My mother, whom everyone called Miss Betsy even though she was married, was a refined woman. She was elegant, proud, but not to the point of condescending behavior (my goodness a Southern lady prides herself on her manners after all), and a cautious woman of strong temperament.

When my father had an affair with a Orleans showgirl, she gritted her teeth and in typical southern fashion she pursed her lips and made the best of the situation. When other people found out, the smile got tighter, the teeth more clenched, but the smile itself never wavered.

I overheard them night after night angrily whispering at each other over this. Back then, no one got divorced in the South. It simply wasn't done. Every house, every family, had its secrets but they were never discussed in public, only behind cupped hands and murmurings or closed doors full of schadenfreude.

So when my father's prurient behavior borderlined on obscene - obscene in the sense that he was starting to show up around town with his lady friend on his arm il delicto, my mother did the southern belle unthinkable - she divorced my father. Or rather, she had the marriage annulled, which wasn't an easy matter for women to do back then either. She was determined, and once she had her mind set there was no persuading.

There were battles, with the church, with him, with society's general favor. Most people sided with my father - more than likely because the "don't ask don't tell" was prevalant and many men had side mistresses.

Recriminations, tears (my father's, not my mother's), pleadings, threats later, she wouldn't budge. Later I was to find that many women, while publicly taking her to task, cheered from the confines of their own loveless marriages. My mother divorced my father in the fall of 1951. My sister and I were devastated as no one had divorced parents back then. We felt like pariahs at school, but my mother just told us to ignore those who speak ill.

We moved out of our house and into a much smaller one. My parents eventually settled into a routine - my father would come over to spend time with his family and beg and plead for mother to take him back, to be a family agan. This much have been very tempting, and an easier solution, and lord knows us girls wanted them to reconcile, but she was too proud.

Eventually my sister and I grew up, got married, had our own lives. Mother married again, to a youngish widower who was very well off, and seemed to be back in her comfortable enivornment of throwing tea parties and lunches for the ladies of society.

But one day, during a particularly rough patch in my own marriage, she pulled me aside and said in her pursed lip, no nonsense way, that had she known back then how hard it was going to be to make a second marriage work - two people being older, set in their ways and habits, that she might have tried harder to make her first marriage a success. She confided that Father wasn't the only one in the wrong.

I took her advice to heart. My husband and I worked out our problems and stayed together until his passing.