This is the beginning of something I’ve been working on about my (unusual) mother.

Grace McSpadden was a winsome girl from bluebonnet country, as smart as she was lovely. She knew it, too. High-spirited and strong-willed, she was determined to live a rich (and fully examined) life. In college, she worked for the Daily Texan, interviewed Carl Sandburg, dreamed of being a journalist. But this was the 1930’s. It didn’t happen.

She married — a preacher. They moved often, from one small southern town to another. They lived in genteel poverty. She cooked and washed and sewed. They had three children. She sang in the choir and did church work. He preached fine sermons but felt professionally stymied and sorely under-appreciated. She failed to be the helpmeet he pined for; she longed for things they could not afford. Their marriage grew more and more unhappy.

I imagine that the life Grace lived and the attitudes she held are representative of those of many of her contemporaries in comparable circumstances. But three things about her stand out: Her lifelong bent for self-reflection. How doggedly she held on to her hopes. And the fact that she wrote it all down, year after year, in letters to family and friends and, occasionally, in probing notes to herself.

Also: She kept carbon copies.

I have two manila folders full. In 2020, amid the crises we alI experienced plus a few extra of my own, I found the folders in a “Memorabilia” box. I put the papers in chronological order and, for the first time, read them through. I saw what a long path she had walked to become the person she was when she died at age 58. I was struck by how little I had known of that path. And I felt that what Grace had left behind, wittingly or not, was a rare record of the experiences of so many of our mothers, who lived, as she did, in the middle of the last century.

The Grace I knew in my young adulthood (I was 24 when she died) was full of fresh accomplishment. She’d earned a graduate degree, bought a house, become a dean in a small liberal arts college. She was teaching college English and African-American studies, and pursuing ground-breaking research on the work of Richard Wright.

My college friends marveled at the sort of mother I had — recently divorced, striking out on her own, a mother who urged us to read Simone de Beauvoir and James Baldwin, a woman who knew how to counsel a student seeking a safe abortion. A striking, vibrant, confident woman. While so many others’ mothers seemed forlorn, mine was flourishing.

On occasion, I could’ve used something less extraordinary. Here’s an example: When Grace dropped me off at Wellesley, she promptly went home and wrote an article called “How to Tell the Kids Goodbye without a Tear.” Proud to have it published, she enclosed it in a note to me. (Would a tear be so terrible?!) Here’s another: In a brief visit home before returning to college after a summer job at Glacier National Park, I told her I’d hopped a freight train from Glacier to Spokane. I thought she might say, “You could’ve lost a leg!” Or, “You could have been raped!” She said, “Oh, how I wish I could have done that.”

Now, though, I think I get it. Reading these letters, full of struggling to force herself to defer to her husband, of stretching dollars and mending clothes, of manses crying out for repair and cars with holes in the floorboard — now I see that this was a woman who had been yearning for years to live the life she was finally living. Yearning to get back to the hopes she’d outlined to herself as a brand new college graduate. To become, as she had put it early on, “A Grace McSpadden I can be proud of.” And damned if she hadn’t gone and done it. But what a journey — from the wish to the reality — it had been.