Mother

There is no doubt in my mind that this is a community. I have been acutely influenced by all of you in some way. This has become very evident in the past few days. First I was overwhelmed by the show of support my last few diary entries generated. Then I read MsNoSign’s poem which she wrote through her father’s eyes. It was so compassionate and I had tears welling up in my eyes. I thought that perhaps I would try writing through MY father’s eyes to see if I could come to terms with some of what’s going on in my life. Then Lee left me a note suggesting that I write about my mother and somehow that feels right.

This could actually be a theme entry since I remember the moment I ‘became an adult’ clearly and it relates to my mother. I was dragged kicking and screaming into adulthood the day she died. I lost my mother suddenly in a car accident. I remember calling several times that evening to speak to her. Each time I called the edge in my father’s voice as he told me she wasn’t yet home was angrier and more fearful. Finally, he called me and told me to get to the house NOW. I didn’t know what was wrong, but something was very wrong. The knot in my stomach got larger when I got to my parents’ house and the neighbors materialized, taking my 3 year old son from me to go play at their house. I walked in to find more neighbors in the house crying and my grandmother wailing on the couch. My dad was nowhere to be seen and no one wanted to talk to me. I went in search of my father. I walked into his bedroom in time to hear him speaking into the phone to my sister, telling her that our mother was dead. I began to cry.

My father hung up the phone and looked at me. I don’t remember anything else about that moment except the words my father said to me: “Don’t. You have to help me.” And so I swallowed my tears and shed the skin of the spoiled 24 year old who had always been sheltered by her mother and stepped into a pair of adult shoes that really didn’t fit. I didn’t mean this to be an entry about my mother’s death, I meant it to be about her life. Apparently I needed to address her death first.

My mother was an incredible dichotomy. To all appearances she was sane, together, focused and supportive; yet inside her private battles raged and she was tortured, angry and troubled. She taught school. After she died I was going through piles of papers and pictures and found years of school pictures. She had hers taken every year along with the students. When I looked at them in chronological order I was struck by her eyes. The oldest picture showed smiling eyes. The newest picture showed haunted eyes. All the pictures in between showed the progression from smile to haunt.

My strongest impression of my mother is that she was a liberal and an individual. She did things her own way, regardless. She was totally non-plussed by the women’s movement. By the time that became a big news item she had already left one bad marriage even though she had a small child, gone back to school to get a Masters Degree, remarried and supported her husband (my dad) while he finished his college education. Civil rights? One of my childhood memories is attending a Black Panther rally. In a time when teaching Home Ec meant baking biscuits and sewing aprons, she taught her students how to fill out job applications. We never went anywhere without being stopped by former students hoping that one of their favorite teachers remembered them. She was a union rep in her school, in the south where unions are more than a little unpopular.

One of the MOST infuriating things about her was that she was always right. Oh how I hated that! I would get in a pickle, Mother would charge in with guns blazing and tell me how to fix it. It would somehow have been easier for me if she had been wrong. She never was. My sister and I have compared notes on this and she agrees with me. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I am missing her so much right now – I am in yet another mess and sure could use the cavalry.

When I wanted to be a Girl Scout, Mother became a Girl Scout leader. When I got older and the activities got more demanding, she never flinched. She came home from training weekends where she learned to camp and canoe bruised from head to toe, but she never quit. In the way of all children, I didn’t learn to appreciate those bruises until many years later.

My first husband’s brother attended the school she taught in. He was failing nearly all his subjects. She spent time with him every single day after school. They reviewed the day’s lessons in every subject, did homework, reviewed for tests. He went on to finish school without failure. By the way, he is the only one of 5 siblings that has turned out to support his family and place a value on education for his own kids. Maybe he learned more than science, math or english from my mother.

Mother hated football. It was too violent. But when soccer made it’s first debut as a major league sport in the 70s, we went to the games and I watched my mother cheer on the trips, kicks, and sly jabs and punches that the players dealt each other. That was the only organized sport I ever saw her support. I didn’t find out until maybe 8 years ago that she had played basketball in high school.

She never felt loved or respected. There were broken bits of diaries found after she died that spoke to this feeling. She would sometimes call my sister threatening suicide. She took such good care of me and others, yet never ever spent 5 minutes of $10 on her own care. At her funeral, a very large funeral home could not hold the number of people that came. The crowd spilled out into the halls, the foyer and ultimately even outside the building. What a shame that she was unable to feel the love and respect that all those people felt for her. I have barely touched the surface of this extraordinary woman. It is truly my honor to have been able to call her mother and I miss her, every single day.