All this talk about Rose has again made me reflect on her life. Since I am, indeed, in the researching-and-writing stage of working on a biography of Rose, it’s not hard for me to settle in to thinking about her. As a woman, Rose seemed tense, conflicted, inwardly struggling with depression and outwardly maintaining the pleasant, gregarious face she was trained to show.
In her childhood, the Wilder family was desperately poor. It’s one of the facts about the Ingalls and Wilder experiences we don’t dwell on much, but it’s clear from the historical record and from their writings that they did not have much money or property, and that at times, even daily food was a struggle–and not just during the hard winter.
Today, we know more about the effects of desperate poverty on the cognitive and emotional development of children who face such poverty in their childhoods. Many of these children struggle in school, missing days or weeks at a time. Early nutritional deficiencies lead to problems with brain, bone and muscle development, and vitamin D deficiency–a current problem in the news–leads to biochemical problems including depression. Physically, cognitively, and emotionally, early childhood poverty takes its toll.
Rose would have felt the burden she seemed to be to her parents at an early age. In The First Four Years, Laura writes that a “Rose in December was more rare than a rose in June, and must be paid for accordingly.” As much as Laura dwells on finances in that book, it seems clear that the couple struggled significantly, and that money worried Laura deeply. Children aren’t stupid; they pick up on these things, and certainly, Rose did, too.
In On the Way Home, Rose writes in the setting that she felt humiliated by her mother’s need to protect her–a big girl, going on eight years old. I re-read that this morning, in the wake of a visit from my own eight-year-old niece, and marveled that Rose could think anyone would leave a young seven-year-old girl alone to play, unsupervised, in an unfamiliar setting. It led me to think about another factor in her development: birth order.
As an oldest-and-only child, research tells us that Rose likely would have been a type-A personality, forced to be independent at an early age, and forced, too, to act more maturely than her brain was ready for. As much as we note Rose’s intelligence and precociousness, we need to understand that her circumstances forced her to grow up earlier than she’d have liked.
So how did this play out? Why is this important?
Because as a young adult, Rose acted out against the restraints of her upbringing, and became a bit of a wild child, indulging her every whim, spending freely, traveling where the wind took her, and living life to the fullest. She married a kindred spirit in this regard, but divorced him when she realized she couldn’t depend on him.
Rose had discovered she could only depend on herself.
And we know where that discovery led her.
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