In October 2005, on the heels of documenting the death and destruction that came as a result of Hurricane Katrina, I took a break, drove to Kentucky to see my sister, and attended the 30th annual Mountain Workshops with a good friend and colleague. Western Kentucky University’s School of Media Photojournalism Program has been hosting the week-long visual storytelling workshop in a different Kentucky county every year since 1976. Potential stories are researched before students arrive. Then, on day one, participants draw a not-so-flushed-out idea from a hat. My first idea and contact fell through. Then, I picked Grandparents Raising Grandchildren.
Melinda Earlywine, then age 49, and her husband, James, 47, a plant manager for an underground limestone quarry along the Kentucky River, were raising their grandson Jacob, age four at the time. They lived inside a 1,600-square-foot double-wide trailer sitting atop the hollers on a farm in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky inside Anderson County. Things are so quiet in the mornings they can hear acorns dropping through the tree leaves. The couple took custody of the boy after his parents had to give him up to the state. His mother admittedly had a history of drug abuse and his incarcerated father was no longer in the picture. According to Melinda, when Jacob was approximately 11 months old, she fished an Oxycontin pill out of the boy’s mouth.
Melinda, now a stay-at-home grandmother, was studying for her real estate license when we met, in addition to home-schooling Jacob. She sent her husband off to work every morning with two packs of cigarettes next to his car keys. Melinda would expose her grandson to educational computer games, and read to him often. Feeling that he read above a fourth-grade level, according to what others have told her. “We really never talked baby talk to him,” she said. She seldom put him in time-out.
“People keep telling me that I’ll stay young raising him (Jacob), but I don’t know,” says Melinda. “I get very tired. It just seems like we’re runnin’ all the time doin’ something.
From Grandmother to Parent, Again
Melinda missed the potential for travel now that she and Jimmy had Jacob. She and her husband were saving for retirement and had been wanting to visit Ocracoke Island on the Outer Banks of North Carolina and spend a month there. “It’s not what I expected now to have to be raising a child,” says Melinda. “Off and on, I think you go through a grief process because you lost the life you thought you were gonna have. In the long run, we’re just gonna be working until we’re 70.”
Child rearing, according to Melinda, is a lot different than it used to be. She went to the library to get a book this time.
“I was excited when I found out I was gonna be a grandmother, but I wanted to be a grandmother,” says Melinda. “It’s not as fun doin’ the raisin’ as it is the spoilin’. That’s what grandparents are supposed to do. But we wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s too quiet when he’s not here,” she added.
Further Reading
- Learn more about the Mountain Workshops here. Every year, there’s a fascinating amount of high-quality visual journalism being produced in just one week.