Chicken Soup for Every Mom's Soul (5 page)

I hang up just as my husband walks through the door, cell phone falling from my ear like an oversized clip-on earring. He picks it up off the floor as I acknowledge, “My mother just called.” Whatever the cost, whenever the time, she has my number. It’s called cellular love.

Amy Hirshberg Lederman

Mini Massage Therapists

L
ittle deeds of kindness,
Little words of love,
Help to make earth happy
Like the heaven above.

Julia Fletcher Carney

It had been a long and exhausting day. My husband was out of town for the third night in a row, the house was a mess, the phone kept ringing, laundry and papers were everywhere, my six-year-old twins were screaming, and my head was pounding. It was a reality-based type of day with no dreamy visions of being the perfect mother with a beautiful, spotless home, laundry all neatly folded in drawers and children playing angelically side by side.

My pleas of “Stop fighting, you two!” “Please stop running in the house!” and “Please play quietly!” went unheeded.

“Mom, Jake came in my room!”

“I did not!”

“Yes, you did . . . Mom—he’s not listening!”

“You’re not the boss of me!”

“But it’s my room!”

“So what! Who do you think you are, Princess Tara or something?”

“Mom, Jake is calling me Princess Tara again! Mom!”

I screamed, “Stop it, you two!” Rather than quiet them, my loud reprimand caused their voices to escalate.

“BUT MOM, I TOLD HIM TO GET OUT OF MY ROOM!”

“BUT MOM, SHE COMES IN MY ROOM SOMETIMES WHEN I TELL HER NOT TO. . . .”

I asked my children to work it out between themselves and decided to find a quiet room for a few moments.

Within a minute they burst in.

“Mom, she won’t share her Disney characters even though she’s not playing with them.”

“That’s because you didn’t share your markers with me the last time I asked you.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have lost your markers. It’s your own fault if you didn’t take care of them, right, Mom?”

“Mom?”

“Mom?”

I gathered my children and whispered, “Jake and Tara, let’s go hug each other quietly for a few moments. I don’t feel very well. I’m also feeling sad right now. I love you both so much, and I would love a very special hug from each of you.”

Their response was quite different than when I had shouted at them to quiet down. With rather serious looks on their faces, they asked, “But why are you sad, Mom?”

“I don’t really know,” I replied. “I just know I need some quiet time and some extra special love from both of you right now.”

“Okay, Mommy,” they whispered. They each took one of my hands, led me to my bed, fluffed up my pillows and told me to lie down. With a big hug and some “I love you’s,” they said, “Okay, Mommy, you just relax here a few minutes.” As they walked away, I heard a lot of excited, conspiratorial whispers.

A few minutes later they were back. Jake brought me a glass of water. Tara brought me my favorite flannel pajamas. I smiled at both of them, took a drink of the water and put my pajamas on. They turned the lights down low, told me to relax on my bed, and started to give me a back scratch. I thought about nothing and simply enjoyed the feel of their four little hands.

Next, they massaged me—first my back, then my legs and arms. My body was sinking into the bed, and I felt totally at peace. They slowly massaged my feet and neck. I felt truly pampered. They then rubbed my temples with their thumbs and massaged my forehead. All the anxiety of the day dissipated. The messy house and to-do lists became inconsequential.

“You are the most special mom in the world,” Tara whispered as she worked.

“This is what you do for us every night, Mommy. Tonight’s your turn,” Jake said affectionately.

Were those really the same children I had spent the day with?

Just when I thought my special treatment was over, they took turns brushing my hair. I was in heaven. I relished every moment and smiled to myself, thinking,
Who
really needs a spotless house and folded laundry?

Tara and Jake whispered to each other, ran into the bathroom, returned with my favorite lotion and slowly massaged my feet again as the peach-scented aroma filled the room.

What did I do to deserve this? I felt more relaxed than I had in a long time. As I thought it over, I realized that rather than scream for quiet or holler that I expected better behavior, I had simply taken a moment to share my need with my children. I had asked for some special nurturing, and thankfully, they were loving enough to give it.

Marian Gormley

The Gravy Boat Rescue

Not long ago my wife and I had a dinner party for some good friends. To add a touch of elegance to the evening I brought out the good stuff—my white Royal Crown Derby china with the fine gold and blue border. When we were seated, one of the guests noticed the beat-up gravy boat I always use. “Is it an heirloom?” she asked tactfully.

I admit the piece is conspicuous; it is very old and it matches nothing else. Worst of all, it is scarred by a V-shaped notch in the lip. But that little gravy boat is much more than an heirloom to me—it is the one thing in this world I will never part with.

Our history together began over fifty years ago when I was seven years old and we lived across the street from the river in New Richmond, Ohio. In anticipation of high water, the ground floor of the house had been built seven feet above grade.

That December, the river started to overflow west of town. When the water began to rise in a serious way, my parents made plans in case the river should invade our house. My mother decided that she would pack our books and her fine china in a small den off the master bedroom. Each piece of the china had a gold rim and then a band of roses. It was not nearly as good as it was old, but the service had been her mother’s and was precious to her.

As she packed the china with great care, she told me, “You must treasure the things people you love have cherished. It keeps you in touch with them.”

I didn’t really understand her concern. I’d never owned anything I cared all that much about. Still, planning for disaster held considerable fascination for me.

The plan was to move upstairs when the river reached the seventh of the steps that led to the front porch. We would keep a rowboat in the downstairs so that we could get from room to room. The one thing we would not do was leave the house. My father, the town’s only doctor, felt he had to be where sick people could find him.

The muddy water rose higher and higher until at last the critical mark was reached. We worked for days carrying things upstairs, until late one afternoon the water edged over the threshold and poured into our house. I watched it from the safety of the stairs, amazed at how rapidly it rose.

Every day I sat on the landing and watched the river rise. My mother turned a spare bedroom into a makeshift kitchen and cooked simple meals there. My father came and went in a fishing boat that was powered by a small outboard motor.

Before long, the Red Cross began to pitch tents on high ground north of town. “We are staying in our house,” my father said.

One night very late I was awakened by a tearing noise, like timbers creaking. Then I heard the rumbling sound of heavy things falling. I jumped out of bed and ran into the hallway. My parents were standing in the doorway to the den. The floor of the den had fallen through and all the treasures, including my mother’s china, that we had attempted to save, were now on the first floor beneath the steadily rising river.

My mother had been courageous it seemed to me, through the ordeal of the flood. But the loss of the things she loved broke her resolve. That night she sat on the top of the stairs with her head on her crossed arms and cried. My father comforted her as best he could, but she was inconsolable.

My father finally told me to go to bed, and I watched him help my mother to their room. In a few minutes he came to see me, to tell me everything would be all right and that my mother would be fine after a good night’s sleep.

I wasn’t sure about that at all. There was a sound in her weeping that I had never heard before, and it troubled me. I wanted to help her feel better, but I couldn’t think of what I could possibly do.

The next morning she made me breakfast, and I could tell how bad she still felt just by how cheerful she pretended to be.

After breakfast, my mother said I could go downstairs and play in the rowboat. I rowed the boat once around the downstairs, staring into the dark water, but could see nothing. It was right then that I thought of trying to fish for my mother’s china.

I carefully put a hook I cut from a wire coat hanger onto a weighted line. Then I let it sink until I felt it hit bottom. I began to slowly drag it back and forth. I spent the next hour or so moving the boat back and forth, dragging my line, hoping against hope to find one of my mother’s treasures. But time after time I pulled the line up empty.

As the water rose day after day, I continued to try to recover something, anything, of my mother’s lost treasure. Soon, however, the water inside had risen to the stairway landing. On the day the water covered the rain gutters, my father decided we would have to seek shelter in the tents on the hill. A powerboat was to pick us up that afternoon.

I spent the morning hurriedly securing things in my room as best I could. Then I got into my rowboat for the last time. I dragged my line through the water and just as I made the last turn to go back to the stairway, I snagged something.

Holding my breath, I raised my catch to the surface. As the dark water drained from it, I could see it was the gravy boat from my mother’s china service. The bright roses and gold leaf seemed dazzling to me.

Then I saw what had helped my line catch: There was a V-shaped chip missing from the lip of the boat. I stowed the treasure inside my jacket and rowed as fast as I could to the stair landing. My mother had called me for the second time, and I knew better than to risk a third.

We left from the porch roof and the boat headed to higher ground. It began to rain, and for the first time I was really afraid. The water might rise forever, might cover the whole valley, the trees, even the hills. The thought made me cold, and I did not look out at the flood again until we landed at the shelter.

By the time we were settled in a Red Cross tent, we were worn out. My father had gone off to help with the sick people, and my mother sat on my cot with her arm around my shoulder. I reached under my pillow and took out the gravy boat.

She looked at it, then at me. Then she took it in her hands and held it a long time. She was very quiet, just sitting, gazing at the gravy boat. She seemed both very close to me and far away at the same time, as though she were remembering. I don’t know what she was thinking, but she pulled me into her arms and held me very close.

We lived in the tent for almost two weeks, waiting for the flood to end. When the water eventually receded, we did not move back to our old house, but to a house in a suburb of Cincinnati, far from the river.

By Easter, we were settled in and my mother made a special kind of celebration on that sacred Sunday. My mother asked me to say grace, and then my father carved the lamb. My mother went into the kitchen and returned with the gravy boat. Smiling at me, she placed it on the table beside her. I said to myself right then that nothing would ever happen to that gravy boat as long as I lived.

And nothing ever has. Now whenever I use it, guests almost always ask about it and sometimes I tell the whole story—at least most of it. But there really is no way to tell—beyond the events of the flood—how deeply that small treasure connects me to the people and places of my past. It is not only the object but also the connection I cherish. That little porcelain boat, old and chipped, ties me to my mother—just as she said—keeping me in touch with her life, her joy and her love.

W. W. Meade

Mom’s Favorite Child

For weeks, both our mother and our brother had been near death with cancer. Mom and her dying son were inseparable, whether at home or as patients in the same hospital. None of us siblings resented that she turned to him so much during those final days. On a cold day in November, her four remaining sons carried her to his funeral, certain that they were fulfilling her last wish.

The long night that followed was both a horror and a blessing. My oldest sister, Marie, and I stayed with Mom in our childhood home. No matter what we did, Mom wept with grief and writhed with pain. Her cries mingled with the sounds of the icy rain blown against the windows of the old farmhouse, first in gusts, then in brief intermissions of heavy calm. Finally, around three o’clock in the morning, after telling us repeatedly that she would not see another dawn, she closed her eyes. An eerie silence settled over the house, as if death were very close to us again.

When Marie and I saw that she was not dead but was resting peacefully, we knew we should rest too. But we couldn’t sleep and started to talk.

Marie was the second child; I was the ninth and last. The two of us had never even lived in the same house, as she already had her own home when I was born. We looked and acted like members of the same clan, but we had never talked real “soul talk.” In the dim light of the room adjoining Mom’s, she and I whispered stories about our family.