Even as I write, I do not know how I can write all this about my mother. She would be pained at hearing the accounts I give of her, and she would be hurt at my disloyalty. What I say would hurt her heart, and I yet I am writing down for all the world to see these stories as I observed them and see them now. I tell her stories as objectively as I can, and, still, it is not fair. Sure, these are my stories too, and, yet, it is not fair. My mother, like all of us, had her illusions. We have to have them. She had to have them. We all seem to have to keep our illusions intact.

Even as my mother would be terribly hurt, my mother would also take a certain pride in my writing. She must know, as I do know, that any storytelling ability I may have, came from her, came directly from her. Drama was her name. She had the storytelling ability all right. My mother knew how to find the words that would wring every drop from a story, the words like steeds that would ride across a tale, delicious words you could taste in your mouth like the sugar cubes she would suck on.

My mother could have been a writer of dramatic proportions. She could have written soap operas. She could have written stories that real operas are made of. She could have written movie scripts for Bette Davis. My mother could have done all this, no doubt about it, except she really did not have a chance.

You remember that my mother came to this country by herself when she was twelve. She put her hair up and passed for sixteen and got a job right away.  No schooling here in the United States for her. No schooling in Russia either. Life was survival there then when my mother, at four, washed clothes in the river for the equivalent of a penny. Children were not the center of attention there then as they are now.

My mother did not know how to write. I mean she did not know how to form words on paper. She knew how to tell a story, but she did not know how to write. She did not know how to write beyond her name, or, rather, she did not dare to write beyond her name. She was ashamed that she could not write, could not spell.

All that my mother kept in, all that she had to keep in, stuck inside, all that never got out from my mother because she had no way to write it down, nowhere to put it.

But I have more to tell, to tell about me concerning Cousin Francis. Like mother like daughter is not a myth. Except, of course, I knew how to write.

To be continued…