My Grandma Bessie had twelve children, eleven of whom survived to adulthood. Grandma’s oldest was born nine years before the Crash of 1929; the youngest was born a year before the United States entered World War Two. So, most of Grandma’s children—my dad’s brothers and sisters—were home for most of the Great Depression (1929-1939).

Grandma’s husband refused to accept help of any kind from the government, including food for his children—a well-meaning neighbor once brought over government surplus food because he knew my dad and his siblings were hungry, but Grandpa made the man take the food back.

So, Grandma had to find a way to feed and clothe herself and her husband and all their kids. Grandma raised chickens, grew vegetables, and made dresses for the girls out of flour sacks. The family was so poor my father was not allowed to play outside in the winter because he did not have snow boots--he didn’t even have shoes.

The five-room house that this 13-person family lived in had two bedrooms upstairs. All five girls slept in one bed in the smaller 8X8 bedroom and all six boys slept in two beds in the (slightly) larger adjoining bedroom. Grandma and Grandpa slept in a tiny room off the living room. All day long, Marshall worked the farm while Bessie cooked, washed, cared for children, and made meals out of raw air and hope. They had an outhouse but no bathroom.

Then, one day, Grandma got a strange request from a neighbor.

The neighbor was wealthy. She had nice dishes and nice furniture. She kept a tablecloth on her table. She dressed smartly. But she was poor in one respect: she had no children. This wealthy woman took a shine to four-year-old Betty who had blonde curls, blue eyes and a big smile, just like Shirley Temple. The wealthy woman’s request of my grandma was this: “You have all these children and I have none. Won’t you let me have Betty? She will want for nothing.”

Before I tell you what Grandma said, let me ask…what would you do? Would you think about the easier life your little girl would have if she lived in a wealthy home, especially considering the hard times that Betty and her family were enduring in 1938? Would you take pity on this childless woman and gift her with a small part of your bounty so the rich woman could know the love of a parent for a child—so she could feel down to her toes the bond that changes your very soul and makes you a better person?

Would you consider how your other children would benefit once Betty was gone and there was more food and more flour sacks to go around? Would you say to yourself, “Giving her away would be better than making her suffer along with the rest of us”?

My Grandma knew her Bible inside and out. She knew the story of Solomon, the wise king of Israel, who in I Kings 3:16-28 was asked to decide a difficult case:

     Two harlots lived in the same house, and each bore a son. One child died, so the mother of the dead
     baby stole the living child and replaced it with her dead one. The second mother recognized
      immediately that the dead baby in her arms was not hers. The women came before Solomon so he
      would decide which of them had the right to the child. Solomon asked for a sword and offered to
      cut the baby in two and give each woman half. The thief-mom said, “That’s fair,” but the baby’s real
     mother said, “No! She can have him,” whereupon Solomon gave the baby to the mother who was
      willing to give him up rather than allow anybody to harm a hair on his head. 

Does this story illustrate that a parent should be willing to give up a child out of love so the child can have a better life as some insist? As my Grandma’s wealthy neighbor insinuated?

No. The story of Solomon's wisdom illustrates that a parent’s love for a child supersedes time, space, borders, governments, prison camps, and for-profit corporations. It shows that a parent who loves a child and a child who loves a parent never stop grieving when they lose one another. They never forget. According to psychiatrist James Gordon, founder and executive director of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine in a 22 June 2018 piece ("How the Stress of Family Separation May Permanently Damage Migrant Children") in Rolling Stone, "Having been deprived of people who love you and take care of you, that's something that's there and it doesn't really go away."

My Grandma refused her wealthy neighbor’s request, and she kept her Betty away from this woman from that day forward. For my Grandma, and nowadays for other poor parents who love their children, to give up your child voluntarily is unthinkable, but to have your child stolen is unimaginable.

I guess Grandma knew that. I guess that’s why she refused to give up her child, even though that meant Betty would grow up eating corn mush at a crowded table with her family rather than growing up eating whipped cream with a silver spoon from a crystal dish and wondering how her brothers and sisters were doing.

Wondering when her mother was going to come and get her and bring her home.  

My friend and I went to see Book Club yesterday because of the cast: Candice Bergen, Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, and Mary Steenburgen, veteran actors all. We figured no matter how silly the premise (Fifty Shades of Grey changes their lives—really?), these actors would elevate the material. If either of us had read Fifty Shades, we might have appreciated the movie more, but….

Sure, we laughed. How could we not with Diane Keaton doing a riff on her endearing Annie Hall shtick and Candice Bergen’s expressive eyes telegraphing her true feelings while her beautiful face maintains its composure?  The other two leads didn’t have much to work with. Jane Fonda's powerhouse talent, in particular, was not needed to play this character, who is pretty much a Barbie with brains. Mary Steenburgen’s character is so fired up by Fifty Shades that she slips Viagra into her husband’s beer. My friend and I were so horrified that a wife would drug her own husband without his knowledge or consent that we were yanked completely out of the story. Just because a woman turns the tables doesn’t make drugging a person OK, and it especially doesn’t make it funny despite (because of?) the husband's unnatural tumescence.

Craig T. Nelson plays Steenburgen’s husband. He dug in deep to play a recently retired man trying to figure out who he is. Andy Garcia, Keaton’s love interest, played a pilot rightfully charmed by her. Don Johnson played a gent with whom I'd certainly take a long walk on a beach. The male characters in this movie, generally speaking, are appealing human beings. The settings are California gorgeous, and everybody in this movie has plenty of money.  

Unfortunately, the screenwriters (Erin Simms and Bill Holderman) laboriously place ridiculous obstacles in front of our heroines’ slog to romantic fulfillment: obstructive daughters who treat Keaton like she’s about to go into a nursing home (I whispered to my friend, “If my kid treated me like that, I’d tell him to take a hike”); Fonda’s unwillingness to accept true love lest it break her comfy routine of sex-without-strings (and her subsequent weep fest after she rejects her lover?—puh-lease!); Bergen’s slacking off on her job as a federal judge because she’s busy with a dating app (really?); Steenburgen’s increasingly (and embarrassingly) desperate attempts to get her husband “in the mood.”

What bothered us most of all was the screenwriters’ basic premise that no woman of any age is complete without a man. Once the characters started reading Fifty Shades of Grey, even their decades-long friendship orbits the book like sad little satellites unable to escape its gravity. They seem not to be interested in anything else in their lives—not being a judge, running a hotel, maintaining a healthy marriage, adjusting to a death. Naturally, in this world, events in the wider world do not exist.

Worse, the screenwriters suggest that the characters shouldn’t have cared about any of those things in the first place because sex is Ground Zero, The Be All And End All Of life, Where It’s At, apparently the message of Fifty Shades of Grey as well. OK, OK—I’m here because of sex, and so are you, and so is my son, but is that all there is? Gotta say no.

My friend and I decided this movie is like a fancy dessert that's delightful to try, but it’s not something you want to eat every day. Please pass the meat and potatoes.