depression and work was hard to find. We lived in St. Louis for a time. I THINK I did the 4^th and 5^th grade there. I remember being in the Brownies and hitting my head while playing drop the hankie in a church basement. I almost knocked myself out. The Brownie leader thought I was being smart assed with her and didn’t realize I had hit my head so hard and on one of the marble pillars that held up the church that I probably had a severe concussion I remember slurring my words and couldn’t say my name and her telling me that maybe I should just go home  if I was going to continue being sassy and so I walked out into the night where the snow had started to fall pretty heavily and then walked home for about two blocks. It was freezing cold and it probably saved my life for I got home and went to bed  where I stayed for about a week or so with a blinding headache and was vomiting every day , no one called a doctor , we didn’t ever call a doctor for something as trivial as a headache but when I returned to school I couldn’t add up a simple column of numbers and I noticed my memory didn’t seem as good as it was before. I   used to  able to tell jokes in Latin but couldn’t do that either. Something felt like it was broken in my head and I wasn’t smart any more, Nobody thought anything about it. It was just life.