Honoring Two Strong Women

For International Women’s Month I’m taking a moment to think of two women in my family, one is my father’s mother, and the other is my mother’s aunt who was like a mother to her.

My grandmother, Helen Johanna Lehrian Manson Jackson, was born the second child of Helena and John Lehrian in 1895. She took the lemons she was dealt in life and tried to make lemonade. A second-generation German American she was only allowed to go to school through 8th grade. Then she worked at home. She married her younger sister’s widow and had two children. He worked as a clerk for Jones and Laughlin Steel, so as a young wife and mother she must have thought she’d have a great life ahead of her. Then with a three-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son her husband died in 1922 of consumption.

She had to go back home and live with her parents, her younger sister and that sister’s family as well as two other relatives in their large three-story home in Bloomfield. She found a job as a cleaning woman at the University of Pittsburgh. Through the years she worked her way up to management in the department before she finally married once more and retired. Of course, back then there was still that glass ceiling, and the university never told her that as a full-time employee her two children could have attended Pitt. As a result, my father and aunt never took advantage of higher education.

After her second marriage I hope she was happy for a few years. At least until her second husband had a serious stroke leaving him partially paralyzed and unable to talk. She took care of him until her own health deteriorated. In later years she wasn’t an easy person to live with, eventually living in a small apartment with family checking in on her.

Some of my fondest memories of this gritty, hardworking woman were when I was in nursing school and on Friday afternoons, my half day of classes, I’d walk down to her apartment and meet my mother who worked nearby, for lunch. It wasn’t fancy, my grandmother never learned how to cook very much (she was relegated to cleaning the house while her mother cooked). But after lunch my mother would return to work, and my grandmother and I would play scrabble! I could never beat her; she was a whiz at the game. I think I get my love of playing games from her.

My grandmother was a survivor in a man’s world. I give her a lot of credit for that. She made lemonade with the lemons of life she was given.

My mother’s aunt, Rosina Barbara Seitzinger Metz was a force to be reckoned with in her own gentle way. Born in 1892, she married at the age of 25, bore two sons and faced the death of her youngest when he was 8 from a motor vehicle accident. The boy was hit when he chased a ball into the street. It happened so many years before I was born, that aside from a brief mention one time when I saw a picture of two little boys with her, that’s all I knew.

I have another photograph of her somewhere, as the owner of a candy store in the Bloomfield section of Pittsburgh. She played the stock market and did well until the stock market crash in 1928. A couple of years later, she, her husband, and oldest son moved in with her brother (my grandfather) and his daughters when their mother died after complications in childbirth. She raised the youngest girl, my Aunt Cathy, from a baby until her brother married again a decade or so later.

As I look at Rogie (that’s what we called her since my oldest cousin couldn’t say Rosina when she was little) and recall her gentle rolling laughter and easy-going nature I also think of her as she puttered around her kitchen cooking when I’d walk up the street to visit. She loved the song, “The Old Rugged Cross” and sang it all year long. It didn’t matter she couldn’t carry a tune; she was happy just to be singing. Maybe I get my love of singing from her. Rogie reminds me, now, decades after she has passed, of a reed planted along a flowing stream. She bent with the sorrows and struggles in her life, then rebounded with the joy of loving others in her own way. My siblings and cousins loved to climb up onto her soft lap, knowing we could rest there, loved and secure.

She babysat my siblings and I when my mother had to go back to work. Rogie supervised my twin sister and I as we learned to cook following meticulous recipes my mother wrote out for us. Most of all I remember her chuckles and laughter, even when the husbands of “her girls” teased her about putting ice cubes in her beer. She did her own thing, went her own way, and loved everyone.

Now, as I think of my grandmother and Rogie, I realize that while their lives were very different, each faced tragic loss in her life. These two women did not complain or dwell on the past. They did not feel entitled, but forged ahead and I applaud the courage, steadfastness and love they had, each in her own way.