You’re right. No one can read another person’s mind. My mother was just guessing, projecting her own experience on a stranger, or just making stuff up. If you like, I will agree that my mother lied to me and by repeating that lie, I just lied to you as well.

Again, I admit it, you are right. My mother did NOT know what that woman was thinking. My mother gave other people what she needed and wanted — things like respect, the benefit of the doubt, and the chance to be heard and understood.

Mama assumed — she did not know — she assumed that the woman in the welfare office might be coping with some of the same things she coped with at her job — things like disrespect, sexual harassment, unfair wages and constant worry over her children left home alone while she worked. Based on that assumption, or experience, whichever pleases you most, my mother did not want to make that woman’s day at work any harder.

We were at the welfare office because my mother had been hit by a car and lost her job. We did not have health insurance, Mama had been out of work two months and our cupboards were bare. Except for those few months, my mother worked for 58 years in a row. For the first 45 of those years, she never had a paid vacation, holiday or sick day — not even one lousy day.

My mother was a secretary and understood systems because she worked at banks, real estate companies, insurance companies, hospitals and corporations. That she could and did explain systems to me is a fact.