It’s that time, again. Friends and family are burning up the air-er-Internet waves with cute mothering and parenting stories. Some are schmaltzy, some endearing, some heartbreaking, and some are even fake urban legends! Some even come from Hallmark. In my mini-Mother’s-Day countdown, I’m going to “try” to skip the schmaltz (as best I can) and record some thoughts on how I made my journey to mother-and-grandmotherhood.
I’ve always wanted to be a mother. Like any self-respecting 1950’s kid, I had plenty of dolls and friends to play dolls with. Playing dolls gave me some relevant practice with bossing people–an important trait of good mothers. My brother Bob, 3 years younger than I, didn’t really dig the doll-playing, but he did his fair share of GI-Joe make-believe and often ordered the baby-dolls to get out his way or he would shoot them. This was pre-Barbie and Ken, of course. However, I wasn’t keen on becoming a mother immediately. My mother had once written in her diary that she wanted to be a secretary for a rich man so she could travel with him around the world. Instead, she joined the Navy Waves and saw some parts of America, and then she married my Dad. They didn’t make it much past Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan, as far as I know. I wanted to be a doctor or a geologist or an archeologist, but Sister Faith, my geometry teacher, always said I should become a missionary in Africa. I thought about the nun thing quite a bit, thinking that I could become “mother superior,” a term I still like, if I went that route. I once threw a major temper tantrum while in 8th grade to convince my parents that I should join the convent in high school. My mother promptly told me that nuns don’t throw tantrums and that I needed to be a “good girl” in order to enter the convent. A “good girl” meant “well-behaved,” “not sassy,” and not “mouthy,” none of which described me then or now. Following my high school graduation, I joined the ranks of college students who didn’t really know what they were going to do when they grew up. Shortly after graduation, my mother was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer. We had no health insurance and she had ignored the lump until it was the size of a grapefruit. The story is a short one–pre-Chemo and effective radiation, she had a radical mastectomy and did radiation treatments. She lost her breast, her hair, and her energy. The skin on her torso was burned black from the radiation, and she felt stupid wearing a wig, so she was bandanna clad most of the time. I dropped out of school temporarily to come back home to care for her. The last months spent with her gave me the best example of motherlove I’ve ever seen or am likely to see again. My mother was funny, with a class-clown personality and infectious laughs, cackles, and giggles. She never stopped being the class clown. Even down to her last week in the hospital, she was cracking jokes with nurses and doctors and making all of us smile. The long part of this very short story is for other posts, but the most vivid memory I have of her during her last days was her longing for our youngest brother, Mike, who was just 7 years old at the time. In those days, hospitals didn’t have much in the way of visiting privileges for family members, especially little ones. But since it was Christmas-New Year’s time, we were able to sneak Mike in for a hug and a cuddle. She absolutely wouldn’t give up without being able to hold her youngest in her arms for one more time. (Next time–Baby #1)
