I wrote this many years ago and I think that I’ve asked that it be printed twice because it says what I know to be the truth about mothers…not all the truth but enough to mean something.
I can see her standing in the light from the kitchen window, dust motes dancing around her as she washed the family clothes. She stood at that sink every Monday and washed the clothing of four small children, her husband and herself on an old fashioned wooden washboard.
At five, I was intrigued, carefully noting her wash day methods. She would scrub each item and, when it was sufficiently cleaned, she would put it behind the washboard and begin to work on another. When there were no more clothes to wash, or, more likely, when there was no more room behind the washboard, she would drain the sink, fill it again with clean water and rinse all that she had just scrubbed, finally wringing each with her hands. She would take each sink load of wet clothing outside to the porch where, in all but wet weather, she would hang the wash on the line, carefully adjusting the poles that held it up under the weight of the clothing. Wash day sometimes took all day.
At five years old, I wanted to be just like her. I wanted my hands to look like hers, reddened by the water and the cold. I couldn’t wait until I could wash clothes at the sink.
She was faced with raising four children born in less than five years virtually alone. My father was spirited away by the state of New York to a tuberculosis sanitarium in Otisville when I, the eldest, was six years old. She struggled with little money, and was even the recipient of welfare for a time, accomplishing heroic deeds with the help of her mother, my beloved grandmother. I can remember them conferring over the remaking of second-hand clothing, ripping apart an old sweater to get yarn to knit mittens or make an afghan to warm our beds, making inexpensive meals out of bizarre ingredients such as chicken feet or kidneys. I can remember not knowing that we were poor, wanting things like paper and crayons, but thinking that only the very rich had these things. I wanted to be just like her, making do, making everything safe.
I saw my mother go off to work, leaving the house at 10 p.m. to work overnight as a telephone operator. She was, for many years, the primary breadwinner. My Dad’s tuberculosis was closely followed by heart disease and the dissolution of the company for which he worked. I was there to take over part of the burden. I had learned as much as I could about her motherly arts. I could cook and clean, and even sew.
I didn’t have to wash clothing in the sink; my five-year-old childhood dream had been transformed by a front-loading GE washing machine. The clothes still dried on the line in the backyard and it took a while before I could help with that chore, but I grew as fast as I could. I helped her as often as possible, focusing on growing up and getting good grades. She was still my hero.
She was tired when she got home, but still had much to do while we were at school. But then, well into my teens, I no longer envied her and aspired to something more than the drudgery of her life. Her vision of life was colored by her experience.
She counseled me, “Learn a trade, Ann, so that when your husband gets sick you will be able to support your family.”
I, at 15, wanted so much more than that and was annoyed at her lack of imagination. At 15 I was too concerned with my own ambition and dreams to see the woman who lived that work-a-day life for the heroine she was. My adulation was replaced by teenage contempt.
Where did that little girl’s adoration go? I was looking at her through a child’s eyes and it was only when I had children of my own and understood the power of that mother-child bond that I began to understand her in even the smallest way.
As a young mother who also worked outside the home, as she had, I complained that I didn’t have enough time to play with my children. She smiled and told me that she never had time to play with us.
“Always so much to do,” she said.
I spent a week with her about a month before she died. We did nothing of great import. We ate out at her favorite restaurants, simple family places tucked here and there around St. Pete. We talked, we listened to the gulls on the beach and watched some TV. I helped her plant flowers in the bed by the side of her house.
She told me that she always wanted to be a nurse, but she had to leave school at the end of the eighth grade to help support her parents. And she loved nice clothes. When you have four growing children and an invalid spouse, money for nice clothes wasn’t possible. Her vices, she would smile, were romance novels and licorice. She loved her small gardens, always with her favorite portulacas front and center. She was an expert seamstress, like her mother, and we were the recipients of her talents for years. She had a faith in God that was strong, a belief in her children even stronger. We could do no wrong. Ever! She cared for us even when we, wrapped up in our lives, were too busy to attend to her, too full of our lives to ascribe the debt that we owed.
She carried us under her heart for nine months. She nursed us through illnesses, celebrated our accomplishments, visited our classrooms, accompanied us to college …something she could never dream for herself … was the last down the aisle before we walked to the altar to marry, spent weeks with us after the birth of our children, clipped coupons and sent them to us when she had more need of them herself. She spent her life on us, giving us all she could. But, I wanted more than that. What it was, I couldn’t articulate.
I wish that I had known my mother as that young girl with dreams, the one who became a woman who gave up those dreams so that we could live ours. At a mature age, I now know what “more” was, how she was “more” in all she did, so strong and determined to raise her family despite tremendous hardships. She sought nothing more than to see us succeed into happy, healthy lives. We were the parameters that defined her existence. We were her “more.”
There’s a small wooden washboard that hangs over the sink at our cottage which reminds me that I am not a good enough person to even come close to being the woman who was and is my mother.
Happy Mother’s Day in heaven.
