Mother's Day 2021-Remembering My Mom

 

Mom with her "bed warmer", Miss Molly (about 1996)

My Mother died eleven years ago. She was my best friend for many years. Towards the end of her life, as dementia crept in she became alienated to me. I suspect part of her attitude had to do with my brother who lived with her and turned her against me. I have two younger brothers, he is the middle one. He never has liked me. Of course he's a Trumper now, no surprise. We don't speak. 

However, for many years my Mother and I were best friends. I was her favorite, being the first born an all. She always wanted a girl and early on I guess that's why she probably treated me as her "little girl." She told me she wanted a girl to make up for the childhood she felt she was robbed of. Her Mother died from the after effects of child birth shortly before my Mother's second birthday. My Mother was the youngest of five children, having two older sisters and two older brothers. One could say she had a Cinderella childhood, whisked away from her Cinderella like chores and step-mothers at only sixteen years of age when she met my father. 

She left school in her senior year and got a quickie marriage in Maryland in 1940. I was born the following year. 

This was during the World War II years and my father was a cross country truck driver (he failed his draft induction because of a childhood brain injury, was stuck in the head with an ax . . . no kidding). "Pop", as we called him, was frequently away for weeks at a time delivering vital supplies across the country while leaving my Mother to raise three small boys a year apart in age (I was born in late 1941 and my two brothers were born in 1943 and 1944).  

When the war ending my father cross country truck driving days were over and he began a job as a welder. No privileged childhood here savings funds for "the boys" to "go to college". 

My Mother's job was raising me and my brothers while my father catting around (another whole story that perhaps I can go into a future blog, stories my Mother only told me after my father passed away). One day she had a confrontation with him about setting new rules for the family. Turn the family finances over to her  (he was spending almost all of his money on other women) or she was going to leave him. And stop the tom catting around. My father was a handsome and charming man physically large and well endowed and thus very popular with the local ladies and he knew it, and they knew it. He loved the attention the ladies gave him but he loved my Mother even more and so he changed his ways and settled down. Of course he was never too fond of me nor my brothers. My youngest brother eventually became his favorite but overall, his three kids were an annoyance to him. He could just as well have done without us.  I remember one Thanksgiving dinner when me and my brothers were teenagers.  Out of nowhere he put down his fork ladened with turkey gravy covered mashed potatoes, took one slow look around the dining room table and said "I must have the dumbest kids."  Where did that come from. But that was Pop. Never one word of encouragement, ever. Never. 

Now my Mother, she urged me on, always. I didn't want to take typing in school because it was a "girl's class".  She said "You're not wasting your time t taking study hall, you're going to learn something you can use in life!" And I took TWO YEARS of typing, eventually earning the award as Best Typist In Class (from Underwood Typewriter company, and I still have the medal to prove it and I'm still typing to this day like right now). 

In elementary school I hated spelling.  I'm still not great at spelling (I've always had trouble spelling archetict and still can't) but she would sit me down at the kitchen table and with a wet dishrag on her right hand, we would go over each word in my third grade spelling test I was having the next day. Each time I would spell a word wrong, she would hit my left ear with that stinky, wet dish rag. Talk about getting the mule's attention with a two by four.  

Also, when I was only ten years old she got me a job that I didn't ask for. She said I was going to be a paper boy. Heck, I wanted an allowance and to hang out with my friend's at Guinta's Drug Store after school. Oh no, she had different plans for me. She contacted Mrs. Linderman, the local "paper lady", and I was soon delivering about sixty Philadelphia Evening Bulletins every day after school, on Saturday and Sunday those HUGE Sunday papers which often took two trips. Initially I was resentful that I was "made to work" but eventually I realized that this was one of the best "career moves" she could have made for me.  For the next five years I delivered newspapers until I quite in ninth grade because I thought I was too big and old to ride a bike. Remember this was the Fifties, and in America only kids rode bikes. We weren't Europeans like in Amsterdam Holland who rode bikes in droves. I remember seeing those newsreel images of adults riding bikes and though "how weird is that?" I certainly didn't want to be like that thus I gave up my bike route and took over my Mother's job cleaning offices after work. She left her office cleaning job to go to work at a new Pepperridge Farm frozen foods plant that had opened nearby. I remember how angry she got when she found out I was making .55 cents an hour (this was The Fifties after all) and she was only making .45 cents an hour. She asked her former boss why her 15 year old son was making more than she did and she was told "Because he's a man." Ah yes, the Glorious Fifties. Boy was she angry.

She went on to work at Pepperridge Farm for the next twenty-five years, eventually becoming the sole breadwinner for the family after my father took "early retirement" at fifty-two years of age because he thought his job making trailers was "too stressful." Pop went on to live another twenty-eight years, puffing on his pipe and lamenting his back luck in having the dumbest kids in the world, dying at age eighty of lung cancer after being told for years to stop smoking. 

After my father died in 2000, my Mother seem to have lost her purpose in life. Her "boys" were now adults with their own lives and families (yes, Bill and I were and are a "family" even if he didn't pop out some kids). Her best friends were her cats "Miss Mollie" (the calico in the picture with her at the beginning of this post) and rusty, a big orange tabby. Eventually my middle brother, the one who hates me, came to live with her after he divorced (big surprise, how could anyone live with him?) Over the next several years he pretty much poisoned her mind against me and at the end of her live she was pretty much distant to me. Eventually she went to live with my youngest brother who lived in South Carolina because my middle brother couldn't take care of her as her health and mental condition declined.  

I wasn't with her when she died.  I wish I was but maybe it wouldn't the made much difference since she was not the same person I grew up with. I think it's fair to say at best she was confused about our relationship and at worst, she probably thought I betrayed her because she was living with my youngest brother and not at her home in Pennsylvania with her cats. But she could no longer take care of herself nor could Middle Brother take care of her. My youngest brother had his mother-in-law live with him and his wife for twenty-nine years before she passed and he was and is a care pastor of a large Christian Fundamentalist church in Greenville, South Carolina. both he and his wife and one daughter who lives at home with them, are very caring. My Mother got the best care possible in her final years for which I will be forever thankful to my baby brother and his wife the rest of my life.

So there you go folks, some off the cuff remembrance of my Mother this Mother's Day 2021. I remember the good times and the bad times but I will always be thankful that she was my Mother because I truly believe I could not have had a better Mother in this world. Now my father, that's a whole different story. I've often wondered what kind of person I would have turned out to be if I had a father he cared about me, nurtured me, encouraged and  most of all liked me. But it was not to be. That's probably why you'll never see a post from me on fond memories of my father. Oh you'll see a post about the "other memories", his cruelty and indifference and selfishness.  Maybe, lately I try to keep my blog upbeat but those old memories keep creeping in.  Those memories of him that to this day cause me so much resentment. But that resentment if offset by my Mother's kindness during most of her life to me before Brother Two's influence and how she raised me to be the person I am today. 

Thank you Mom. Rest in peace. 

Me and Mom and Pop - about 1986