Marcella's Secret Dreams and Stories: A Mother's Legacy

Overview

Did you ever look at your parents and wonder what kind of romantic relationship they had when they first met? Ever learn something about your mother or father that was so surprising you couldn’t believe the topic had never come up for discussion before?

Sometimes it can take a lifetime for all the pieces of a puzzle to come together. It took Barbara Brabec more than twenty years to finally see the whole picture and decide to write this book about her mother’s life and legacy for the family—and also to inspire others to write a memoir.

Eight years before she died, Marcella—Barbara’s mother—wrote the story of her life in a private memoir for her three daughters and brother. Typed on the manual Smith Corona typewriter Barbara had used in high school, it contained surprising historical facts and delightful never-told-before family tales, revealing Marcella as a gifted writer and storyteller. But what the memoir didn’t mention were Marcella’s unrealized secret dreams as a 16-year-old girl.

Barbara would not learn about them until her mother was in the last four years of her life. On that life-changing day, she gave Barbara a bundle of papers and letters that made her jaw drop, put her head in a spin, and showed her a secret side of her mother that no one in the family had ever seen before. Marcella thought she was just an ordinary woman, wife, and mother, but in truth she was quite extraordinary for her times.

Now Barbara has artfully woven together the memoirs of two authors—a book within a book—to tell a true-life story of three generations of a Midwestern farming family going back to the 1880s. The authentic dialogue, stories, and unusual collection of letters in this book offer a mixture of history, humor, drama, and pathos.

In completing the story of Marcella’s inspiring life and accomplishments with present-day reflections from her sisters, Barbara illustrates the importance of their mother’s legacy to the family and challenges readers to think about the life story only they can tell—one that should be shared with their family and perhaps the world.