Mother's Marriage (Peculiar Marriage II) Zhang Baotong 2016.5.1

This is a story told to me by Boss Shao, who runs a restaurant in Shang County.

In the mountainous area of Shangxian County, it is very sad that there are no boys in the family. Because if there are no boys, there is no one to inherit the family business.

My grandfather used to be a landlord, and I heard that before liberation, there were mules, horses, cows, and some Guangyang. However, after liberation, they were all divided by the government, and from then on, they became poor. But my grandfather's biggest worry was that my grandmother gave birth to five golden flowers for him, but not a single boy. When all the girls grow up, the grandfather will choose the most beautiful and aura girl among the five girls to stay at home and recruit a son-in-law.

As a result, Mom was chosen. At that time, my mother was only 16 years old, the third in the family, and she was in the middle of the line. Although there is no photo of that time, from my impressions and memories of my mother when I was a child, I think my mother is still very beautiful, and dignified and beautiful, with the demeanor of everyone's ladies. On the contrary, my dad looks like the kind of poor man who is honest and responsible. I just buried my head in my work all day, didn't say a word, and sometimes I had to look at my mother's face. So, I think my dad is quite pitiful in his life. However, it was also his blessing that he could meet a woman like my mother.

My dad was from a family on the edge of the river more than ten miles away from my mother's house. Because the river often floods, causing no grain to be harvested, the people there are very poor. My dad was eighteen when he came to my mom's house. At that time, it was not considered to be married, and I could not live with my mother, but I worked at my mother's house, which was actually the same as a long-term worker. If my grandfather is unhappy one day, I can get rid of him. It wasn't until two years later that my grandfather asked my mom to marry my dad.

Because my grandfather has a bit of a family background, the life of the family is quite good. However, two years after my mother and my father got married, my grandmother gave birth to another boy to my grandfather, which was my uncle. And I was more than a year old at that time. Because my grandfather had a boy, he couldn't let my mom and dad stay at home anymore. So, I forced my mom and dad to leave the house and set up their own businesses. But where did my mom and dad go to set up their own doors? This family was all theirs, but now this family is not theirs. Grandpa saw that they had no place to live, so he gave them the bullpen. The cattle pen is small, dirty and smelly, and there is water everywhere. My mom and dad cleaned the cattle pen, shoveled away the stagnant water, leveled the ground with dry earth, and made their home here. Although the house is not so dirty and smelly, and there is no stagnant water, but there is no door on all sides. My dad managed to figure it out for days before he finally got the house in order.

My mom and dad didn't have any land. So, my mom and dad found a hillside and started farming. Soon there were more than ten acres of land. My mom and dad planted wheat, corn, potatoes and soybeans in the fields. Life is slowly getting better. However, my grandfather and grandmother are old, and they used to rely on my mother and my father to work in the fields, but now my mother and my father are on their own, and they do all the work in the fields, because my uncle was still young at that time.

Grandma was a very eccentric woman, and seeing that my mother and my father were doing better than theirs, she began to disturb our family, and often ran to our yard in the middle of the night to pretend to be haunted, which made our whole family sleep restlessly, but there was no way. Once, at about three or four o'clock in the middle of the night, things in our yard were knocked over, and the noise was very loud. Our whole family woke up frightened, thinking that we had recruited thieves. However, when my father came out to take a look, he saw that my grandmother had come out of the haystack. For a long time, my mom and dad were helpless about my grandma's behavior. Later, my mother found out that my grandmother wanted to ask for my family's place.

When I started school, my brother was four years old. My mother and my father built two huts on the edge of the village, and from then on, our family moved a little further away from my grandfather's house and returned the house that had been converted into a cowpen to my grandfather.

After all, my mother is the daughter of a big family, and she is still a little particular about dressing and living, and her temperament is also very solemn. She always speaks slowly and reasonably, so she is very much like the head of our family. And my dad is still like a long-term worker, he doesn't like to talk all day long, and my mom lets him do whatever he wants. I never pay attention to food and clothing, what I eat, and a piece of clothing can be worn from spring to winter. But he believed in my mom as if she were his sister. Moreover, although he is a door-to-door son-in-law, he did not become a door-to-door son-in-law later, and our children's surnames also follow his surname Shao, so he is equivalent to getting a smart and beautiful woman like my mother without spending a penny, which should also be his blessing and luck.

My mom and dad have two daughters and a son. Because we are very poor in the mountains, all three of us came to Xi'an to work as soon as we graduated from junior high school, and now we all have children. But we all love Mom and Dad, and we know that they have suffered for us in the past, and now they are old, so we all want them to live a better life.