Flora Ann says: My life has by no means been perfect. I married an Air Force sergeant and for 15 years was an AF wife, moving often and never close to home or family. Of course, he's now retired from the AF as well as the state of NC. Our first son was born in Gulfport, MS and, being a breech delivery, a neck muscle was pulled (torticollis) and he had have physical therapy for that as a baby. The next child, two years later, was born with spina bifida and lived only three days. This was at Barksdale AFB in LA. A year later I had a miscarriage and nearly died of infection. Herman was overseas and I was getting ready to join him. While in Morocco, our son, aged four, had a tonsillectomy and afterwards started to bleed profusely, was rushed back to surgery for a stitch to stop it. Our two younger children were pretty tame pregnancies and deliveries, though our daughter, Rebecca was a breech delivery, making two of our three to back into this world. I don't think they let women go through breech deliveries anymore. They go ahead and do C-sections.
I've written about my mother because I believe most people today don't have a clue to life as she lived it in the mountains of NC. Children today are so privileged they could not imagine walking miles to a one-room schoolhouse, having to entertain oneself with games and songs, having only a homemade doll and homemade toys to play with. My mother went hungry often while her family lived off a patch of land that was not their own, and she lost her mother at age nine. Children today cannot be put to work at age twelve in a tedious workplace for long hours as she was, thanks to child labor laws. Yet my mother learned to be independent at that age when her family moved from the mountains to Gastonia, NC, and put her to work in a cotton mill. As they say, her schooling was truly in the "school of hard knocks." Still she went on to become a writer herself (how else could I have all the material on hand that I incorporated into my books?) She also wrote poetry. Though she never graduated from high school, she liked to say she went through HS four times (with her four children,) and she valued education highly, taking courses at the community college as an adult. She became an expert in flower arranging, never having taken a course in that, but born with a natural eye for beauty and symmetry of flower arrangements. She was president of her garden club, did flower show judging, and conducted workshops. My mother was also a Christian and chaired a mission circle of women.
Those are among reasons I wanted to write about my mother. Long ago I saw that, for a new writer, it's almost impossible to break into the realm of the big publishers. After countless rejections along with publishers who ask you to rewrite and re-submit ad finitum, I found Tate Publishing, a Christian publisher, who read and liked my work. I've stuck with them, though there's much to complain about and I often do. They never fail to address any questions, concerns, that I have, and for that I'm grateful.
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