Honoring Mothers: MY MOTHER

A collection of reminiscences shared by the readers of Joyce Maynard’s website. (With a few grandmothers included, for good measure.)

My Mother was a Christian (she would not have appreciated being characterized otherwise), and she believed in spirits. Many an evening while sitting at the kitchen table, late at night, my mother and my older sister would go to the closet and bring down the Ouija board. This ritual occurred whenever there was a pressing issue to be resolved, or a serious question to be answered. In the dim light, over coffee, and through cigarette smoke, the Ouija board would perform it's magic. Not everyone could get results running the Ouija board, but my Mother seemed to inspire the spirits. The little heart shaped plastic piece would race around the board in answer to any question, and sometimes without any provocation at all. It would move so fast, zig-zagging quickly that I had no idea what it was saying. (I should mention that when I was allowed to observe, I had to maintain a certain decorum -- it seems that the spirits do not abide a frivolous nature or skeptics.) When it would stop, my Mother would pause thoughtfully and then relate what the spirits had responded. Only she was sure of the message.

Mom believed, quite literally, that I was an angel, and I was never sure if she loved me so much because I was an angel, or because I was her son, but no matter, I felt her unconditional love. My own mind does not allow me the luxury of trusting the Ouija board, but sometimes in the middle of the night when I awake with a troubled mind, I sense my mother’s spirit comforting me, and I believe.

-- John Thiesen, Tucson, Arizona

My mother, born in 1909, was always very mysterious about her childhood in New York. Whatever my sisters and I know has been cobbled together from bits and pieces Mother disclosed over the years. Before she died at 91 years old, I asked her if both her parents were Sicilian. “Why do you want to know?” As it turned out, her father was only an Italian.

Mother told me about going with my grandmother, Sarah, to secretly visit her mother’s sisters. They stood outside a large estate and visited these estranged aunts through a locked wrought iron gate. Sarah married Frank Idone against her father’s wishes, an unforgivable sin in a Sicilian family. Unfortunately, my great grandfather was a good judge of character

Frank Idone focused his abuse on his oldest daughter. Mother was forced to sit in a chair in the middle of the kitchen while he threw garbage at her and berated her. When she could, she took refuge in New York City’s museums and art galleries and began a life long love affair with art, painting and sculpting well into her eighties. When Mother was twelve or thirteen, a truant officer came looking for her after a prolonged absence from school. The New York City authorities found her pregnant and being kept at home to hide the “family shame.” Frank Idone was arrested, tried and jailed. Mother testified against him in court but felt blamed for her father’s crime.

She was taken out of the home and put in a Catholic home for “wayward” girls. My mother gave birth to a red-headed son who was whisked away and adopted. When she voiced a desire to become a nun and teach, she was told she was “un-pure” and could only hope to work in the kitchens of the parish schools. Nonetheless, Mother clung to the Catholic Church till the day she died. “Jesus Christ is my best friend,” she said frequently.

When Mother’s emancipation from the girls’ school approached, her father was preparing to leave prison. Sarah worked in a candy factory and lived with Mother’s younger sister, Marie. Mother suggested that they get a house and live as a family again. Although for a while when I was a teenager, Mother created an imaginary step father, Mr. White, when Frank Idone was released from jail, he resumed his place as the head of the household. Nonetheless, Mother always spoke of her mother, Sarah Strano-Idone as “a saint.” Whatever anger she had about that betrayal, she held close to her heart with all her other secrets.

Mother was named after her mother, Sarah Bertha Idone, but changed her name to sound more American. She became Sally B. and set about re-inventing herself on her own terms. When Mother left the girls home when she was eighteen, she went to work as a live in “mother’s helper” and enrolled in the Peter Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. She dreamed of a better future for herself.

When Mother met my father, Thomas Joseph Murphy, he was still in high school and working as a bicycle delivery boy for a local butcher. They fell in love and after he graduated, they married and my mother left school like a good Catholic wife should. My four older sisters were all born in New York City within eight years. Ten years and a move to Oklahoma later, I was born during the worst poverty the Murphys ever suffered. Then when I was five, my father died of a heart attack after a visit to the dentist.

I was nine in 1958 and old enough to compare my family with those of my classmates, I noticed that my mother was very different from the other children’s mothers. For one reason, I thought she was very old -- nearly fifty. My oldest sister, Marilyn was the same age as the mothers of my classmates. I would see them in their station wagons in front of Marquette School looking young and pretty -- youthful in their pedal pushers and cotton blouses. My mother looked like my classmates’ grandmothers who I’d see with their families at Christ the King Church on Sundays.

Another reason was that Mother was “a career girl,” as she liked to call herself. After Daddy died, she started working full time as a sales clerk at Seidenback’s Department Store. She sold expensive clothes to the rich women of Tulsa. Mother was 5’2”, and wore the highest platform shoes she could stand to walk in for eight hours. The clothes she wore to work hung under plastic covers in the corner of her closet. “Mix and Match! That’s the secret to a good wardrobe.” She kept four detachable collars in a jewelry box on her dresser, her way of making her one good sweater look like four good sweaters. She had a pearl collar, one with white silk embroidery, one with stones that looked like diamonds and my favorite with two tiny fox faces and eight tiny fox paws.

If payday fell on Mother’s day off, I’d go with her to pick up her check. I felt like I was in a movie when we stepped through the heavy glass doors of Seidenback’s and my feet sunk into the store’s thick carpeting. The store walls were covered with silky wallpaper and perfume hung in the air. The muffled ding of the elevator announced when we arrived at “Ladies Fine Apparel.” But Mother spoke with scorn about her customers. “Those women have nothing better to do with their time than to go shopping and spend their poor husband’s money.”

Blotting her lipstick was the last thing Mother did every morning - leaving lip prints on a tiny piece of toilet paper in the bathroom trash bag. When she was dressed and ready for work, every chestnut hair in place (cut and colored by the girls at the beauty school to save money) her long nails painted red and her lips outlined perfectly, she’d pause in front of the full length mirror on her bedroom door, posing with fingertips of the right hand gently resting in her upturned left palm, ankles together at an angle, a slight turn of the hips. I think my mother looked at herself with a great deal of satisfaction. Then she’d disappear out the front door with a quick, “Tah Tah.” The house seemed to settle and sigh after the screen door slammed.

-- Sharon Murphy, Oakland, CA

The rain clouds are filling, the sky is gray, the house is quiet and I’m still in bed. My eyes zero in on the wall of photos above my desk and I feel a slow grin coming. There, holding the place of honor in death that she always expected was her due in life is Henrietta Bernadette Pasturzcak De Bettignies. Hank to her family, Bernie to her Chicago Women’s Club buddies, Nana to those of us who are her grandkids. I think, not for the first time, that I should do a wall memorial of photos, a chronicle of moments with her that span a life of 93 years.

The slow grin is now a wide open smile, remembering my very first luncheon date. Nana was done up in an emerald green cocktail dress, red bouffant hair-do topped with one of her signature hats, this one a turbaned, bejeweled concoction adorned with a single pheasant feather plume, white elbow length gloves and an entourage of three grandchildren. We went to Chicago’s Palmer House to receive a lesson in dining with the rich and famous, neither of which we were. But Nana, we believed, was descended from royalty, Polish gypsy nomads, whom she often reminded us had allegiance to no state and freely roamed the southern European countryside.

We are ceremoniously seated and handed menus the size of mini-billboards. Nana demonstrates with practiced movements the correct way to gracefully un-glove ourselves. She orders a mimosa but we only get a pale imitation of orange juice and sparkling water. “Champagne is meant to be sipped and savored” she instructs us. It is her drink of choice and she daily reads the Chicago Tribune cover to cover alert to the offers of Andre 2 for 1. At her wake there is no rosary artfully wound around praying hands but rather 2 magnums wedged in to the corner.

At the end of the meal she removes all uneaten crackers and breadsticks, wraps them in one of the towel sized linen napkins and deposits them in her purse. “We paid for these and they’ll just throw them out if we don’t take them. And there are too many starving children in this world.” I guess there is logic in that.

Twice she was named one of Chicago’s Women of the Year, once for all of her work organizing the city-wide Blood Pressure drive. Arriving at one of the sites to kick off the campaign, nurses took her blood pressure and wanted to call for an ambulance. At 5 ft. 4” she could stare down anybody and beneath the wide-lipped black platter hat with fish netting her eyes darkened to match her tone of voice. “That will not be necessary or expedient. I have a club luncheon at noon and I am giving the invocation.” And she swept out of the clinic to settle herself in my Grandpa Larry’s custom built maroon Hudson.

Larry was not only her chauffeur but butler, maid and chef. He adored her and she welcomed his doting presence. It was a second marriage for both which spanned 52 years. He suffered a massive coronary on the back porch landing while taking out the trash. When she found him her grief was real as she knelt beside him and keened, “Oh Larry, who’s going to fix my morning muffin now?”

He once brought margarine home and Nana acted as if he had invited terrorists to lunch. Margarine and dream whip were abominations. Real butter and whipped cream were pure foods and far healthier in her estimation. Breakfast was always an English muffin buried beneath a mound of creamy butter accompanied with a side dish of fresh strawberries hidden in a cup of the purest white whipping cream. She was an insulin dependent diabetic but on eating her foods of choice or drinking mimosas she would comment that she wasn’t a fanatic about dietary restrictions.

Larry was a quiet, understated man who never once raised his voice or insisted on doing things his way. He had the bearing of a valet and an invisible presence that allowed all attention to be focused on everyone else. I once asked him what the attraction to Nana was. He smiled wide, stood up straight and opened his arms full width. “She lives so big. Everything about her is drama and excess. I am never bored by her.”

Excess was an apt word to describe the 2nd floor walkup apartment they lived in for 42 years. It was one bedroom, living room, dining room, kitchen and 3 closets furnished with tiffany lamps, brocade love seats with matching ottoman, French provincial side chairs, a fake fireplace, television and a curio cabinet. Walking through the room was done intentionally along a very narrow space. What was meant to be a walk-in closet Nana dubbed “The dog house.” It was the most magical of spaces and housed a minimum of 23 hats, old travel magazines, newspapers from years gone by, table decorations for the theme dinner parties she delighted in having, life-size paper mache palm trees and a portable bar.

When I wonder if I have too much stuff, if I need to downsize my living space, what to do with left over dinner rolls or restricting my diet, I console myself with the fact that I share in her gene pool. I have developed a taste for champagne and I agree that real butter and whipped cream are far healthier for me. And I would definitely like to live big.

-- Kris Schrader, from Illinois, for the last eighteen years
serving a community in Guatemala City, Guatemala

If anyone modeled how to welcome change gracefully, it was my British war-bride mum, who survived her feisty Boston-Irish inlaws and went on to make a home for her family -- over and over -- in locations throughout the world where her career-officer husband was stationed. Her deliberate and dedicated “nesting” efforts gave every place we lived that consistent feeling of home that I can recognize anywhere.

Because she was such a canny yet unobtrusive ally in assisting our friendships, my sister and I each find it easy to make friends wherever we go, to be the one to go talk to someone standing alone at a party, as we often saw her do. With her lively writer’s and reader’s mind, she always had friendly, interesting questions that would coax people gently into the nicest conversations, even if she had to ask them in a language she was struggling to learn.

-- Phyllis Ring, Exeter, NH
remembering Peggy Wilson Edgerly

It has now been a year and a half since the death of my mother. She had decided to take her own life by jumping 9 stories from her living room window she had moved into a month prior. I recieved a call from her 20 minutes prior and hung the phone up on her because she was drunk again. I found her belly up and still alive before the ambulance came that October afternoon. I hate to say it, but a weight was lifted from me immediatley after she passed.

Today, I still don't know exactly where my feelings stand about that. I know it is a shame. I know we all tried to get her help along all the years and it was just a matter of time before she picked up the bottle of booze or pills again and again. But I find myself listening to her music as I drive in the car and singing aloud like she did. And it feels good to wear daisy dukes, high heels, and a big smile on summer days. I know her blood runs through me. To boogy in the middle of the dance floor when everyone else is a baby, gives me pride to know I am my mother's daughter and to let it be known!

-- Lia Krystyn, Massachusetts

My senses were brushed by the smell of your comfort today
A wisp under my cheek, there for me to notice
How I miss you
The clatter in the kitchen, as you peeled a carrot for me to nibble
Life was right then, the order of things
Home, life, love, and the hope of expanding horizons
You were always, and then you were gone
Lost in between now and later
An eerie world of memories unconnected in thought and deed
A smile perhaps, a look of knowing
My ears long for your voice
My hand for your touch
My heart aches for your love.
Mom, I remember you everyday

-- Helen Meline, California

My Mother grew up one of 6 children during the depression. They were very poor which affected my Mom for the rest of her life. She got married in 1939 and the next 5 - 7 years were very rough for my parents, rationing, the war and I was born a year after their marriage. My brother was born 21 months later. Mom was born in Nashville, Tennessee and Dad was from Montgomery, Alabama. They met and married in Akron, Ohio where my brother and I were born. I was raised on Southern cooking only I did not know that was what it was while growing up. I thought everyone ate like we did. My Dad's mom would make Rhubarb Pie, bread pudding and Sassafras Tea, cooked greens and other Southern dishes. My mother cooked like she was taught from her mother. Mom made the best macaroni and cheese, wonderful banana cream pudding, Christmas custard, Graham Cracker Cream Pie (graham cracker crust baked with custard filling and meringue on top). Her fried chicken and beef roasts were delicious. My maternal grandmother made Cinnamon Rolls, and all her crusts were made with lard. My maternal grandparents owned a bakery at one time so cakes, pies, rolls were a big part of my growing up. Anything Mom made, she made from scratch without a recipe. So when I would try to make her recipes, they never quite came out the way I remember them. This past weekend, I made Mom's banana cream pudding. I worked very hard since I only make it about once a year. Mom would make one end without bananas for my sister, Beth, who doesn't like fruit. My sister came over for her end of the pudding and when she finished, she said that was just like Mom's. I smiled. That was what I hoped to hear.

Mom died in January 1999. I miss her so much. She was my mother but she was also my friend. She was much loved by everyone in the family. As my kids were growing up, we moved to Florida. When Grandma was coming, they would help clean the house, wash the windows, anything so that when Grandma came, she couldn't work but would just have to rest. And they loved everything she cooked while she was here. For many more reasons than her cooking, she is a legend in our family.

-- Lee Anderson, Clearwater, FL

As a Mother, I found sadness. My husband fell more in love with our daughter and fell, in a fashion out of love with me. Guess there can be only one "trophy" in the family. He enjoyed and encouraged that I didn't breast feed so he could get up and feed her in the early morning hours. I accepted it. He used to brag to me about how he became a "woman magnet" everytime he took her to the park. We went on (by surprise) to have another baby... a boy in the next year... he wasn't so taken with our son. And then increasingly (as I worked less and took on more and more domestic responsibilities... new house, more cars, more debt...), less taken with me. Please don't get me wrong... his love and care of our daughter is healthy and she has benefited by his interest and support. I'm just saying... in giving him his daughter... I became less important. I'd served my purpose in giving him a living person who he could love and protect unconditionally (he is not one to dig too deep). A pure, uncomplicated love. I loved her too. I physically felt her separate from me when she was about 3 months old, an amazing and disconcerting event... unbelieveable... my love for my children is more than I ever believed was possible. Her birth was the most confirming spiritual experience I have or will ever have and, wonder of wonders, I got that great gift of reliving it in my son's birth. Over the next few years my husband was overly critical of our son and a bit too accommodating to our daughter. I became less attached to my daughter and a bit overprotective of my son (of which my daughter, the overachiever, complained to me about often). It would come as no surprise that my husband had two affairs by the time our son entered kindergarten and I was able to take a bath ALONE). We went to counseling, separated, reconciled, separated... but divorced by the time my children were 10 and 12 (affair # 3 -- he just wasn't happy). I loved him more than I valued my children. I allowed a very emotionally toxic situation to continue, I exceeded my own strength, at the expense of all of us, because I loved him. I was deeply in despair. After all these years I know now he kept promising me because he didn't want to leave our daughter or his comfort. It was a long time ago and he has established a productive relationship with our son(now 18). And our daughter (now 20) is no fool. Dispite all of it, she knows her dad and she deeply loves her brother, and all of us. However, she still has "issues" with me. She felt me pull away when she was a child and she resented it. She felt that she was in a "tug of war" between her father and myself. And she blames me for that. I hope she will someday understand that is exactly why I pulled away. I let "it" ride, at her expense. Even today I don't know what I could've done to fix the imbalance between her, her father and her brother. I got so damn sad. Her father took on a "hobby" of building sailboats, when I had all the physical and financial responsiblities of a house, childcare, groceries, bills, etc. Child support didn't even pay the mortgage. I never talked to my children about the money problems. (As credit card debt piled up, I didn't want the kids to have a set back in lifestyle, never realizing I should've talked to them about expenses -- they weren't babies.) I didn't tell them that he was smearing my character in our professional and personal life. I didn't tell them that I had become so isolated that I couldn't defend myself. I didn't tell them that he had established a separate bank account where he used money for his own needs even as I struggled to pay the mortgage, bills, etc. My children don't know to this day, the extent of his self interest. At the end of my marriage there was no arena that wasn't betrayed. What they know is that I just "wasnt there." I was there physically, but I was a ghost. My children are alive only BECAUSE I loved HIM. Where will I find forgiveness? Children must be loved because YOU WANT THEM. I wanted them because HE did. That is my maternal confession. My only defense is I didn't know. I didn't know. I only thought to have a family with a man I dearly loved. I never saw children as an extension of me. I always believed they would be their own selves. My primary relationship was with HIM. The good news is, despite my failings, something remained. My children have a wonderful, supportive extended family ( that I nurtured both in my family and HIS), they are independent and confident... and they love. They love and for the most part, forgive and understand and have compassion for the imperfections of the human condition. They both are, for the most part, unjudgemental. Both have an unconditional belief in human rights. I like to think that came from me. They will never have the "family home" that I have depended on and needed all my life (my parents are healthy, independent and well into their 80s), but they have something else -- a sense of defined identity, purpose, and dependence on themselves. I find that I admire my children. I cannot express the gift and pride they continually give to me. They are so much more than I ever was or honestly will be. Life renews itself in the most dramatic way. I know now that no matter what my life brings in my middle age, I have already achieved my purpose: I gave birth to them.

-- Elizabeth, Minneapolis

When I was a very little girl, I thought my mother had the most beautiful hands in the world. I would lie with my head in her lap on Sunday mornings at our little country church, and play with her fingers. Her long, pretty nails were always perfectly manicured. I loved to see which color she wore from week to week. Like everything else about my mother, her hands seemed complete... perfect... whole.

As I was growing up, Mama and I became best friends. We shared our dreams, hopes, and confided our fears. Mama was only 16 when I was born so we could have been sisters instead of mother and daughter. I loved Mama with a passion. She was my best friend, greatest fan, and most amazing support.

Last year, after brain surgery, I moved back to my hometown, less than five miles away from Mama. I anticipated long talks together, walking down her street, just renewing the deep bond we've shared for so many years now.

It was not to be. Mama has changed just as I have over the years. She means to be caring and helpful, but what comes out is bossy and critical. I mean to be patient and understanding but what comes out is defensiveness and irritability. We're an odd, odd couple, my Mama and I.

In one argument, just last week, I felt tired and defeated as we slowly stopped haranguing each other. I looked at my mother -- with her blue eyes bright as when I was a little girl, and her dyed hair (so nobody sees the grey), and how she slumps now, from being tired or not caring or whatever. I felt cold and distanced from her. The old childhood rhyme danced snidely through my head: "She loves me, she loves me not... loves me, loves me not." She definitely does not love me anymore, I was thinking sadly. And maybe I've even quit loving her. Then, all of a sudden, I saw her hands.

Those once-beautiful hands, with the perfectly manicured nails, are gone forever. In their place are rough, reddened hands, with nails bit to the quick. Mama's hands have suffered from years and years of taking care of what life has brought to her: grandchildren from my sister that Mama has had to raise, hard work doing other people's laundry when ends didn't meet, and eczema brought on by stress. Mama has had a lot of stress over the years. When she found out I had a brain tumor, Mama used those hands to cool my forehead when the headaches raged. When my sister's twins were born, Mama took them in, and has used those hands the last two years to feed, diaper, bathe and cuddle two active babies at one time.

Suddenly, the world stopped. The rhyme stopped too, right where it needed to:
She loves me.
She loves me.
She loves me.

My mama loves me, this I know.

-- Donna Reames, Waverly Hall Georgia

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