Thinking of Mom

We grew up in a beautiful, big house with lots of room to spread out. Dad was a General Practitioner, which meant he made a decent living, but with nine kids, it didn't always go that far. The house was a splurge and he left the challenge of meeting a tight monthly budget to my Mom.

My siblings and I worked from a young age on; the boys had paper routes, and in 7th grade the girls started working in Dad's office washing test tubes and pipettes. My Mom saved money by buying toilet paper by the carton and making lots of ground beef casseroles, and we each had our table setting, room cleaning, toilet scrubbing, dish washing, yard work, and snow shoveling assignments to do.

Mom was no slouch. She worked hard to keep the house going and nine kids fed and clothed. She cooked all the meals, carted kids around, painted rooms, and hung wallpaper. She was a beautiful woman who often looked crabby and always looked harried, and she wasn't much concerned with looking fashionable. The times when I found her cutting the grass in shorts and ankle socks so ugly they set a teenage girl's teeth on edge were the worst. We had the biggest house on the block, but I don't remember any other mother who cut the grass much less cut the grass looking like that. It was mortifying.

Fast forward to 2010: I have become my mother.

I've spent the past 6 weeks gardening like a crazy woman. I wear torn shorts, sloppy t-shirts, black ankle socks and clogs. I sweat like a yeoman, my hair is flat and lifeless, and all the bending, kneeling, digging I've done has left me with the gait and the posture of an old, crippled lady. I stumble from the back garden to the front of the house trying to whip the flowers and the bushes and the trees in to shape, trying to race the clock as it ticks down toward next week's garden tour. I'm sure I'm entertaining the neighbors with my antics, but I want my garden to look perfect and I'm beyond caring how I look or what other people think. Above all, I'm having a blast. The weather's been great, I've lost a couple of pounds, and my garden . . . well, it's looking darn good.

Mom's been gone for several years now, but that doesn't mean I don't owe her an apology. I can't imagine having her job, and she did the best she could to take care of my Dad, raise us, keep us from harm, and manage a complicated household. She always looked a little crazed because she was a little crazed. Forty-plus years later, I am my mother.

By the way, the garden has done a number on my fingernails: They are a grade A mess. But tomorrow I will take a seat across from my manicurist (see earlier blog entry) and she is going to have to work her little heart out to make them look presentable.

See, there is an up side!