Lessons From My Three Mothers

Grandmother, mother and great-grandmother with author, 1974.

By Supervisor Joel P. Engardio

On every Mother’s Day, I’m grateful for the three strong women and extraordinary mothers who influenced my life. They didn’t have it easy.

My great-grandmother was on her own in Sicily with a young child while her husband tried to start a life in America. Four years later, she traveled by boat across the Atlantic with a seven-year-old who didn’t know his father. She made a home in the back of a produce store in Michigan and raised eight kids (and lost three). She lived to 95 and never learned English.

My grandmother was widowed at 48 with only a 9th grade education and had to enter the workforce for the first time in the Mad Men era of the 1960s.

My mom became a single parent a few years out of high school when my dad skipped town three months before I was born. She cleaned houses for a living and took me along on the job as day care.

When this picture of my three mothers was taken in 1974, the men in their lives were dead or absent. These women were survivors at a time when the odds were very much stacked against them.

They didn’t have much education, money or connections — but they taught me how to get by and be smart with the resources we had.

I wasn’t aware of any of their hardships as a little boy. All I knew was that I felt loved and cared for.