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Recently I marveled that my mother's picture in 1933 at age 21 gave no hint of her difficult childhood or all she would accomplish. Then my mind drifted back to several significant legacies she left me.

As a young child, I was entranced by all the tales her sister and five brothers told of her accidents and adventures as a child growing up after their father died when she was two. They told of her being tossed face down into a fire when she overturned her rocker as an infant. Then there was the time she came screaming to the house with a sizable poisonous copperhead snake latched onto her tiny ankle. Once while they were all picking cotton, Hallie and her younger brother, Daniel, caused quite a stir. After they got their sacks full, the two youngsters were too small to get their cotton sacks onto the trailer without having an older sibling help them. So, being independent, they decided to make a device to swing their cotton sacks onto the trailer without adult help. I could never picture what they put together or how it worked, but one of the main parts of their apparatus was a hoe. However, it all came apart as they tried to use their invention to swing a sack of cotton onto the trailer. The hoe fell off the trailer onto Mother's head. According to the way her siblings and my grandmother told the story, the hoe "split her head open.” As a young child, I pictured her head cracked open like a watermelon because my grandmother described holding it all together as she washed my mother's head in the running water of a creek. Her brothers told me they thought she would die because the water turned red from her prolific bleeding. Thinking back on their story, I assume my grandmother was talking about holding the scalp skin together as she prayed for it to all heal without any problems since no doctor was available in the early 1900s where they lived.

Mother was determined to attend and finish school despite all the obstacles of being one of the youngest of a poor widow's brood of seven. Her siblings were not that interested in school because, in order to have a roof over their heads, they were living as sharecroppers in rural Oklahoma.

If you're not familiar with sharecropping, let me explain. Once slavery was outlawed, sharecropping emerged out of necessity. It was a system near slavery but without legal sanctions. First, the landowner furnished a "roof over your head" and assigned your family a small tract of land to farm. Then, when the crop was harvested, the landowner took it to market and gave half of the proceeds to your family after deducting for your "furnishings"—which might not leave much for your family income or, in some cases, leave you owing money to the landowner.

At that time, cotton farming in southern Oklahoma required workers to hoe the rows to prevent plant overcrowding once the plants sprouted in the spring, and more hoeing continued to control weeds. Your hoe served as the weed killer. Regular attendance of farm children at school was rare before Thanksgiving because (beginning in late September) workers were placing their handpicked cotton in cloth sacks dumped into a wagon to deliver to nearby gins—this could continue until around Thanksgiving. Hence, my mother and her siblings missed months of school because they were working in the fields. It was hard for them to keep up with all the days missed from school each year. However, that didn't stop Hallie because she often arranged to get her books and assignments ahead of time so she could keep up with her class on her own at home. 

When she did attend school, hers was often one of the last stops after a long bus ride. There were lots of stories about her attempts to get to or from school—such as when she and the bus driver crawled out of the bus after the bridge collapsed and dropped the rear of the bus into the stream or the time she fell into the creek on her walk home after the bus let her off. The temperature was below freezing, and she had to cross the creek on a log. Unfortunately, she slipped off the log and got soaked in the stream below since it was icy. Scared and cold, she ran the rest of the way home. My grandmother would always tear up when telling me Mother's hair and clothes were frozen stiff when she arrived home. Grandmother Hays was very touched that she had a daughter so determined to attend school and learn all she could. That was why she allowed Hallie to move into town when she was given the opportunity to attend high school by living with the principal and his family. Mother paid for her room and board by cooking for them and babysitting their children—thus, against all odds, Hallie managed to finish high school when many didn't value education. However, her inner drive for learning didn't stop at high school as she acquired several advanced degrees.

Her drive to overcome all obstacles and get an education impacted me and extraordinarily influenced her many nieces and nephews. However, I don't think it was the "most" significant legacy she left me. 

Was it her artistic talent and creativity that influenced me? I look around my home and see various examples of her resourcefulness and talent. She seemed gifted at whatever she tried—whether hand-making flowers to add to our greenware as we made and fired ceramics or doing leather work or copper tooling. Some of her work was so exceptional it was even put in exhibitions, and we didn't always get it back. Then there was the fact that she was always making up something new in her head to sew for me, her only child. I have many memories of her spreading the newspaper on the floor to cut out a pattern she visualized in her head for something "special" she would make for a concert or recital, or some other special occasion for me. Then, she would teach all day and work on my dress in the evenings. I would watch her lay out the fabric on the living room floor and cut it out using the pattern she had made. She would be busy working on her project long after I went to bed. I often felt I was her "doll" and that she was having fun "dressing me up" and then parading me for others to see. On many occasions, I worried "the dress" wouldn't be finished in time for my event, but she always made it—sometimes with only a few minutes to spare. My dad once told me he probably should have set Mother up in her own store and just turned her loose to make and sell things because of her creativity and how she excelled in whatever she tried her hand at doing.

However, I don't think her tenacity or creative talent is what I would count as my "most" important legacy from her. Instead, it was something that happened after Monty and I married. By that time, Mother had acquired several master's degrees and specialty certifications. She had become a specialized reading teacher for the Wichita, Kansas, public schools. She also taught some Reading Workshops at Wichita State University. The university began trying to get her to take a couple of courses and write a dissertation to complete her doctorate because they wanted her to teach full-time. It would mean more money for her and she was very tempted by the offer. I knew she would love to teach full-time at the university. When she told me she finally decided not to do it, I was surprised and asked her why she decided against it. She quietly answered, "Because—it would put too much pressure on your father. If I finished my doctorate, he would feel that he should also, and that's too much pressure on him." 

Mother seemed to thrive on learning and it never seemed difficult for her. However, we both knew that going to graduate school took a heavy toll on Daddy because of his fear of reading and tests that grew from his bad experience in his small rural grade school. Although he always managed to do well, it would upset his stomach and literally make him physically ill.

Watching my mother set her ambition aside was a stark example to me—a newlywed—in an era of militant women's liberation. It would have been in keeping with many attitudes of that day for her to "do her own thing" despite the pressure it put on her husband, Buel. Her example served as an illustration for me of the scripture in Proverbs 31 that describes an excellent wife as one whose husband's heart trusts in her and further states "She does him good, and not harm, all the days of her life." (Proverbs 31:12) Her example trumpeted loud and clear to me that when you love someone, you're willing to sacrifice for their good. Of course, that's easily true when you have children—something inside you changes once you birth that child who is now dependent upon you. However, her actions demonstrated the same tender, self-sacrificial love expressed in her marriage. Now, thinking back on her life and mine, I believe her difficult decision left me one of the most important legacies I received from my very creative, headstrong, and ambitious mother. God used it to show me that "true love trumps ambition."