Mothers' Day

My mother died on June 1, 1987, in Florida. She was in a hospital at the time, and when I talked to her the phone from Los Angeles not long before her death, she told me that she didn't want to go home. That is still the saddest statement I've ever heard a human being utter. And she didn't go home. She just died.

My memories of my mother are mixed, to say the least. I don't think I ever saw her truly happy. Oh sure, she laughed and appeared to outsiders to be living a normal life. But she was never truly happy. I was born in 1940; my mother was 19 years old at the time. By the time she was 26, she was divorced. The two of us lived with her parents, and early in our stay, my grandmother made a concerted effort to take legal custody of me. In fact, my mother was on the way to sign the papers when she changed her mind at the last minute

My mother and grandmother never got along. What I remember from my childhood are terrible screaming matches and my grandmother making every attempt to supplant my mother in my eyes. There are periods in my memory when my mother isn't even there, though I'm not sure why. My grandmother doesn't disappear when I think back. I still wonder what happened.

My mother worked at several low paying jobs until she was hired as a timekeeper at Tennesee Coal and Iron Company, later U. S. Steel, the largest employer in our city. It was a job that would allow her to be indepedent; however, she remarried in the spring of 1954, to a man to whom she was married when she died. Oh, she didn't stay married to him for 33 years because it was a match made in heaven. She had another son in 1956, then a daughter in 1958. Staying busy raising them probably allowed her to remain relatively sane for more years than she would have. And she was a good mother to them.

Although my mother and step-father were married for over three decades, I remember driving her away, pulling a U-haul on at least two occasions after she had ugly fights with my step-father. Of course, we headed back to my grandparents' house. I don't know which was worse. My grandmother was totally self-centered and manipulative, and my step-father was one of the most horrible men I've ever met, more self-cented and manipulative than my grandmother. He also had a girfriend outside his marriage during their entire married life. And he married my mother only after his son had picked her from several girlfriends to be a step-mother. He was a rat, to say the least.

When my mother had options to make decisions that would've benefited me, she simply didn't do it. When I was in grade school, I was doing so well academically that they wanted to double-promote me on at least two occasions. My mother wouldn't allow it. And when I got the opportunity to attend a private school in another state through the largesse of my grandfather, my mother wouldn't allow that either because she said it wouldn't be fair to my step-brother. And my mother never comforted me because she didn't know how.

My children have often told me how wonderful a grandmother she was to them, and I'm so happy that's true. We lived near her for twelve years before her death, and my children loved going to her house and talking endlessly and eating her wonderful cooking. I'm very happy that they had a grandmother such as she. I often wish I'd had a mother like that. I know that some of it is my fault. When I became an adult, I should've acted like an adult and embraced her for what she was. But I didn't. And we never truly connected. I'm so sorry for that.

She died by choice, not suicide, on June 1, 1987, nearly 20 years ago, as she couldn't spend one more minute in that horrible atmosphere with that horrible man. How I wish I had one more opportunity to wish her a Happy Mothers' Day.