Donna Ladd was in the third grade when her mother sat her down and said the words she'd never forget: "I can't read or write. I'm gonna need you to help me do my business." 

In this episode, award-winning journalist and Mississippi Free Press co-founder Donna Ladd talks about her mother, Katie May Coates Ladd, a woman kept home from school to cook for field hands, married at fourteen in the middle of a road so no one could stop it, and yet one of the sharpest, funniest, most clear-eyed people Donna has ever known. "I have deep respect for smart people stuck in uneducated bodies," Donna says. "My mother was an example of that."

We talk about shame and secrecy, about a mother who unlearned a lifetime of casual racism when her daughter asked her to, about beehive hairdos, and how home calls us back. 

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In this episode of A Daughter's Inheritance, host Susan Seal talks with Dr. Donna Clevinger, professor and senior faculty fellow in Mississippi State's Shackouls Honors College, about the mother who shaped her life on and off the stage.

Donna shares memories of her mother, a spirited young woman who came of age in 1940s Virginia, met her husband-to-be at the YMCA, and was pulled out of pharmacy school the moment she got engaged. Two decades later,  she went back to school for agriculture and landscape design.

At the heart of the episode is the story of two weathered white vases: a flower show entry that "had no movement", and the quiet grace with which Donna's mother turned disappointment into fuel for a whole new chapter. 

A story about resilience, reinvention, and charting your own course.

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This week on A Daughter's Inheritance, I'm joined by my colleague and friend Gail Miller, who works alongside me at the College of Professional and Continuing Studies. Gail shares the story of her mother, Mary Catherine Williams, known to everyone as "Miss Kat", a beautician for over 50 years whose chair became a place for more than just haircuts.

Gail talks about growing up around the quilt frame at her grandmother's house, the community of women who helped raise her while her mother worked, and the quiet strength her mother carried, including the customers Miss Kat would let slide on payment, no questions asked, until they could pay her back. We talk about growing up in the segregated South, the things that generation simply didn't discuss, and the powerful, unspoken ways love and lessons got passed down anyway.

This is a conversation about nurturing, community, silence, and strength, and about a mother whose actions spoke louder than words ever could.

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In this episode of A Daughter's Inheritance, Susan sits down with Kate Salter Gregory,  Associate Professor and Director of the Mississippi Political Collections at Mississippi State University Libraries who has learned to make the most of whatever situation she was in. "You play the hand that you're dealt" was a mantra for the women who came before her. 

Kate shares the story of her mother, a confident, intelligent, endlessly curious woman who built a career in economic development with the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians before her diagnosis at 24 reshaped everything. Kate talks candidly about what it meant to grow up fast, to find independence forced on her early, and to spend countless hours in hospital rooms during her teenage years. She reflects on the friendships, faith, and community that carried her through.

This episode is a tender exploration of resilience, grief, and the inheritance of grit, faith, and self-belief passed from mother to daughter and now from Kate to her own two children.

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She was impatient, restless, and by her own daughter's admission, a bit of a hot mess. But Joy Griner was also a pioneer, a woman who grew up in the hills of West Virginia in the 1930s and spent a lifetime pushing back against what the world told her she was supposed to be.

In this episode, Susan sits down with Emily Noble, a Starkville educator, to explore the life of her mother Joy, a librarian and PhD, who found her truest self only after she stopped trying to be someone else. Emily reflects on a relationship that was sometimes more silence than conversation, the funny stories and the tender moments, and what she finally got to say as well as what she wishes she'd said sooner.

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In this episode, I sit down with Diana Eubanks, DVM for a moving conversation about her mother Diane, a woman who once confessed that "apple pie and motherhood" might not be her thing. Their relationship wasn't always the best, and Diana's dad didn't help, but later in life, they grew closer. 

From a friendship forged in Girl Scouts that lasted a lifetime, to a card Diana discovered carrying words she didn't know she needed. This is a story about the strength that only reveals itself through difficulty. 

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 Rhonda DiBiase grew up a Mississippi Delta girl and lives 12 miles from the town where she was born. She was shaped by a mother who never claimed to have all the answers but somehow always knew just what to say. In this conversation, the author of Fear Finds Faith shares memories of a woman who was funny, faithful, a little bit mischievous, and almost always "thoughty." These stories of Rhonda's mother, Linda Baker, will make you laugh out loud and just might inspire you to drop a card in the mail to let someone know they're on your mind. 

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Losing a mother is difficult at any age but losing her as a toddler creates a longing that can shape an entire life.

In this episode, Nina Rivenburgh opens up about what it means to grow up without her mother, who stepped in to nurture her, how she found connection across the absence, and why the bond between a daughter and the mother she barely knew can still feel remarkably, alive.

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The mother-daughter relationship is complicated enough on its own. Add siblings to the conversation, and things get really interesting.

In this episode, Susan sits down with three of four sisters to explore how one woman shaped each of them differently, and what that has meant for the relationships they have with each other. Shared memories, different experiences, and the mother who lives in all of them.

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 In this first episode, Susan introduces the heart behind the podcast and the woman who inspired it, her mother, Bobbie Seal. Through conversation with her cousin Linda Weir, Susan begins to trace the outline of a life that shaped her own,  sharing the memories, values, and laughter, and how the wisdom of her mother (in her own voice) continues to echo across generations. 

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