When you are young, things seem possible. Your dreams still
have lift, texture and shine. As my family drove back to Illinois homeless and
broke, I can imagine my mother – with two babies and an erratic unpredictable,
intoxicated husband – felt her grip on those dreams melt away like the sweat
from her brow as the car headed north, making its way through the humid
landscape of corn rows and bean fields. She was going home, the only home she’d
ever known: 512.
One spring
morning in 1942, she found herself coming into a world that had not been
planned for her in this very house. Her mother, my grandmother Lillie, was
forty-one years old and having a child at that age was certainly not what she
wanted. It had been such a strain on her heart that she was bedridden because
of it. My mother’s life up to this car ride had been sheltered and not in the
direction she dreamed of going. Growing up in a town I will lovingly refer to
simply as Shit Town, she found a hell on earth. She wasn’t what you would call
“in” with the popular group, or any group for that matter, during her public
school life, and being shy and meek and eager to please, she found herself
rolled over by everything and everyone.
There are
two kinds of people: smashers and shooers. This is a woman who would not hurt a
fly. She would shoo a fly before she was swat one. She was basically a happy,
quiet child that played a lot by herself, as most of her siblings were older.
By the time she was born she had two older brothers serving in the military,
that whole WW2 thing, a teenage sister and another older brother who was five.
She was the baby of the bunch and by the time she was five or six years old she
was alone.
Finding
yourself alone most of your childhood breeds loneliness to a certain extent,
but it really cultivates your imagination. You have to create your own
entertainment, your own fun. But no matter how you grow up, at some point you
find yourself needing some kind of validation of the dreams you have conjured
in your heart and mind. My mother never had that. Not from family, not from
friends, not from school teachers. The realization of how lonely her childhood
was breaks my heart. I’m not saying she wasn’t loved at home. She was. She
loved her mother and idolized her daddy. Her sister Flora feeling, I’m
guessing, a little bit of solidarity, being one of two sisters, always tried to
include my mom in the things she was doing.
Flora eventually went to college,
the first in the family to do so. She graduated from a teaching college in
Normal, Illinois and went on to work with special education right out of
school. She took a job in Germany to teach army brats on the U.S. military
bases and by 1968 she was living in California teaching in Sacramento. She sent
my mom financial help during this difficult time, a practice she would continue
until her death.
Mother’s
Day has just passed and I reflect on how much my mother has given up to be a
mom. It has inspired me to try to do whatever I can for my kids. You made the
right decision that day Mom. I know you probably have doubted a lot of things
you have done with raising us, but you did good the day you set us free. Thanks
Mom.