I Remember Mama

March 6, 2014 I’m sure almost everyone thinks their mother is “the best,” but I feel very grateful to have had the mother God gave me. She had all the qualities of a Proverb 31 woman. She was faithful and loving, creative and artistic, innovative and resourceful, industrious and steadfast and truly a wonderful example of what a godly mother should be. Mother was born in 1902, the youngest of 5. She was born and lived with her family in Calumet, Oklahoma, near an Indian reservation. (Do you remember the Calumet baking powder with an Indian on the front?). She had many stories to tell about having Indians as neighbors and friends. I loved to sit as a child and listen to her and my older siblings relate strange tales about the ways of the Indians, like raising dogs for meat and a few other dietary delicacies I will not mention. Mother was not only a wonderful mother but as I became an adult she was a wonderful friend. After I was married we moved to Texas from Oklahoma and I would call her nearly every Saturday morning to talk. We exchanged recipes and whatever was going on in our lives at the time. We shared a love for the Word of God and the hope we had in Jesus and would talk about how God was working in our lives and answering our prayers. Those talks and watching a faith filled life turn crisis after crisis into victories, made an indelible etching on my heart and life. Not many knew that Mother was an artist. She had an ear for music and played the organ as a young person. She also could draw. I remember when I was in high school I needed some posters for our class play. I asked Mother if she could help me, not knowing she had this latent talent. She drew several funny and whimsical caricatures without even looking at a picture. My posters won first place. With nine children she never had time to develop her talents or hobbies as she could have. She unselfishly devoted her life to her family. Mother loved beautiful things: flowers, fine china, clothes, etc. She was never wealthy but she could take the simple things she had and create something lovely. Even her table settings were works of art. Because of an unfortunate event that happened when my parents were young, Mother had to become the chief caretaker and eventually the breadwinner for 5 of the younger children, including me (I was the third from the youngest). My Dad, we called him Papa (at his request), was lost in an Oklahoma snow storm on his way into town. He had on a cap that, Mother said, “It was always too tight for him,” but it was all he had to wear. When they found him he was already in a coma in which he remained for 5-6 days. The doctors told mother that if he lived he would probably have brain damage from nearly freezing to death and from the tight cap which caused a lack of oxygen to his brain. Papa was never the same after that. The damage affected the part of the brain that reasons and makes judgments. His whole personality changed. Before he was a very hard working man but after the accident he showed no responsibility toward his family or life in general. Therefore Mother had to become the main one to keep the family together. My oldest brother, who was 13, and being the only boy at the time, had to take over all the outside chores, including planting and harvesting crops, milking the cows and many myriad other chores that had to be done on a farm. My next to oldest sister would help Allen with the outside chores while my oldest sister would help Mother in the house with chores and care for the younger children. Mother learned to be very innovative. She was still a young mother when the “great depression” and the “dust bowl” days happened. I wasn’t born yet but was told that during this time my family lived, literally, from “hand to mouth,” never knowing from where the next meal would come. But Mother learned to be very creative when presented with any challenge. Papa came home one day with a large amount of turnips. Since there was nothing else to eat for several days, Mother came up with all kinds of new ways to fix turnips. Not surprisingly, my older siblings do not like turnips to this day. Just to let you see a child’s priority in the poverty people experienced during that time I will quote from a manuscript my older brother, Allen, wrote of “the good ol’ days.” He wrote, “I had never had a candy bar and Papa promised me one if I passed all my subjects in the 6th grade. Well, I passed and got a Baby Ruth candy (5c then). I think I made it last a week. I savored every bite. In those days, once in a great while, we would get a stick of gum. Every night we would stick it on the bed post and chew it again the next day until it was like chewing a tasteless piece of rubber.” I know how it must have hurt Mother’s heart to see her children so deprived of the simplest joys of childhood. But a lot were as deprived as we were so we didn’t know we were as poor as church mice. As many farm women did, Mother would take the flour sacks, which were printed with flowers or checks or plaids, and make the girls dresses and Papa and Allen shirts. All were in style since everyone else was wearing flour sack clothes also. I was born soon after papa’s near-death accident and remember just a little of his abusive and irresponsible ways. He sold our farm and moved to town when I was three. After living in a few houses, Papa, with the money from the sale of the farm, bought us a nice, large, brick home on several lots where we had room to play and Mother could have her garden. Our house was across the street from the school and we children spent many hours on the school grounds playing on the swings and merry-go-round. Some time after moving into town Mother’s parents died leaving her and her siblings a rather large inheritance from the sale of their large wheat farm. Papa had Mother sign all her inheritance over to him and he took the money and went to “the valley” in south Texas to buy property and move us all down there. He would be gone for months at a time but never bought any property. He would come home and stay for a short while and leave again. Eventually the money was all gone. Some of my older siblings thought maybe Papa had gambled the money away – no one knew. I am not sure how Mother provided for all of her children during this time except that my older siblings were old enough to work and helped provide for all the younger ones. When the city planned to pave the streets every homeowner had to pay for half the cost in front of their house. Since we owned several lots and lived on the corner there was no way Mother could pay her share of the paving so she put our home up for sale. She bought an old frame house on the other side of town that had been moved in from somewhere else. After paying for our frame home, Mother had enough money left to have the house painted and carpet laid in the living and dining room, but it didn’t fill in the cracks around the outside floor boards, and the continuous Oklahoma wind would whistle through the cracks. It was also an easy entry for small varmints. I was in the third grade when we made our move across “the tracks.” We didn’t have trains but we had an inurbane which ran right down the middle of Main Street. It ran from our town, Bethany, east to Oklahoma City, where a lot of our town’s people worked, and I worked after I became old enough. By that time the electric inurbane had been replaced with an inurbane bus. Because there was no high school at the country, one-room school where Mother attended and my grandparents couldn’t afford to send her away to boarding school, she only attended through the eighth grade. So now at this time in her life when Papa wasn’t home and sent her very little money, she must work to make a living for the seven children still at home. She did what she knew to do very well – wash and iron clothes for others. We lived in a college town and only a block from the college, so the college boys became her patrons. But there were not enough of the young men who could afford to have their clothes washed and ironed to fill Mother’s need for her large family. So Mother found a job at a laundry around the corner from where we lived where she stood on hard concrete floors, in heat and cold, 8-10 hours a day washing and ironing for others. After working these long hours she would come home to fix supper and take care of all the household chores that needed to be done. The older children still at home had jobs after school so could offer little help. We younger ones did what we could. So was the life of a single, uneducated mother in those days. There was no “welfare” in those days - Mother would not have taken it anyway. She just trusted the Lord for every day’s needs. And God was always faithful. I don’t remember ever going without something to eat. We always had a hot breakfast, probably oatmeal, I don’t remember. We children walked to and from school, morning, noon for lunch, and evening. Mother took her lunch period and was always at home at lunch time. I can never remember having anything to eat at lunch but pinto beans and fried potatoes – and I still love them. In the evening we had a sandwich, no chips and dip, etc. When the weather was too bad to come home at lunch time we got a quarter to eat at “the Stand.” This was a small, one room building, not a part of but next to the school. This quarter would buy a hotdog, bag of chips and a pop. Since we never got these “delicacies” at home it was a treat to have bad weather, although, after school we had to walk home in that bad weather. (Because of these circumstances none of us had a weight problem). Martha, my only living sister, has told me how after she had graduated from high school she got a job at the telephone company. She gave Mother what she could of her paycheck to help with expenses. Many days after riding the bus home from Oklahoma City, she would get home later after our supper had been eaten and she would find “nothing” in the “ice box.”(An ice box was simply that…a metal box with two doors, one in which to put a large block of ice, the other side for groceries). Before Mother had to go outside our home to work she sewed all our clothes, but just didn’t have the time when working. There is one exception to this. At Christmas time each of us smaller children would get a new pair of pajamas. The older children who worked were able to buy a few clothes but the younger ones all wore hand-me-downs from the older siblings or neighbors. One of the few pictures I have of me as a small child (about 6 or 7) was of me in one of my “hand-me-downs.” The dress was much too big and I looked like a little refugee. But it was always like Christmas when our neighbor’s gave us some of her old clothes. Our neighbor, Mr. Hagen, was a plumber so they had considerably more than most. Rose was their only child, a little on the plump side and about six years older than I, so her clothes didn’t exactly fit me. My sister just older than I wouldn’t wear Rose’s clothes so I got them, and was glad to get them, although they didn’t fit. Never did I hear one word of complaint from Mother, not even saying she was tired and never did I hear a negative word against Papa, even after he died, 25 years before she went home to be with the Lord. In fact, I did not know the whole story of why Papa was like he was until I was grown and married. Mother just didn’t talk about it. She just lived her faith – to love, forgive and trust the Father for her provision, spirit, soul and body. Mother was industrious, not just when times were hard and trying to rear nine children, but even in her older years she was busy with something constructive. Although she had to work outside our home until her later years, she managed to find time to raise a vegetable garden every year and had many flowers, and even mow her own lawn. She also made her own clothes and curtains or anything else that was needed. When Mother was 81 she had a brain aneurysm, after mowing her lawn on a hot August day. She survived, after surgery, but it left her from being completely independent to being completely dependent, all without complaint but just an indomitable spirit to live with a rejoicing spirit with all her disabilities. She was in a nursing home in Oklahoma City, where she was greatly abusively neglected, I would go once a month a stay a week and after 6 months I could see that she was not going to last long with the neglect she was receiving. I talked with my three sisters there around Oklahoma City about bringing her home with me. They hesitantly agreed. I came home and told Wendell that I would like to bring her to our home to take care of her. He agreed, with trepidation, so we went back to Oklahoma City to get her. She was so glad to come and get into a loving and caring situation. We made her a bed in the back of our car. The nurse told us she would probably be sick, since she was always nauseous in the morning. We made preparation for her to be sick. We loaded her dishpan full of pills – everything from heart pills to sleeping pills. So, we began our seven hour trip to Marshall, Texas. I found out later that Wendell was very fearful that she could not even make the trip, but her Lord was riding in the back seat with her and she just rested in His lap. We hadn’t gone far before she became sick, but we were prepared. We found out later it was some of the medication, or combination of some that made her sick. Oh, how things changed, especially Mother and my roles. At first Mother had to be diapered, dressed, bathed, fed and turned in bed. I threw away nearly all her pills because I could see she didn’t need them. She gradually began to gain strength, weight and health. Each of her health problems I would face with fervent prayer for the Lord to show me what to do or not do. The Lord was faithful to my cries and one by one each problem was overcome or healed - from vertigo, incontinence and having to wear a catheter, learning to stand and then walk again, coming to the table and feeding herself and even going to church with us in a wheelchair. I finally got a home-health nurse who came three hours a day, five days a week, and would bathe her, feed her, straighten her room and anything else pertaining to Mother’s care. During these three hours I could get out and run errands or do anything else I wished. I must include one difficult problem I faced where the Lord gave me the determination to solve it and showed me what to do. Mother was always groomed and dressed with her best, but her straight hair was always a problem so before she became disabled she gave herself home permanents. After six months in a nursing home without any hair care, her hair was just pitiful. So since I had given myself perms since before I married, I had the curlers, bought a perm and decided to give her a perm. Since she couldn’t even sit up I devised a plan to put down a plastic sheet which was draped over the side of the bed, covering the mattresses and arranged into a large basin so the run-off water would run into the pan. Wendell helped me move her to where she was lying perpendicular on the bed with her head near the edge. I wish I had taken before/during and/ after pictures. After the perm was completed, I rolled her hair on brush rollers and put the hair dryer on her (all while she was lying flat in bed). It was a successful venture and I received a lot of joy from knowing she was going to get a lot of pleasure out of her curled coiffure. I would like to think that the “fixed” hair and make-up I put on her helped her get well faster. Mother always was a fun person and we had a lot of laughs together over those fifteen years she was with us. She loved to play games and when the family all went home to her house, we always ended up playing some kind of group games. After she came to live with us she still loved to play games with us and our friends. She was truly a “Proverb 31 Woman.” Her faith and trust in the Lord made an indelible imprint on my life. I still remember vividly a scene of a terrible storm going on outside. It was probably a tornado, with high winds, hail and deluges of rain – we had many in Oklahoma. All the while the storm was raging Mother was sitting at the dining room table mending some clothes as if the sun were shining outside and the birds were singing. We had no storm cellar or basement in which to go so Mother just trusted God to keep her family – and as always, He did! She influenced my life in so many ways but mostly in her love for and faith in God which I saw played out my entire life by the way she faced life with peace in her heart and praise in her words for her Savior, Who had never failed her in any of her most difficult times. Her life gave me a desire as a very young child to know that same Jesus, and He is proving to be as faithful to me as He was to her and will be to anyone who trusts Him. Mother went to be with Jesus about 2:20 p.m., September 29, 1998, after being bedfast for a year with crippling arthritis. She had macular degeneration and could no longer read or watch television. Her hearing had also degenerated so it was hard to converse with her. I would play musical tapes for her to enjoy and she would hum along. Her world had become dark, silent and painful, but not her spirit. At times I could hear her talking and knew she was conversing with Jesus. On the morning of, September 28, when Carolyn Ambercrombie, her health care provider, was there bathing and feeding her she called me into the bedroom because Mother was having trouble breathing. We rolled her hospital bed up but her difficulty continued and increased. I called her doctor and friend, Orin Littlejohn, and he said she had congestive heart failure. She had said she didn’t want life support and wanted to die at home so Dr. Littlejohn brought out a tank of oxygen, thinking it might help some, but it didn’t. I will eternally be grateful to his tender and personal home calls and care he gave Mother at this time. I had called Wendell home from school and after Carolyn left he and I took turns caring for Mother’s needs, which were constant. Her struggling went all through the day and into the night. About 11:00 p.m. she seemed to breathe easier and went to sleep. I made a pallet on the floor by her bed and also rested until about 2:30 a.m., the morning of the 29th. Her breathing had become very labored again, with all the residual symptoms that go with congestive heart failure. Wendell and my vigil with Mother went on until after 2:00 p.m. and she just stopped breathing. Her next good breath was when she was in the arms of Jesus. I remember not feeling grief but an unexplainable joy that she was running, laughing, praising and enjoying all the wonders of Heaven. She was not a 96 year old lady in Heaven but she was now ageless and didn’t count years anymore. Her body is not wasting and her pain is forever gone, spirit, soul and body!!! In recounting her last days I still grieve when I remember her suffering. Why did she have to suffer? Only God knows the answer and He told us, “In this world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer for I have overcome this world!” All because of Jesus she now has overcome this world – Hallelujah! I will always love and remember “Mama” for being the best mother ever and I thank and praise God for letting me be her daughter, and that I came to love and trust Jesus by watching her live. And now I must ask myself, “What will my legacy be to my family and my world?” My prayer is that all who come behind me will find me faithful!