Happy Birth Day Mom: Chpt 25

August 19 is a day that is always very hard for me to get through, because it was my mother’s birthday, and she would have been 72 had she still been alive. I always find her birthday and death-day difficult. I loved my mother very much, and I miss her terribly. Evelyn was born August 19, 1929 on the North Dakota plains, she was the second of six surviving children born to farmer and his wife. My mother survived the dust bowels of the plains, the depression, World War II, my father and four children only to be brought down by some broken cells that became cancerous. It’s not fair and I am still mad that she is dead.
Evelyn started life with many disadvantages; I remember her telling me stories about her childhood. Food was so scares that my grandmother had to sift the wheat to get the bugs out before she could use that wheat to cook a meal for her family (I usually heard this story when I refused to eat something that my mother cooked). Looking for work my grandparents moved to Detroit Michigan when my mother was 13, it wasn’t until this move from the farm to the city that my mother had access to in-door pluming.
My mom married my father when she was eighteen and had their first child a year later. My parents work hard and built a good life together. Mine was a happy childhood, filled with love and good memories. I mean I had the normal mother-daughter love-hate relationship, but I missed her every day. I thought about my mother all the time while I was recovering, it felt like she was right besides me helping me make the decisions about my treatment.
There is not a day that goes by when I don’t think about my mom, and wish that she were here to share my happy life with me. I feel cheated that she is not around now, I feel cheated for both of us. She gave birth to me and raised me, through the physical work of early child rearing and the mental work of my teens and my twenties. She did all the hard stuff and suffered all the pain of raising me (and it wasn’t easy). She is no longer here; I am not able to call her complaining about how my daughters are driving me crazy. She would just laugh and say,
“Sounds familiar” or “I got my wish for you to have a daughter just like you.” But we never get to have those conversations, I try with my dad, who is a great guy, but it is not the same. Even today five years after her death, once and while one of my girls dose something interesting and I find myself reaching for the phone to tell my mom, then the realization that she is not here comes to me and I hang up the phone and feel very sad.
There is not enough space to tell you all about my mother, but I would like to say a few things about her. She was one of a kind, even as a child I was aware that she was not like the other mothers, and I am ashamed to admit that as a kid this embarrassed me.
Joyce was born ahead of her time; she was intelligent and independent at a time when mothers (at least in my neighborhood) were supposed to play Suzie-homemaker. Yes, her house was clean (cleaner than mine is) and there was always food on the table, she did her wifely and motherly job. But when the other mothers were baking from scratch or sewing their children’s clothes or tending their gardens or gossiping over the fence, Evelyn had other ideas. She used Betty Crocker to make a cake and she bought all of our clothes, couldn’t be bothered with a garden and never wasted her time with neighborhood gossip. Instead she spent the very little spare time she had improving her mind.
She was always reading, a book, a newspaper, a magazine. When I think of my mother I think of her reading. When she died and my father asked me what things of hers did I want, I said that I wanted “The Red Books.” These books are a collection of classic writing, including Shakespeare, Longfellow, Dickens, Hugo etc. that my mother bought long ago.
Evelyn was not school educated, but she was self-educated, she wanted to know everything. Our house was filled with books on art, literature, history, my father was just as curious as she was, but for a man it was ok, for a woman suspicious. Here is a brief example of her knowledge. When I went back to college after Ronnie was born one of the classes I took was geology. One day the professor was lecturing on plate-tonics when suddenly I got a flash-back of hearing a similar lecture from my mother. How did she know about plate-tonics? I have no idea, but she some how knew about them because I had this memory of her telling me all about them, weird huh?
As a child I had wanted her to be like the other moms, sweating in the kitchen, attending PTA meetings, so on. Evelyn was also the only mother on my block that worked, she was a waitress/ hostess in a fancy restaurant, her working was very embarrassing…that was until the woman’s movement hit. Suddenly I had the hippist, coolist mother on the block. Evelyn didn't changed, the times did.
The fact that she died from the same disease that I was fighting makes the day all the more difficult. Why am I alive when she dead? Then again, at this stage in her treatment she was alive and doing very well. Will my body turn on me too? Do I only have a year or two left also? I was still angry about her death and fearful for my life at the same time. August 19 is always a hard day to get through, dealing with it while I was still recovering from my own cancer made it harder still.