Legacy--Mom

In the interest of providing a little history for my daughter, it's time to talk about her maternal grandmother. Some of the more important bits can be found in the August 2019 posting "Ambivalence", and so I won't repeat them here. I'll get to Grandpa next time.

My grandfather was born in a little place called Buzzard's Glory. The last time I went by, decades ago, there was little more than a crumbling wall of a brick building, so there probably isn't even that any more. Granny, my mom, was born in Dawn, which was one street long but had a church and a school for all that. They moved to Versailles sometime in her childhood, and that's where she went to all but the last year of her schooling. 

My mother was the oldest of four, with straight blonde hair and big blue eyes, and childhood photos often featured an enormous bow on the top of her head. She was a child of the Depression, so she knew how to get by with not much, which turned out later on to be a good thing. Her weekly chore was to walk to the store to get the family's ration of oleomargarine. It was white, and came with an orange capsule of food dye, and she would be the person to mix it all up so that the white oleo resembled butter, but fooled absolutely nobody.

They moved to the town where I grew up right before Mom's senior year of high school, taking her away from her good friends, an occasion for bitterness for the rest of her life. She had taken the secretarial classes in high school, and went right to work. She wanted desperately to go to college, and she would have been quite successful there, as she was extremely intelligent, but there was no money for her to go. This was another cause of bitterness, as her younger brother went to college with the rationale that he was the boy. Her younger sister went to a school for the deaf, and the very youngest was sent to college in her turn but wasted the opportunity, skipping class to run around with her friends instead. 

At some point in the first couple of years after high school Mom dated a man who later became a lawyer, and her mother used that against her when she complained about not having money later in life, saying "You should have married that lawyer!". Thanks Grandma, very helpful. But in a couple more years she married my dad. The way he put it was that he was the Sunday school president and she was the vice-president, and they just kept it that way for life. Dad was smitten with Mom to the end of his days, despite ups and downs and fierce, noisy arguments.

They dated and were married in a time of wide skirts, tiny waists, and adorable shoes, and went to live in off-campus housing on 12th Avenue in Columbus (the upstairs apartment of a family named Gump) while Dad finished his master's degree. Mom hopped on a bus and worked downtown as a secretary while Dad was in classes, and loved every minute of it. And in her spare time, of course, she typed up Dad's thesis. You can still view it from the Depository at OSU.

After graduation, they moved to Findlay where my sister and I were born, and when I was five we all moved to Piqua. We went to the church where Mom and Dad had met, and Mom had a wonderful, true, soft little voice for singing hymns. Sometime in those first couple of years back in Piqua, I think they came close to divorcing, although I don't know if my siblings even know this. I remember Mom taking my sister and me with her to an office which I recognized much later in life as that of a lawyer, and Mom cried and cried in front of him. Shortly after this my grandmother pulled me aside and told me that if my parents split up that I was to make sure to tell them that I had to go live with her. It didn't impress me at the time, but I put the pieces together later. 

My baby brother was born a little while later, and I have always wondered if he was a reconciliation baby, but I'll never know. We were living outside of town at that point, in a house Dad designed and built himself. We never had more than two pennies to rub together, so it wasn't the house they wanted, but it turned out to be a great house anyway. And there was room on our property for a substantial garden. Poor Mom--she had told dad before she married him that she wouldn't be a farmer's wife, and she never was, but thanks to that garden and the even larger plot down the road, she still spent all her summers canning, freezing, and otherwise bitterly processing produce. But technically, Dad was a military contractor, not a farmer!

Mom had two great loves in life--big cities, and books. Dad was thoroughly allergic to big cities, but he shared the love of books. I grew up with lots of books in the house and a well-worn library card. We kids didn't really own much in the way of kids' books, but I made up for that later. Mom was like I am, or perhaps I am like she was; if we weren't doing anything else we had a book open in front of our faces, and always carried one with us wherever we went. I still do.

When I was in junior high school, Mom was diagnosed as diabetic. I suspect she was diabetic several years before she knew it, as looking back I can tell that a lot of her behavior was that of someone who just wasn't physically well and took it out on everybody else. Taking it out on others took several forms, none of them good. Once she got treatment things got better, fortunately, but then her own mother died. Mom always accused her mother of "digging her grave with her teeth" as Grandma loved food and didn't let her own bad health slow her down any in the gustatory department. Mom considered it a form of suicide, and was bitter about that too. 

Once I was in college, as my college years overlapped with my older sister, funds went from "tight" to "pretty much non-existent". So Mom went back to work, using those faithful old secretarial skills, and was a happy woman at last. By the time we three were all out of college, she had that income but not as much to spend it on, and life got much better. She and Dad went to the UK twice, and in fact were stuck in Scotland at one point as they were over there on 9/11. Nobody could leave. Ah, what hardship, to be stuck in Scotland! And Mom, for the first time in her life, finally got to indulge in shopping for shopping's sake, and not as a dire necessity. One time my little family went to visit for the weekend and managed to miss taking one of the suitcases. Mom joyously put on her shoes and took me out to buy a small boy some pajamas and clothes to replace what had been left behind. I don't think I could have made her happier if I'd tried. 

In her last years, the doctor put her on progressively more restricted diets in an attempt to control her increasingly severe diabetes, and Mom got thinner and thinner. This was yet another cause of bitterness, as Dad could still have whatever he wanted, and was as large as ever. It really did not seem fair. And then dementia set in, little by little. It showed up in her cooking, as she began to leave crucial ingredients out of dishes she had been making for decades, and also in an unfortunate paranoia that had Dad as its focus. She was convinced he was hiding things from her, and that he was moving her bookmark in the book she was reading. Or trying to read, at any rate, as her vision was nearly gone by then--the final bitterness of one who lived to read. So she would hide her book when she wasn't reading so he couldn't get at it and move that bookmark. Of course what really happened is that she just forgot what had happened in the plot last time she read it. 

There is a trend, here, and it probably wasn't difficult to pick up on. Mom was a bitter woman. Of course, she had plenty of reason to be, and I understand that. I wish I could have changed her life for her, sent her to college and waved a fairy-godmother wand to fix all the frustrating events of the years, but of course I couldn't do that. I wish I could have known her as a young woman, and given her the female friend that she never had by her side during her married years. I wish I could sit down with her now and ask for some happy stories to mix in with the sad ones. Mom was baptized at the local Baptist church in her sixties, and I know that the pastor there would not have baptized her if he hadn't been certain that she was a believer. It's my consolation, the hope that God is making everything wonderful for her to make up for the years the locust has eaten. I do hope that indeed, and that someday we'll be able to sit down together and marvel that all the bitterness is gone, and never to come again.

Love, Spud