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Essay: Mothers & Marmees & Moms, Oh My!

Courtesy of Pam Parker

Mother’s Day is a time to celebrate the many gifts our parents give us, and sometimes the gifts we’ve given them. Lake Effect essayist, Pam Parker, fondly remembers the gifts she and her mom shared one bygone Mother’s Day.

Mother’s Day approaches, bringing back memories of my sister and I and an Easy-Bake Oven cake presented to my mother, in bed, with purple Kool-aid. She smiled and choked it all down — we laugh about it still. Have you ever considered that it’s likely your mother heard your first laugh? And, your laughter is likely something your mother loved to hear. Her child’s laughter fills a mother’s heart with joy more easily than anything else. As a mom of grown young men, I miss my boys laughing together at the dinner table (it helped that I raised a couple of characters, rather comedic characters).

I’ve been thinking about literary mothers, too and the two who affected me most as a child are Marmee, Mrs. March from Little Women and Caroline Ingalls (before the television show) from the Little House books. To me, they both were amazing — full of love and very “teacherly” in a non-threatening way. I adored them. They were strong women, living in times and situations that required strength, but strength tempered with unconditional love created something else altogether for me — the ideal mom.

In my life, I’ve been fortunate to spring from strong women.

I have a family snapshot from my uncle’s wedding in 1965, showing me as the unhappy flower girl. (I was ill with a bladder infection and pouting a lot, partly because even though I was almost five, my mother insisted I had to wear rubber pants. She was right, of course, but I was far too old for rubber pants in my little mind — and, quite upset.) I love this picture for so many reasons — my Grandma, (mother of the groom) looks happy, proud and gently concerned about me, with a gloved hand on by upper back. She’s wearing a fur wrap, which I wonder if she owned or borrowed from someone. I remember her as frugal. My mother stands in a white sailor dress, wearing a hat that could be a basket for holding fruit. Her expression, a closed mouth smile, beams with pride. She holds my hand with her white gloved one and her other arm is looped in her grandmother’s arm, my great-grandmother. Mom and my Babci, Polish for grandmother, share the same expression. There’s another growing person in the photo. My baby brother is barely visible as a tiny bump under my mother’s dress.

It’s a classic picture for the era. At mass and special occasions in 1965, women still wore hats and gloves. But more than fashion sings out for me in that photo. My great-grandmother lived the mythic American story, arriving through Ellis Island in the early 1900s. She outlived three of her daughters. My grandmother raised her family under difficult conditions after a divorce, at a time when divorces were scandalous. My father died when my mother was thirty-nine, leaving her with two daughters in college and a teenaged son. Life wasn’t easy for these hard-working women, but they channeled Winston Churchill, never gave up, and taught by example about what perseverance means.

We learn many things from our mothers. If we’re lucky, we learn about unconditional love, about truth, about family and building lives with meaning. But I’ve been exceptionally lucky, because as I look at this old photo, I am reminded that I spring from a blood line with the motto “Never quit” in my veins. That desire to persevere has pulled me through hardships, has kept me working at my craft of writing and informs my decisions every day. It’s the greatest gift my mother, her mother and her grandmother could have given me.