Mother's Day Musing

My mother was a beautiful woman, slender and strong and tall, especially in the 1930s and 40s, when women tended to be shorter than we are today.  She was also highly intelligent, well read, and sophisticated.  She attended Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, an elite private university, until the Depression forced her family into bankruptcy.  At Ursinus she studied languages (French and Latin), doing light housekeeping for a professor and his wife in exchange for room and board.  She was an excellent student, always.  My dad finished a Master's degree and taught high school English; he was certainly no slouch intellectually.  But it was our mother who insisted on high intellectual standards.  I remember when I was in 2nd grade, I volunteered to do a report on somebody famous, Lincoln maybe.  One of my classmates had done one, and the teacher seemed mightily impressed.  I wanted some of that praise, too, so I decided to do what he had done.  I got home all excited, pulled out the appropriate Book of Knowledge from the shelf, and started copying verbatim what was there.  When Mother asked me what I was doing, I explained the situation, and she sat down with me to help.  So far, so good.  But then she told me to put away the paper, told me that you can't copy a report from somebody else's work, and made me read the segment carefully.  Then she took away the Book of Knowledge and told me to put into my own words what I had read!  I was all kinds of aggravated—that wasn't what I wanted to do, I just wanted some easy praise at school!  I learned forcefully the meaning of "plagiarism," and as a university writing instructor, I have wished all second graders received the lesson I did that day.  Mother's response to my taking the easy way out was typical.  She was always encouraging, not irritable about it, but she simply insisted that we develop rigorous intellectual standards for ourselves.

Mother used big words all the time.  I remember that so clearly about her—she wasn't like my friends' moms.  Her elevated vocabulary was completely natural to her, like her proud carriage and grace.  She was a humble, self-deprecating, shy woman, so there was never a feeling that she thought she was "all that" as the kids say now.  She simply loved words and shared that love with us all.  She read to us, classic works like Tom Sawyer, A Christmas Carol, and The Secret Garden, stopping as necessary to explain nuances and big words to my little sister and me (to the irritation of the older kids, who were exasperated with our ignorance).

Daddy always credited Mother with getting him through his college days, and to his death, he remained somewhat bemused and surprised that God had blessed him with this beautiful, sophisticated, classy woman to share his life with.  My dad was a wonderful character in his own right, but this is a Mother's Day tribute, and he really did feel grateful and a little unworthy of my mother with her well-connected family and cultivated mind.

My mother was the youngest of three; her brother and sister as well as all their progeny were Ivy League educated.  Only Mother was still dependent when the Depression crept into her insulated and privileged world.  Her father, an inventor and public servant, had worked with Franklin D. Roosevelt when he was Governor of New York.  Among the items auctioned with the family’s other treasures was an armchair that had been in the Governor’s Mansion, a gift from FDR.

My mother went from student to working girl with her characteristic grace, landing a good job in downtown Philadelphia.  In 1942, she met a sailor assigned to Philadelphia to outfit a new warship—my dad, a country boy from southern Illinois who had dropped out of school at 14 in order to help support his family.  Their backgrounds could not have been more different.   Her family warned her that “nothing good could come out of Little Egypt,” but my mother was as captivated by Daddy’s simple goodness as he was by her sophistication.  He was always a little in awe of Mother’s intellect and education, and she was drawn to his authentic integrity.

By the time Daddy retired from the Navy in 1956, he had completed a G.E.D. and was therefore eligible for the new G.I. Bill.  He and his East Coast bride moved to dinky little Carterville, Illinois, near Daddy’s roots but far from Mother’s, and he enrolled in college.  Mother helped him with his classes, managed the finances and kids, and time marched on.

I don’t remember Mother’s Day as a big deal, really.  We never went out to eat or anything.  Sometimes we gave cards and gifts made at school or church, but Hallmark and Madison Avenue didn’t hold much sway in rural southern Illinois.  I mostly remember warm weather and the smell of late spring.  My mother was not a gardener, but every Mother's Day we wore flowers to church.  Red roses for us kids, signifying that our mother was living, and white peonies for Mother and Daddy, signifying that their mothers had passed on.  Now this was in southern Illinois, where the roses bloom around Mother's Day, and we had a lovely bush with small blooms.  We'd sing loudly, "Mother, Mother, Mother, pin a rose on me!"  I never did know where that came from, but we sang it every year on Mother's Day, and cut little red roses to wear on our church clothes.  Mother and Daddy, however, weren't quite so lucky in their floral apparel.  We had some peony bushes out front, a couple of which had white flowers, so they'd scrounge around and try to find a small-ish blossom to wear.  Well, peonies even at their very best are big, showy, gaudy divas of the flower world, and they bloom before the roses do, so they were always well past their prime by Mother's Day, brownish, shedding petals, attracting ants.  It never occurred to any of us to look further than the peony bushes for a white flower, though, so Mother and Daddy would search for the least-sad looking, smallest blooms they could find, and thus clad in our flowers we'd head to the Rosiclare United Methodist Church, six miles away.  By the time we got to church, the roses were droopy and the peonies had shed their few shriveled petals.  I have no idea why we persisted with this silly ritual every year, but we did.  In a way, it does shine a light into Mother's character.  For all her aristocratic upbringing, she had a lighthearted approach to life, embracing the moments, relishing God's world in all its funny little foibles.

Happy Mother’s Day, Vera Mildred Hay Bishop.