My mom, my aunts, my cousins, my oldest friend’s mom, my foster mom, my mom where I did live-in babysitting, my moms-in-law — wow!! What an amazing cross-section of women influenced my life.
Despite the fact that, after my dad died, she and I were pretty much a diad living in a city at some distance from other relatives, my mom instilled in me a strong sense of family. Several times a year we hopped a Greyhound bus, rode the “rolly-coaster hills”, and went “down home” to visits aunts, uncles, and cousins on the farms of central Ohio. As a city kid, I was not fond of outhouses, spiders, geese that chased me, chickens that defended their eggs with their beaks, or dung that required careful navigation of the fields and barnyard. But, oh, I loved the people! And sheep! And dogs and cats! When my mom, widowed and thus a single mom, needed a break, I had warm and welcoming places to go.
My mom encouraged my interest in drawing, designing doll clothes, pretend play, singing and reading. She made sure I went on school field trips to orchestral concerts and took me to a few plays. These events fed into my lifelong love of the arts.
When my mom had bouts of illness and mental health issues, a whole cadre of women stepped in.
My friend from Belgium (the Brussels sprout) had a mom who was friends with mine. She took me in on a couple of occasions when my mom was hospitalized. I learned to love rare steaks and garlic. And to parle francais un peu.
An aunt who lived half an hour away in another town took me in for a number of weeks and drove me back and forth to my high school daily. (I learned twenty years later that her daughter, my dear cousin, had begun to make plans to adopt me should it be necessary.)
Eventually, arrangements were made for me to live with a minister and his wife in a mansion that would later be razed to construct a nursing home. So, for much of my junior and senior years of high school, I lived in a 28-room mansion on eight acres of property with two ponds and a stream. (The minister and his wife were to become the administrators or the nursing home later on, so were living in the mansion and showing a sample room that had been built on one of the porches.) These folks had been missionaries in Egypt for a number of years, and the woman’s elderly father lived in the home as well. I learned a lot of elephant jokes, a teeny bit of Arabic, saw “Lawrence of Arabia” with them, and fell in love with camels. (In fact, I can do a rather impressive camel imitation — facial features, vocalization, the whole works!) My “foster mom” encouraged my writing and had me enter poetry contests for the two years I stayed with them. I won a third place prize and an honorable mention! Wow!
I began to do babysitting my senior year for a family with five kids, and became a live-in babysitter for that family for about a year. The mom was a librarian and fostered my love of reading. She also introduced me to the music of The Weavers and Bob Dylan.
Mothers’ Day has certainly dredged up the memories for me. And they are precious.