Mom - I Remember What you Told Me.

Growing up with my family was an adventure to say the least.  While the Saturday night fights were being shown on TV, my own family had their own version of it.  It was live and my brother and I had front row seats.

It was many years before I came to understand what made my mother the way she was.  It did not make what she did right, but I was able to understand.  Understanding why became extremely important when I had my own child.

On July 1, 1930 a female child was born to Nancy and George.  She was the youngest of then 6 living children.  There was Pershing, James, Nancy, Marjorie, Juanita, Mom and George Jr. was born about a year or so after Mom.

I am not sure of the birth order.  I was never paying close enough attention when Mom droned on about her ancestors and her immediate family.  It was important to her, but all I wanted to know was how to leave that town I so came to detest.  There are some things that I remembered about the life she lead as a child because she repeated them often.

Mom was less than six when she learned to cook.  She had a stool she stood on while she fried an egg for herself and her little brother.  If she did not cook for them, they got no breakfast.

It was a wood-burning cook stove and it was almost 2 feet from the wall of the kitchen.  She got up in the morning and made sure there was a fire in the stove.  She got out an iron skillet and some lard.  She then cracked an egg into the skillet and fried it.  One of them ate the yoke and the other ate the white part.  They each got the part they liked.

She wore hand-me-down clothes and shoes so there were seldom times that anything fit properly.  She was six years old when she smoked her first cigarette.  One of her older sisters told her she would pay her if she would wash out her baby's dirty diapers.  She washed them out and when she was paid, it was in a couple of cigarettes.  She didn't know what else to do with them so she smoked them.  It did not take too long for her to be finding all kinds of nasty jobs to get her pay in cigarettes.

Mom was a sickly child and often had bronchitis and pneumonia even before she started smoking.  It was apparent early in her life that her mother, Nancy, had problems.  Nancy or Nannie as George called her had what was referred to as "sick headaches" and was often lying on the sofa with a rag tied around her head.  It was at those times, Mom knew to stay as far away as she could.  Nannie was brutal.  When she was in one of her moods she would kick Mom and berate her until Mom found a chance to escape and hide behind the stove in the kitchen.

Mom was beaten often and her frail body was frequently bruised and hurting.  After one of Nannie's more boisterous rampages, Mom came down with pneumonia, at least that was what they thought, and did not expect her to survive the night.  She survived, but got no better.  Nannie did not want to take her to the doctor because of the fresh bruises on her body.  George picked up the small body and took her to the hospital.

Mom had rheumatic fever.  They called in the Catholic Priest to give her Last Rites.  When the Priest knelt by her bedside, she opened her eyes.

The priest asked if there was something he could do for her and she said, "I want a cigarette."  She told me that if the Priest was there, that meant she was dying and it would not make any difference if Nannie knew she was smoking.

The frail little girl did not die.  She lived to go back home with her mother who now knew she smoked.  She still slept in the bed she shared with her little brother.  Georgie wet the bed.  Mom did not like sleeping in the bed with him so she took a canning jar and caught a black widow spider.  She put it on the stand next to the bed and told him that if he didn't stay sleeping at the foot of the bed, she would let it loose on him.  He did not know she was not about to let that thing loose on the bed or in the house.  She did not like spiders but she liked a pissy bed even less.

Something that even Mom did not know until I was in high school was that she had polio when she was a child.  She went to the doctor with me and they still had her old medical records.  When she went back to the doctor, he asked her if she had any problems after having polio.  She was shocked to learn that she had polio when she was a young girl.  After finding out about the polio, she wondered if that was why her one leg was a couple of inches shorter than the other.

When she was in her mid-twenties Mom was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis.  One of the specialists she saw told her she needed to be in a wheelchair.  According to Mom the conversation went something like this.

"You need to be in a wheelchair."

"Why?"

"Because of the pain you are in."

"Will being in the wheelchair make the pain go away?"

"No.  You will always have the pain, but..."

"If I'm going to have pain if I'm in a wheelchair or not, why would I want to confine myself to a friggin wheelchair?  Have you lost your mind?"

And that was how Mom handled everything.  She was in pain, but she was up and going, not letting someone wheel her around simply because she was in pain.  She had pain from the MS.  She had asthma and allergies to dust, wool, fragrances, grasses and a bunch of other things.  She had pain from Rheumatoid Arthritis. 

She took up bowling because a doctor said it would be good for her back.  She could not bowl with the big balls so she bowled duckpins.  She had her own balls and a special skirt made just for bowling.  She was good enough to get a trophy.

Ah, the trophy.  After several years and married to her third husband, we were living back in the small town where she grew up.  My little brother and I were arguing about something and he picked up the trophy and I grabbed it from him and it broke.  I knew it was going to cause a scene and I meant to get it repaired before she found out, but she was quicker than I was sneaky.  It is only recently that I realize what that trophy meant to her and why she cried when she saw it.  It was a symbol of what she had accomplished against all the odds.  It was a symbol of her determination and I broke it.

Over the years I have learned that Mom was less brutal than her mother and I was less brutal than she was.  I learned that she changed and so could I.  Over the years I learned to appreciate her, even admire her.

I miss my mother.  I would like to be able to tell her how sorry I am for breaking her only trophy.  I would like to thank her for doing the best job she could.  There are so many things that I would like to tell her.  I would like to tell her once again that I love her.

Mom called me at 6:00 am every morning for the longest time and there were times when I was so aggravated and wished she hadn't called, but I never said anything to deter her.  Then one day, I noticed that she had not called for several days, so I called her.

She answered and said something unintelligible and I immediately got concerned.  I called several times a day and throughout the evening until I spoke to her husband.  He said she was losing her mind and he was going to have to put her in a nursing home.

I told him I would be there in 24 hours.  By the time I got there she had been admitted to the hospital.  Within 48 hours, they diagnosed her with stage 4 lung cancer.  She was losing her mind because the oxygen was being cut off by the tumor.

I brought her home with me after she was discharged so I could care for her.  That was October 31, 2000.  Mid November she started chemo.  By late December she was in her right mind.  We had visitors in December and one of them asked her if she knew Jesus Christ as her Saviour.  Her answer was simply, "No."

Her answer shocked me just a bit because in the past she always argued with anyone who brought up God, or Scriptures or anything connected to the Bible.

She shocked me again when the following Saturday she asked me if I was going to church on Sunday.  I had not attended church since I brought her home, but my answer was, "Yes."  She asked me if she could go and what should she wear.

I do not know the time that it happened for her because we never really got a chance to discuss it.  She changed.  Suddenly she was at peace.  Her language was clean.  She wanted to go to church every chance.  She was a wonderful person to be around.

She told me one day that all those years she had read the Bible, this was the first time that she saw salvation in it.  I was stunned.  God, The Father, was awesome.  He gave her that one more chance, that chance that I had prayed for eight years asking, pleading for Him to give her.  She took it.

It was March of 2001 when her husband drove to our home and picked her up and took her back to their home.  I visited her several times and I asked The Lord for one more favor and that was to be with her when she went home to be with him.  He granted my request.  I almost did not go to see her that weekend, but He compelled me to go.

It was June and the cancer had overcome her weakened state.  The radiation treatments had not helped.  She had been given steroids and her face was swollen.  Her hair was gone and she was very weak.  Her hospital bed was in the living room and I was sleeping in the recliner which was about a foot from her bed.  I was flipping through the channels with the sound muted when I heard it.  I heard that final breath, that sigh of relief.  I looked at the time.  It was 2:00 am.  There was really no need to wake anyone.  Good-byes should have already been said.  So, I woke no one.  I turned off the TV and leaned over my mother and whispered to her that I loved her.  I had heard that as a person dies, their hearing is the last sense to leave.  On that assumption I had to tell her that one last time that I loved her and I did. 

I waited until morning when someone else came in and "discovered" her death.  After the memorial service, I told her husband when she had actually died and that I had been awake.  He said that I had done the right thing in waiting.

The funeral was filled with people who had known her "before" and there were many mentions of what a change had come over her.  She was so pleasant to be around.  There was no greater compliment that The Lord could have gotten than the acknowledgment that He had changed her life so dramatically.

She and her husband had been married more than 30 years and he said that if she had been that pleasant to be around the whole time they were married, that their marriage would have been so much better.  I told him that He had The Lord to thank for that, but I don't know that those words truly registered with him.

I miss Mom, but my hope is that she is with The Lord and I will once again see her and we will praise Him together.