Chicken Soup for Every Mom's Soul (6 page)

Seeing my mother near death, I felt like a little girl again. I told Marie how I remembered so often the special solace of Mom’s lap. That was my retreat when I sought comfort for aching ears, or refuge from warring siblings, or just the closeness of her hug. To me she was always wonderfully soft and warm.

Marie knew the feeling. The shadows danced on the wall, a background to our animated whispers about childhood— the family struggles, the strict discipline and hard work, the inevitable fights with our siblings.

Then she made a shocking statement.

“It wasn’t really so hard for me, though, because I was always Mom’s favorite.”

I was astounded that she said the word out loud! Mom didn’t have favorites! Yet as I let myself think about it, I had to reply, “I can’t believe you said that . . . I guess I always thought I was her favorite.”

Marie and I both chuckled, each believing that the other had certainly placed second. Then the truth began to unfold, as we continued to swap stories about the calm and loving woman asleep in the next room.

“I have an idea,” I told her. “When the boys get here in the morning, let’s ask them who was her favorite.”

Two of our brothers awakened us at dawn, anxious to see if Mom had made it through the night. She had, and was still dozing. Over coffee at the big family table, I asked them the unspeakable question.

“Marie and I were talking last night, and couldn’t agree on something, so we thought we’d ask you. Who do you think was Mom’s favorite child?”

Coffee mugs stalled in midair. The two men’s eyebrows arched, and their mouths fell open. They squirmed in their chairs and looked out the window as intently as if counting the raindrops. Marie and I waited.

Finally, one brother spoke. “Well, you know Mom never played favorites. . . .” Then, making uneasy eye contact again, he said, “But if I were honest about it, I guess I’d have to say I always thought
I
was her favorite.”

The second brother, grinning with relief that he didn’t have to say it out loud first, confessed that he thought he was her favorite.

For the first time in months, we all laughed, as only childhood friends can laugh when finding a hidden treasure and sharing the secret.

How did she manage to make each of us feel like the favored child? She never told us we were. She showered none of us with gifts or special privileges. She was not very physically affectionate with us, and “I love you” was not part of daily conversation. But in her quiet way, she had a gift of presence more powerful than words. My husband (knowing secretly that he was her favorite son-in-law) summed it up: “When she was with you, she was all yours, as if you were the most important person in the world. Then she would go on to the next person, all his for a while.”

In those days just before her death, my brothers and sisters and I discovered together what each of us had felt all along. Mom’s love had no limits—each child was her favorite.

Sue Thomas Hegyvary

off the mark by Mark Parisi

www.offthcmark.com

Reprinted by permission of Mark Parisi. ©1993 Mark Parisi.

Letter to Josh

In 1989, several days before my oldest son, Josh’s, eighteenth birthday, I wrote the following piece and sent it to our local paper asking them to print it. They agreed, and it appeared the next day. It read:

My oldest son is celebrating his eighteenth birthday, and I
am proud to announce that his father and I are going to survive.
Now for all those who have never raised children this
might not seem like a big deal, but believe me from my experience
this is truly an amazing and wondrous feat.

Dear Josh,

On your thirteenth birthday we watched as you took those first giant rebellious steps toward adulthood. You no longer accepted, unquestioningly, our answers to why you had to be in bed early and why you could not play outside after dark. We began to see small hints of skepticism and humor in eyes that once held only adoration and respect for all we said and did.

And . . . your father and I began to discuss, in depth, the feasibility of sending you to military school until you were eighteen.

On your fourteenth birthday you were no longer content to remain in the neighborhood. You wanted to claim the whole world as your domain, and your ever-widening circle of friends now contained names we did not know. We reluctantly accepted your mad dashes to answer the phone (acknowledging that most of the phone calls were now for you anyway) and on the few occasions when we did answer, it seemed strange to hear girls’ voices asking for you.

And . . . your father and I began to consider in earnest calling several well-established adoption agencies (including the local humane society) to see if they would accept you for the next four years.

When you turned fifteen we learned of all-night skating and midnight bowling, that no one goes to the early movies and everyone lives at the mall. Our conversations with you became minimal and usually turned into heated debates. Pros and cons rang through the house. Your sentences began with “All my friends are doing it” and ended with “Wait till I’m eighteen.”

And . . . your father and I began to seriously contemplate running away.

It was on your sixteenth birthday that a very real panic began to set in as you proudly announced to all who would listen that you were going to get your driver’s license. I stood there in shock, numbly thinking,
This kid
wants my car keys,
and remembering all the Band-Aids, every tube of first-aid cream and the numerous trips to the emergency room as you gradually worked your way from the stroller to tricycles, from big-wheels to bicycles, to roller skates and ice skates, skateboards and snow sleds.

And . . . your father and I decided that, when we did run away, we were taking both of the cars with us.

Your seventeenth birthday brought more changes. It seemed the only time we saw you was when you were hungry or needed to use the car. The refrigerator hated to see you coming and we hated to see you go. Our conversations now centered around college versus the armed forces, and we felt a little lost when we took our first family vacation without you.

But, Josh, we are truly proud of the man you have become, of your many accomplishments, the awards and trophies you have received over the years and your involvement in so many wonderful organizations.

And now . . . your father and I watch with equal measures of pride and apprehension as you walk out into that world you wanted to claim as your domain so long ago.

Happy birthday, Josh.

Love,
Mom and Dad

Initially we intended to give Josh a mild ribbing—he was a kid who loved to instigate and loved a good laugh, even when the joke was on him. But it became a way of letting him know that I believed in him and supported him in the hard decisions coming up as he entered the adult world with all its complexities and challenges.

Now I regard it as a loving reminder of a time that passed all too quickly.

My daring toddler, my lovable little boy, my wonderful rambunctious teenager, Joshua, died when he was twenty-one.

Linda Masters

My Mother’s Blue Bowl

Visitors to my house are often served food—soup, potatoes, rice—in a large blue stoneware bowl, noticeably chipped at the rim. It is perhaps the most precious thing I own. My mother gave it to me in her last healthy days. The days before a massive stroke laid her low and left her almost speechless.

For much of her life my mother longed, passionately, for a decent house. One with a yard that did not have to be cleared with an ax. One with a roof that kept out the rain. One with floors that you could not fall through. She longed for a beautiful house of wood or stone. Or of red brick, like the houses her many sisters and their husbands had. When I was thirteen, she found such a house. Green shuttered, white walled. Breezy. With a lawn and hedge and giant pecan trees. A porch swing. There her gardens flourished in spite of the shade, as did her youngest daughter, for whom she sacrificed her life doing hard labor in someone else’s house in order to afford peace and prettiness for her child, to whose grateful embrace she returned each night.

But, curiously, the minute I left home, at seventeen, to attend college, she abandoned the dream house and moved into the projects. Into a small, tight apartment of few breezes, in which I was never to feel comfortable, but that she declared suited her “to a T.” I took solace in the fact that it was at least hugged by a spacious lawn on one side, and by forest out the back door, and that its isolated position at the end of the street meant she would have a measure of privacy.

Her move into the projects—the best housing poor black people in the South ever had, she would occasionally declare, even as my father struggled to adjust to the cramped rooms and hard, unforgiving qualities of brick— was, I now understand, a step in the direction of lightening her load, permitting her worldly possessions to dwindle in significance and roll away from her, well before she herself would turn to spirit.

She owned little, in fact. A dresser, some chairs. A set of living-room furniture. A set of kitchen furniture. A bed and wardrobe (given to her years before, when I was a teenager, by one of her more prosperous sisters). Her flowers: everywhere, inside the house and outside. Planted in anything she managed to get her green hands on, including old suitcases and abandoned shoes. She recycled everything, effortlessly. And gradually she had only a small amount of stuff—mostly stuff her children gave her: nightgowns, perfumes, a microwave—to recycle or to use.

Each time I visited her, I marveled at the modesty of her desires. She appeared to have barely any, beyond a thirst for a Pepsi-Cola or a hunger for a piece of fried chicken or fish. On every visit I noticed that more and more of what I remembered of her possessions seemed to be missing. One day I commented on this.

Taking a deep breath, sighing, and following both with a beaming big smile, which lit up her face, the room and my heart, she said, “Yes, it’s all going. I don’t need it anymore. If there’s anything you want, take it when you leave; it might not be here when you come back.” But there was nothing there for me to want.

One day, however, looking for a jar in which to pour leftover iced tea, I found myself probing deep into the wilderness of the overstuffed, airless pantry. Into the land of the old-fashioned, the outmoded, the outdated. The humble and the obsolete. There was a smoothing iron, a churn. A butter press. And two large bowls.

One was cream and rose with a blue stripe. The other was a deep, vivid blue.

“May I have this bowl, Mama?” I asked, looking at her and at the blue bowl with delight.

“You can have both of them,” she said, barely acknowledging them, and continuing to put leftover food away.

In giving me these gifts, my mother had done a number of astonishing things in her typically offhand way. She had taught me a lesson about letting go of possessions— easily, without emphasis or regret—and she had given me a symbol of what she herself represented in my life.

For the blue bowl especially was a cauldron of memories. Of cold, harsh wintry days, when my brothers and sister and I trudged home from school burdened down by the silence and frigidity of our long trek from the main road, down the hill to our shabby-looking house.

Slogging through sleet and wind to the sagging front door, thankful our house was too far from the road to be seen clearly from the school bus, I always felt a wave of embarrassment and misery. But then I would open the door. And there inside would be my mother’s winter flowers: a glowing fire in the fireplace, colorful handmade quilts on all our beds, paintings and drawings of flowers and fruits and, most of all, there in the center of the rough-hewn table, stood the big blue bowl, full of whatever was the most tasty thing on earth.

There was my mother herself. Glowing. Her teeth sparkling. Her eyes twinkling. As if she lived in a castle and her favorite princes and princesses had just dropped by to visit.

A blue bowl stood there, seemingly full forever, no matter how deeply or rapaciously we dipped, as if it had no bottom. And she dipped up soup. Dipped up lima beans. Dipped up stew. Forked out potatoes. Spooned out rice and peas and corn. And in the light and warmth that was her, we dined.