Oddly enough, my mom has been in
my thoughts all weekend. It can’t
possibly have anything to do with the fact that today is Mother’s Day, but
there it is, nonetheless.
My mother was a complex
contradiction in terms, as moms the world over tend to be. She grew up all tomboy with six brothers and
two sisters, while simultaneously evolving into an indisputably voluptuous
young woman. She was born and raised in
a small southwest Kansas town, went to tiny schools, and was afforded the
somewhat stunted educational benefits that generally attach to such an
environment; but curiosity,
intelligence, and EQ were in her DNA, so she found herself on a quest for
learning from the start.
Mother graduated high school and
then earned what was known as an Emergency Teaching Certificate through a six-week
course at what was then Ft. Hays State Teachers' College. This was
during WWII and the situation called for desperate measures. At about 18 years old, she taught for one year in a
country school where most of the high school boys were taller than she
was. Then she met my dad and that
temporarily ended her teaching career.
She married a few months short of her 19th birthday, and
three weeks short of her 20th she delivered her first baby – me.
Four more babies followed, one of
whom she lost during delivery, and what with being a mother and a wife, and filling countless other roles, she didn’t get around to college again for a
decade and a half. There was never a
time, however, when she wasn’t reading at least two books and filling
journals with her thoughts.
Finally, when I was a junior in
high school, she enrolled in the local community college and graduated with
honors. Then she went on to the local
four-year college (I was a freshman there when she was a junior) and graduated
with HIGHEST honors. With those
credentials she taught English, Drama and Yearbook for several years at the
high school my siblings and I attended. In fact, my two sisters and my brother all had her as a teacher, and she and my dad were so well-loved that they were invited to help chaperone a Senior Trip. Later, she taught EMR (old label, but it
stood for Educable Mentally Retarded) classes, and was one of a handful of
women who founded the Learning Co-op for this part of the state. I was thoroughly immersed in my own life by
then and didn’t keep up with everything she was doing, but I knew enough to be
justifiably proud of her.
Somewhere in there, Mother earned
a Master’s degree, again, fittingly, from Ft. Hays State, and had family
circumstances not intervened it’s highly possible she might have gone on to get
a doctorate.
Because of Mother’s love of learning and reading, my sisters and brother and I grew up in a household
of books. When we were little she read
to us a lot, and later on she carted us to the Carnegie Library every week or so
and let us choose our own stack of books to take home. She had a small office filled with books, and
her end of the couch was surrounded by more books and notebooks. Each of us absorbed her priorities and ended
up with our OWN love of reading.
Sadly, we had to say goodbye to
our beautiful, intriguing mother far too early.
A sudden heart attack took her from us when she was just 67 years
old. I often find myself wondering what
she might be like now in her 80s, but I really only have to remember what my
grandmother – her mother – was like into her 90s --- lovely, intelligent,
interesting, kind, thoughtful, funny and fun-loving. I miss them both! And therein lies another story ….
Mommy & Me on Mother's Day
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