Page 72 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

Narrating the self 65
used to come down here when I was a kid’. But it’s only through
them that I’m remembering.
BB: Because they’re doing it?
Rosemary: Yeah, and I think, ‘oh I done that’. And I suppose more so that
you’ve got children that you do remember that. Because if you
didn’t, then you probably wouldn’t remember back to when you
was a kid, and that’s you know.
BB: And you try and do things the same or different according to
how you?
Rosemary: Um, mind you, I had a nice childhood. Like I say, my mum tried
to do everything, I mean I was an only one.
BB: Oh were you?
Rosemary: Yes. And she tried to do [interrupted by children] what was I
saying?
BB: Your childhood, you were saying you enjoyed it?
Rosemary: Yeah, my mum tried to do everything for me and I try and do
everything for them. If they want something, you know I’ll try
and get it for them. I’ll work for it, or I might say: ‘well, that’s
how it goes, you can’t get’. But it’s all for them that I do every-
thing. And I don’t think they understand that sometimes. I mean
I see them happy, well-dressed and that and it makes me happy.
(Interview 14)

It is difficult to get a sense of Rosemary’s subjectivity. She presented it as
totally subsumed within being a mother and she stressed how she was the
same as her mother – ‘my mum tried to do everything for me and I try and
do everything for them’ (although, as we shall see later in this chapter, she
also presents them as having very different styles of mothering). Children
were her ‘life’ and her only happiness was seeing them happy. Rosemary
seemed unable to make her life the subject of a narrative. Rosemary did not
lack the art of telling a good story. She told stories about her children and
was interested in exploring their different personalities. But it is interesting
that she does not suggest why they might behave in the ways they do, or why
they are as they are. Rather, the characteristics she described were essential
to each of them.

But, our Michele, is like so quiet and, well, not indoors, but at school.
At first I had a real problem with her – crying every day and not wanting
to go, used to be in class saying ‘what time is it, what’s the time, what
time is it’, you know, to the teachers. And throwing up outside the class.
When we went to school the other morning we walked out and as we
walked out she burst out crying. So, I’m, we’ve got to find a school that
she feels comfortable with
[...]
This one [referring to another daughter who sat in on the interview]