Still missing Mama

I didn’t buy a Mother’s Day card this year. While most of the people I know were talking about the gifts they were getting for their moms, I kept uncharacteristically silent. It’s been over 10 years since Dad died and Mom followed him about six years later.

It’s still a strange feeling to go past the greeting card section and to keep the credit card in the wallet during this season. I wonder if a Mother’s Day will pass when I don’t miss her?

Growing up in northeastern Tennessee, my mother was a constant figure in my life. She worked before I was born but, once I came along, she never worked outside the home again. I thought once that she might but, when I was in the third grade, my brother came along and she was a stay-home mom for him, too.

There’s a great deal I miss about those early days. Food comes to mind. We nearly always had eggs, biscuits with gravy, and either bacon or sausage for breakfast seven days a week. During the summers, lunch (called “dinner” in east Tennessee) consisted of a sandwich or a can of something opened and heated on the stove. Dinner (known as “supper”) was always a veritable feast of country cooking.

Mom was a cleanliness fanatic. Clothes didn’t pile up, the floor was cleaned at least once a day, and we always said that one could eat off the floors. She ironed and folded t-shirts and underwear, made the beds every day by 7:30 a.m., and had Dad’s lunch made before he ever came to the breakfast table.

She didn’t learn to drive until I was in the seventh grade but, once she did, she also became the taxi driver for whatever sports practices I needed to attend. She would “cut a switch” to discipline me, bandage my head when a neighbor kid split it open with a rock, wipe my nose when a bully on the bus bloodied it, and would cry when my dog died, even though she couldn’t stand the thing.

In the midst of all that, she constantly called on and cared for her mother who lived less than half a mile away and, on occasion, would mow the lawn and trim the hedges. When I got hurt on the football field and had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance, she tried to run out onto the field. Only Dad’s physical restraint kept her off the field and saved me from a fate worse than injury — embarrassment in front of one’s fellow jocks.

After Christmas 1980, I took my wife and two children (with another on the way) and moved to western Colorado, Looking back on it, I think it devastated her. I’m sure she thought that I’d live in or near the hometown all my life and that the grandchildren would be over every Sunday. But I went where the work was and never moved back home.

I did come to Georgia in June 1983 but I think she felt robbed — cheated — that we were never closer than six hours from her home.

I wrote to her or sent photographs nearly every day, visited when I could, and called less than I should. I wish I had done more. Like most people, I thought there would be more time.

Although she had not been in the best of health for some time, when she took sick, it happened in a hurry. Eight days after she entered the hospital, she was gone. It’s hard to lose a parent, harder still to preach the funeral of one’s own parent, which I have now done twice.

In a few days, I’ll return to the hills just a few miles from Virginia and visit where Mom lies peacefully next to Dad on a high place overlooking the city, not far from where other family members are buried. I’ll sit for awhile in the warm spring sun and listen to the birds singing in the trees and reflect and remember.

I’d much rather be able to give her a Mother’s Day card and buy her just one more gift.