MOM

My mother has been gone since Oct. 21, 1991...and I still miss her. What I'd give to pick up the phone and call her and talk to about Kadyn, the flea market, Tammy's health, my pride in my boys and their families!

My mother was a complicated woman. She was a better mother to us when we became adults than when we were children. There was just so many of us! When I was very little, living in Kentucky, Mom worked very hard. She and Dad raised a big garden every summer, then she canned most of our food for the winter...beans, corn, tomatoes, pickles. They always raised lots of green beans and besides canning them, Mom dried them (on strings for what we called shuck beans), pickled some and cooked them every day when they were ripe, usually with little home grown potatoes.

Since we didn't have electricity, Mom washed clothes on a wash board...after carrying and heating tubs full of water. One of my first chores was scrubbing socks on the washboard. She spent a lot of hours during the day just cooking on the coal cookstove...building a fire in it first thing each morning and keeping it hot all day....irregardless of the outside temperature! Breakfast was usually eggs, gravy and biscuits...and the eggs were from the hens mom raised and tended to. Supper was usually a pot of beans...either pinto beans or green beans and cornbread. Lunch at home was usually fried potatoes and cornbread. School lunches were usually peanut butter spread on biscuits. The biscuits were cut in half and spread with the peanut butter...sometimes with potted meat. Sometimes just jelly that mom made herself.

Every wash day Mom would take the bleach water and scrub all the floors with it. We had wood plank floors that were white when she scrubbed them...from all the bleach water that had been used over the years. But...we had coal burning fireplaces for heat besides the coal cookstove...so the floors...nor anything else...stayed clean very long, from the smoke and soot.

With all the work Mom had to do, its amazing that she even had the time to bear nine babies! And she doted on each baby...until the next one came along. She loved us and we knew it...but she was not affectionate to us...after we stopped being the baby. She made sure we were always clean, fed and polite. Mom was big on manners. Please and Thank yous were an important part of our vocabulary taught as soon as we could string words together.

Mom hated for us kids to fight and squabble with each other...and many times we wore the switch stripes to prove it! She often said friends would come and go...but our brothers and sisters were ours all our lives.

We were poor and never had many, if any, luxuries...but Mom shared whatever we had with people....friends, strangers and relatives...who had less. Many times I've seen her pack a box with fresh vegetables from the garden or jars of her canned vegetables, paper bags of sugar, flour and cornmeal and she and Daddy would carry it several miles to my grandparents, uncles and aunts...or the family down the road who she knew didn't have any money.

After we moved from Kentucky to Michigan, Mom had all the luxuries she had never even dreamed of. Electricity. Hot and cold running water. Inside plumbing. Electric cookstove. Wringer washing machine. Refrigerator. And, since most of the work she had always done was not necessary now..like making all our clothes...she didn't do much of anything. During my teen years I can remember Mom only doing the cooking and laundry. Us kids did everything else. But still, Mom mothered us all. Still teaching us all she could. She took care of us when we were hurt or sick. She worried about us when we were out...not sleeping until she knew we were all home and safe again.

Mom always said she didn't care if we "liked" her or not. She didnt' try to be our friend...she was our mother who had to teach us right from wrong and keep us from making disastrous decisions...until we were able to leave home...then she trusted us to do the right thing. But, God help us if we were ever discourteous or sassy to daddy. Dad was the center of her world and we all knew it. Mom was the disciplinarian...always saying she didn't believe in waiting for Dad to come home to mete out punishment for misdeeds. Consequently, Dad seldom punished any of us...and we all worshipped him, just as Mom planned.

After I was grown, Mom became my best friend. I could and did call her nearly every day after I moved to Indiana. While I lived in Michigan, I never let more than two months go by without driving to Indiana to see her for a weekend. After my husband and kids, Mom was the most important person in my life. I couldn't imagine a life without her in it. And since she's been gone, there's been a hole in my life that nothing has been able to fill. I still look at Mother's Day cards and wish I could buy the biggest, prettiest, most sentimental one and give it to her.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY, MOM!