Tag: mother

She was complicated and stayed hidden from me for a long, long time.

I loved her, but she was so quiet, and my dad and I were so loud. She was a puzzle to me when she was alive, but the layers of who she was and what she valued have become more vivid over the 15 years since she passed.

She was stricken by physical and emotional traumas that marked her childhood. She grew up with older brothers and old relatives who didn’t make time for her. She could pinpoint exactly when her childhood ended—“when I was 9,” she answered when I asked if she was aware of the end.

“What happened to you?” I asked.

“My Daddy Frank died,” she replied without a dot of hesitation.

It was a remarkable conversation for me because Mother didn’t reveal herself to many people, and her ready answer and complete candor caught me by surprise. She held herself apart from people, having learned as a very, very little girl that she must protect herself.

Her mother died when she was three.

She grew up with an absentee father who was almost killed—permanently disabled and addicted to pain meds—in a work accident in his 30s. He and his three living children lived at my maternal grandmother’s until he remarried briefly, and in her Granny’s house was where she could count on her grandfather’s attention and affection and some semblance of safety.

She detested any ounce of pity she was shown from others.

I asked her why she reacts to pity with rancor, and she seemed to recoil from the thought of it. My dad tried to fill in the gap: “She was patted on the head as a little motherless girl, she said, and people would sigh, ‘Oh, dear, poor little thing,’ and she’d step back from them and sneer.”

“I hated their condescending tone. What good was their pity to me?”

She presented a tough exterior like that, but people spoke after her death about her warmth as well as her dignity. She must have cultivated a protective shell that insincere people couldn’t penetrate.

At her core, she was diligent and perpetually striving. She could outwork anyone I knew and resented how much sleep she needed: “Think how much you could accomplish if you didn’t have to sleep!”

I didn’t think that. I still don’t.

What I do think is that I will never be the relentless striver to the degree that she was. I honestly don’t know what drove her, but I suspect it was her experience of poverty. She dropped out of school when she married very young and went on to complete an earned doctorate. She could absolutely work circles around my siblings and me and most of the free world.

This Mother’s Day, I am remembering the joy she expressed in learning new skills and exploring different cultures and cultivating her gardens. I am remembering the passion she expressed in the beautiful heirloom garments she made for children and the delicious, homemade sourdough bread she made for her colleagues in the college library. She had an insatiable curiosity and the heart of a maker.

She was quiet, but her impact on her family, on students’ she taught over her 40-year career in education, on her friends and admirers from civic, church and social groups was loud and reverberates in us forever.

I was richly blessed and deeply inspired. I look forward to telling her so again.