Mother's Day

Mother is Mother. Right? The “idea” of Mother develops from the experience each of us has with our individual mothers. Around Mother’s Day we are bombarded with sentimental tributes, as if all mothers were perfect. Well. . . Some are perfect, almost. Some are much less than perfect. Some are just plain bad. Mine fit into her own category.

My mother was the sweetest woman in the World. Ask anyone who knew her. She was generous to strangers. During the Great Depression, when our family was as poor as anyone, she never turned a tramp away from our door without giving him a sandwich. She told Bible Stories to four-year-olds in Sunday School for fifty years. She never raised her voice or screamed at her children. She never said an unkind word about anyone. A saint.

I did not begin to understand my Mother until I was 70 years old. Unlike me, Mother never questioned her beliefs or tried to analyze her feelings. All she knew was that, in order to be liked, she had to please people, and the one she wanted approval of most was her mother. Especially, she wanted to please her mother.

My grandmother, “Nonna”, also wanted to be a saint. My grandfather, a partner in a drugstore in Sherman, Texas, died in the 1918 flu epidemic. Left a widow with two small children and no income, my grandmother moved to Fort Worth to be near her sister Lena, who had tuberculosis, and Aunt Lena’s husband, George Wharton, a well-to-do lawyer. Uncle George died. A year later, Aunt Lena also died, leaving three little girls. Their guardians let my grandmother, who was already living in the house, remain to care for the children. My brother Don did not know that my grandmother did not own the house until I explained it to him in 2003.

My grandmother focused all her attention to caring for these rich little orphans. She let everyone know that she devoted her life to the care and love for “the girls.” Many years later, after I was a mother and, among everything else, was a leader of my daughter’s Girl Scout troop, my grandmother said, “I wish I could have had time for Girl Scouts, but I had to take care of three little girls.”

I did not point out that I also had three children, one of them a baby still in diapers, plus a very demanding husband. In addition, I did my own housework and gardening, while, when “the girls” were small, my grandmother had the help of a cook, a gardener and handyman, and my mother, who, as a teenager, was an unpaid servant.

My mother spent her entire life trying to please a mother who was indifferent to her. As children, my brother and I transferred to a school close to my grandmother’s house, so we could walk to Nonna’s every afternoon. Mother was always there, waiting to tell us, “Go outside and play.” Today people would be scandalized by the little girl spending hours with a little neighbor boy inside a little hut build out of logs from the woodpile. We held each other tightly as we huddled together trying to escape biting January winds. Mother was so concerned with pleasing her mother that she neglected her children.

After “the girls” became adults, married, and scattered to other parts of Texas, they sold the house to my parents. My grandmother stayed and lived with my parents until she died, aged 89. At 70, for the first time in her life, my mother was in charge of the kitchen.

After Nonna died, one day my mother and I were in her kitchen doing dishes. She washed and I dried. Mother was quiet for a while, letting her thoughts drift. I was remembering how my grandmother always washed the dishes while Mother dried them. Nonna was always in a hurry to get the job done. Once, when I was lingering over a cup of tea after supper, she grabbed the saucer from in front of me, leaving me with no place to set the cup down. In her haste Nonna often left bits of mashed potato on the plates and grease on the frying pan. While I smiled at these memories, Mother turned and, handing me a dripping plate, said sorrowfully, “I wished Mother loved me as much as she did the girls, but she never did.”

My life took a different course from my mother’s. At age 23 I married and went to live with my new husband in Chicago. For most of my adult life I lived hundreds, even thousands, of miles away from my mother. I had three children. Was I a good mother? I don’t know. I did the best I knew how to be. That’s all any one can do. That is what my mother did. God bless her.