distractors: and or so
sentence: My mother , born in the late 1920s,  received  no education.Her mother, whom she loved dearly , died when she was 12 years old.Her father remarried,  [MASK]  he stepmother was  cruel  to her.As a result, my mother was always kept busy doing ail kinds of household  affairs  ,varying from feeding scores of tame birds to  looking after  her stepbrothers "Never say die" she  would  say to herself.