I’ve been thinking a lot about my mom lately. Not surprising considering the anniversary of her death was August 11th. She has been gone for 5 years now. However, mentally, she was gone years before her physical passing. She has Alzheimer’s.
Before the disease came along my mom was total greatness. She was funny, kind, gentle, thoughtful, resourceful, confident and just in general amazing. She was all of the things I so desperately want to be. I never ever heard her say one bad word about anyone. EVER! That is a hard thing to accomplish. I remember asking her once if she had ever done anything bad in her life. She sat there for a long time, finally she said well this one time when I was 5 years old…. I can’t tell you what she did, as she made me promise never to reveal her secret, but the real point of the whole thing was she had to go back 80 years!!! She was 85 when she told me that story. I can begin my list at the age of 4 and just continue on till today! She had the patience of Job. I remember the one and only time I ever saw her lose her cool and it was when I was 15 and my dad decided to teach me to drive, well, during one of our driving lessons I backed the car into the fence. No comments please. My mom shot out of the house like a lightning bolt, pointed her finger at my dad and said “Driver’s Ed!” then went back into the house. My dad looked at me and said “Well, I guess that settles that”. LOL! It was funny.
My mom was so very intelligent. She was a published author, a retired dental assistant, seamstress, Sunday school teacher and frustrated wannabe English teacher. She told me that when she was a girl she wanted to go to college and become a teacher. Well since it was the depression and she was a girl there was no money for college. It wasn’t even discussed. I often wonder what kind of life my mother would have had if she had been able to go to college.
The quality that I loved the most, and still miss to this day, is the way I could tell my mom anything and she never judged me. She never offered advice unless I specifically asked for it, even then, never expected me to act on the advice.
I try and mimic that characteristic with my own children. I hope I do half as good of job as my mom did in the whole parenting department. I sometimes feel bad that my children don’t have as good a mother as I had.
Did I mention the cooking? My mom was a terrific cook. She made the best ever fried green tomatoes and this coconut cake, it was white cake with this icing that was out of this world, made out of that marshmellow stuff in a jar with coconut, it was a pure white cake, so good!! Trust me when I say we ate well. She tried to impart all of that domestic stuff on to me, it hasn’t taken yet…
When I grow up I want to be like my mother.
Angie World 