A Mom post

 You know, I see a lot of people posting (or re-posting) Mother's day stories. And I thought about joining their ranks.

But what would I say?  I was in the summer before high school when she died, the baby of the family. And it was 50 years ago this year.

I know a handfull of stories, some recollections from the spoiled child who never saw the rough patches my four siblings went through.Where, with my Dad for a long time, I saw the bad without the good, with Mom it was the good without the bad.

From my perspective a good thing.  I'm glad I got that side, because I know how hard it is to do the opposite.  But can I put it out there as, "This was my Mom?"

I could tell you about the loudest female farter I've still ever met- taught me all I do, lol! I could tell you about someone who took the paddle to me when I might have thought I didn't deserve it- and the one time she should have put me in the hospital with it, and didn't for whatever reason.  I can tell you about a woman that took my Dad's drunken verbal garbage- garbage that was of a deeper hurt I never saw- too many times.  How she never threw a glass bowl at his head instead of the floor, I'll never know.

I have heard enough after the fact that she had her own problems, too.  That made things as difficult for some of my siblings as Dad's shenanigans did on me and others.  But that is their stories, not mine.

I got the noodle dough rolled out on the table to dry as she napped, while cats walked across it to see their footprints in the flour, and 4-year-old boys nibbled the edges.

I got the lap that was a nighttime battleground for a puppy and kitten that couldn't admit they loved each other until one of them died.  The lap that held the old topsheet, her pulling the embroidery design 'boogers' out to turn it into rags while a tornado passed close by.  The lap that held huge crocheted pieces she was hooking all night- some destined to be saved, starched, put in a storage box and forgotten about, some to be torn apart upon completion to be crocheted anew.

I got the meat loaf, the boiled potatoes, and the salmon patties I loved, and the boiled cabbage and cremed carrots I hated.

I got the, "Woody Martin, get that boy off the roof" or "lawn mower", that I shouldn't have, that left me vulnerable to Dad's drunken, "You're afraid of the -fill in the blank-" I always heard years later when I was the one getting the 'drunken shenanigans' after she passed.

But the one thing that is still precious to me I got, was the woman that spent the first part of her morning after Dad and his brothers left for work, deep in her prayer book.  Her faith- and Dad's- might not have had a lot of public evidence, but it was enough for me to never doubt there was a God, and He loved me.

And, contrary as this all may seem, I never doubted THEY loved me.

So I can't tell you in a post who she was, not really.  Only who she was TO ME.  And that, I suppose, is enough.