Chapter 6 of Tales I Can Remember, by Elsie Swagerty Burton
The financial situation for my father must have improved that summer because the family moved into a rented house in the small town of Ceres.I remember some things about that period, not what the house was like, where my sleeping quarters were, but about a few things that occurred there. One Sunday morning we, my brothers and I awakened and after investigating our parents’ room and not finding them there, went out into the living room. There, to our surprise, we discovered an older cousin, Frank Morris, sleeping on the sofa. We wanted to know why he was there and why our parents were not in the house. He announced that we now had a baby brother and that’s where the folks were. I remember I felt rage that they had not told me they were going to do that. After all I was eight years old! I always remembered that slight. I made sure my children knew in advance when a sibling was expected.
It seems there was a rule at our house that older children were not to be made responsible for the care of their younger brothers or sisters. My father had been and he thoroughly resented it. It was not to be repeated in this generation. Mother did ask me to feed a bottle to my baby brother, Jack, just once. It came at a time when a friend who lived down the street and we were doing something I considered of great importance so that incident stood out in my memory. Years later I was relating from memory how I had to feed this baby. Mother became outraged because she had gone to great pains and at considerable sacrifice to herself to see that I did not have that responsibility. At her challenge I could not, of course, recall a single other incidence when I had fed or cared for the baby, but my memory told me that I had done it all the time. It was a practical lesson in psychology to me. It showed me how we create our own realities of actualities.
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