My grandma was lucky, her daddy owned the store (the store) in Albany KY. Her daddy was AOK with her getting an education. That's a real rare thing in Eastern KY. She left home and got a nursing degree. She came home and hooked up with my grandad. He was 15 years older than her, and a real rascal. He owned a tow truck and was a mechanic. This gave him options. For example, he was able to run booze with the tow truck while grandma was still looking for a job in the hills and taking care of their home. For whatever reason she was very enamored of him. They eventually had four children together, but the defining moment was early on, when the first baby was born. Grandma was home alone that night and all the next day with her dead child. For whatever reason, that was turning point for grampa. My grandmother was his fifth wife and that dead child, named Billy Joe, was his third kid. He, according to grandma, became a different man after that night.
They worked things out some way or another. They moved to the big old city of Eastern KY [redacted]. Grandma got a better job than Grandpa. Grandpa got religion, and there finally came a day, when they took custody of me because my mom was kind of crazy. Grandma never really got into Gandpas religion thing, but she humored him for years. It was weird. She was always just like, Tuesday, this is not how I want you to live. She took me to the library when she was tired, she encouraged me to read books, and I'm not kidding, when I say that he was still such a backward person that he would hide her reading material and mine. Shit, I don't even know what my point was anymore.
Maybe just my grandma