About My Mother: True Stories of a Horse-Crazy Daughter and Her Baseball-Obsessed Mother
This month I needed a little lighter reading so I took a leap into a happier book this week with About My Mother: True Stories of a Horse-Crazy Daughter and Her Baseball-Obsessed Mother by Peggy Rowe.
About My Mother is a memoir, the first published book of Peggy Rowe, whose book Vacuuming in the Nude I read almost two years ago. And then I saved her other two books for when I needed a serotonin pick me up, so this one was a good pick.
And it really is a memoir, telling the story of a mother and daughter who seem to have absolutely nothing in common, but find common ground through love of each other. It’s completely relatable, because who hasn’t been embarrassed by their mother at one point or another? Or grown up to discover they’ve become their mother, in some capacity.
So this is just Peggy Rowe’s story of what it was like to grow up with her mother, who loved baseball, specifically the Baltimore Orioles, and did not understand that Peggy was not the proper young lady that her mother Thelma hoped for. The proper young lady was Peggy’s older sister Janet.
In true oldest child fashion, Janet was everything a mother could want. Good table manners, enjoyed playing piano, popular at school, a good student, liked boys, but not indecently so. Peggy was….not. She was a bit more of a tom boy, almost a juvenile delinquent, playing ding-dong ditch at the neighbors houses, tossing small stones on their roofs, and not at all interested in boys before she got to college. Peggy disliked music lessons, was an average student, and a bit braver than the average girl.
One of the stories has to do with a particularly awful teacher she had in grade school. Teachers today are basically whipping boys for the students and I’ve heard completely awful stories from friends who are teachers about parents who believe their little darlings can do no wrong and scream at the teachers when their kids get failing grades. Believe me….this is a very new phenomenon.
And when Peggy had a particularly awful teacher, who would make misbehaving students stand in the garbage can or under her desk. And when she turned her evil eye on Peggy, Peggy ran away rather than be humiliated like that. And about halfway home, she realized that if she actually went home, she’d have to explain to her mother what she was doing home. Which is not really an option at a time when parents usually sided with teachers. I like to think that Thelma would have been horrified to learn the teacher so humiliated her students. We’ll never know because Peggy returned to school and faced down her teacher in the Principals office. And no one had to stand in the garbage can again. So that gives you an idea of the kind of backbone Peggy Knobel Rowe was born with.
But, the one tomboy thing she did not get, was baseball. And the one very girly thing she loved, although it seems her mother did not know just how girly this is, is horses. I think I read somewhere that most of the extras in Lord of the Rings are women, because they couldn’t find enough men who were experienced riders. Because girls LOVE horses.
But, while they lived semi-rural, the family did not have room for horses. Happiest day of Peggy’s life occurred when their new neighbors joined them at church, and she found out the neighbors had horses.
And when that eventually didn’t work out, through no fault of Peggy’s….well, she almost ended up a true delinquent.
But here’s the thing. Peggy grew up in a time when parents didn’t just plant their kids in front of a screen and let TV….or the Internet…raise their kids. So one day after the first horse contact fell through, she did the very girly thing of going shopping with a friend. Thelma was thrilled. Peggy bought a combination fishnet/tube top shirt. Which Thelma did not see her in. But her dad did when she came back home. He didn’t say anything, but his eyes about popped out of his head, and within like a week he’d found a new horse connection for Peggy.
And not too long after that, the family bought a house with enough land Peggy could HAVE a horse. And Thelma briefly took riding lessons, with Peggy as a teacher.
This book was as charming and heartwarming as Vacuuming in the Nude. Mrs. Rowe truly does have a way with words, that pulls you right in and takes you through the life she’s lived. And I laughed and I cried, and I immensely enjoyed this book.
