Wisdom from the kitchen table.

• Author: Vasquez, Angie Trudell
• Position: Life lessons from grandmother - Essay

I come from a long line of strong women. Women who left home and made a new life in a foreign land. These women's blood flows in mine. I know their stories because they were revealed to me at the kitchen table, when the adults forgot I was listening with big ears and eyes.

I know of one ancestor who spent her pregnancy in a hammock inside a boxcar as she followed her husband on the railroad. I know she wanted to stop traveling and to settle down in Iowa so their kids could go to school and get a good education. So they did. Education was and is prized by immigrants as the ticket up and onward. This is one side of my family.

On the other side, I know my paternal grandma got a divorce in Mexico from her first husband because he was abusive. This was at a time when getting a divorce was hard and almost unheard of. She had to sacrifice one child to her husband's family. They took everything away from her but the child in her belly. She got away, and while she never got over leaving her daughter behind, she saved herself and her unborn son.

My paternal grandmother had to give her daughter away to save herself, and though she knew the family loved her little girl and would take care of her, she never got over her loss.

Later, she could have moved back to Mexico and taken her three U.S.-born sons to her parents' house when her husband died, but she didn't. She stayed in Iowa and raised her three boys. Half of her was always in Mexico with the daughter she had to give up, and with the son who chose to stay with her parents when she came to the United States with her new husband. How do you split a heart? It is from her I get my stoicism and the ability to endure heartache and hard times no matter what.

I know my maternal grandmother worked in factories in Des Moines during World War II when all the men had left. I know she bought her own car as a young woman and raced back and forth from Newton to Des Moines with her cousins and friends. I know she bore eight children and buried one. I know she made food last and stretched out her money to the end, and that she dared to love again after my grandfather was murdered by a drunken man in a fit of rage. She never got justice. How much can one heart take? And how do you keep your laugh intact after such a tragedy?

From my maternal grandmother, I get my laugh, and my love for dancing and being on stage. With both of my grandmothers' blood in my veins, I am complete. I know sacrifices were made for my...