Mom

My mom has been on my mind lately…a lot. She died in October before she would have turned eighty the following January. I just turned eighty.

Mom was always there for us, my siblings and me. Not once in my whole life did I question her love for me but she was more a doer than a hugger. Our home was spic and span…we were spic and span, and when she wasn’t polishing the floors of our small home she was sewing. Not only school clothes for us but Terry Lee doll clothes. I had a trunk full of them. I was just a kid and didn’t realize how much she must have labored over those clothes with the tiny zippers and buttons, but I did understand that my girlfriends were giddy about getting to play with them.

I supposed some people would have labeled us as poor. We didn’t. All the kids in my school and neighborhood were from similar backgrounds: blue collar, but the fathers had jobs and they worked hard. Neither I nor the kids I ran around with wore name-brand clothes if there was such a thing back then and when we were old enough to drive, Jewel Edwards was the only one in my large circle of friends with a car. (She was an only child.) Mr. Dunn, the TV repair man, had the biggest house.

When my children were preschoolers, Mom took care of them so I could work. I don’t think I told her enough how much we appreciated her. She looks happy in this photo with my daughters, Paige and Tracy. She adored them…and they her.

Our ageing couldn’t have been more different. Knowledge of fitness and healthcare advances have grown exponentially since my mother was young. When she was in her sixties, Mom was hospitalized five days for quintuple bypass surgery. I will never forget being in the room when the doctors took tubes out of her chest…the moaning.  I, on the other hand, at sixty-three had similar issues with my heart but had a couple of stents, spent one night in the hospital, and left a couple of days later for sightseeing in New York with my daughter and granddaughter. When I was a young mother, I exercised everyday with Jack LaLanne and have worked out ever since. By that time there was a national emphasis on fitness but not when Mom was young and that was not part of my parents’ lifestyle. I am happy, healthy, and active.

In her early seventies Mom had had a bout with peritonitis that left her comatose for a month and in intensive care for two more. She came home from the hospital on an IV antibiotic because her doctor said if she didn’t get out of the hospital she would die. My father had already passed. I and each of my three siblings took a week of vacation to take turns taking care of her. After that, she couldn’t see well enough to drive. I don’t think she enjoyed her life from then on. She was a proud woman and didn’t want to be dependent on anyone. I lived out of state by that time and felt guilty that most of the care for my mother depended on my sisters. I got home as often as possible but still…

Even though I lived away, especially when her health was failing, I talked to my mother almost every day. After 24 years, I still miss that. There’s so much I’d like to tell her.