Lydia Shire

Age 15

I grew up in Brookline, and I was a problem child for a while. I was very wild, so my mother and father put me into a very strict foster home with other children when I was 15. That is why I moved from Brookline to Dorchester—Fields Corner. This lady, Mary Kelly, had foster children and kept a very strict house. But actually, believe it or not, she taught me things about food. She used to go to the butter store, and she would have her butter cut, a whole big round of fresh butter, and I loved it, but she never refrigerated it. And I asked, “why don’t you have to refrigerate butter?” and she said there’s no milk solids in it left to go bad. So it was just little things along the way that I learned from her. She was a wonderful woman. Every morning we would have to hang out the clothes out on the line, and even in the winter we’d go out and put clothespins, and even now I love the way laundry smells when it’s been outdoors. To this day, I never dry my pillowcases in the drier. So you can always learn something from anybody, really.

I went to Jeremiah E. Burke High School, and at that time it was all women. Donna Summers went there, too—she was my friend. I fell in love with my boss, Tom Shire, that was his name, at the movie theater, where I worked as the ticket person in Dorchester. And my father had just died a year before, and my mother was living in Brookline and struggling financially a little bit, but she was okay. And I got pregnant—I was seventeen. We decided to get married and have the baby. And I remember this night so well, it was a beautiful night. I went home to Brookline with my husband to be, and I rang my mother’s doorbell, we went upstairs, sat down on the couch, I introduced her to Tom, and in the next five minutes I said, “Mommy I’m here, and I’m letting you know this is going to be my husband and I’m pregnant.” And this is the most beautiful thing I am going to tell you. My mother was such a wonderful woman, that all she did was care about me. She didn’t care about herself, or what her friends would say. She looked at me across the room and she said, “How are you? Do you feel alright?” All she cared about was me. Not a bad word came out of her mouth. She didn’t flinch, she had no horror in her face. She was sweet and she was wonderful to me. You’d hope all parents would be like that.