I tease my mother by calling her Emily after Emily Gilmore both because overall my family reminds me very much of the Gilmores and because she’s never met a brand name she didn’t like whereas I’m perfectly content to buy generic.
I thank her among many things for a thorough grounding in the domestic and other arts.
Mom teaches first grade and is actually famous in a quiet sort of way. The kind parents brag about and angle their kids for though she’s won national awards too. Of course I owe everything I know about educating to her and among my own peers I’m considered an asskicking trainer.
She also insisted we learn to perform routine self maintenance, little things like laundry and ironing, machine and hand mending. basic cooking. Of course she always indulged us with trips to museums and zoos, made sure we got library cards, did the usual bus driver thing to swim practice, had this huge second career as a Brownie/Girl Scout Leader for my sister.
At one point when I was old enough for it to make an impression she took her Masters of Fine Arts in Art of all things, so I know a little Art History with Far Eastern. I understand how to bang out a copper pot and make silver rings because she took me to class once or twice. She liked stained glass so much that she and dad made several pieces (you use a soldering iron and can cut yourself pretty bad so it’s a macho thing too). They also did silk screening which taught me a lot about layout and graphic arts.
But she always liked fabric arts and in addition to a framed three dimensional piece in the living room, there are Afghans and rugs and scarves and pot holders and wash cloths and hats and quilts and dolls.
And the training kits and manuals for her mentorship programs, and the adaptations and costumes for the annual first and fifth grade play. Did I mention she plays 3 instruments, though mostly piano?
She touch types too.
So to Emily, a woman of accomplishment and refinement, Happy Mother’s Day.
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Happy Mother’s Day to you too.
Your Mom tribute was quite sweet!!!!!!
Are you slipping up because I have expectation about how you behave and I am a bit worried.
Really nice. 🙂
Has not had a good year…. Grandma died and she had been spending all of her free time prior to that caring for her spelled off by me when I visited. Then her basement needed major renovations or else the house would have gotten condemned and she needed about 40,000 dollars of work. Had this been the movies I would have whipped out a check and saved Mom but I just don’t have that kind of money myself.
Our household was always budget conscious. When my Mom first bought the house we had to take in a “boarder” and the house had one bathroom 900 sq feet. Her name was Rita and she was a total crazy woman. German.
Mom got paid once a month and so a good chunk of the month we ate vegetarian. When “no name” products first came out in grocery stores she bought this awful no name toothpaste. God. I still remember it. She got a Masters of Ed in the 70’s when it wasn’t that easy to do for a working single mother and commuted three hours to do it. Needless to say my grandmother looked after me a lot. She was good at weaving, knitting, taught me to cook at a young age, still knows a lot about wine. I still call her when I am trying a new recipe out.
We like the same movies including foreign arty crap with lots of sex an nudity. My mother will be the one saying,”my he had a large ^&&(*..” She has a great “eye” and makes folk art things like bags and place mats and things that are quite interesting.
Lives on 65 acres by herself on a tight budget and things break and I feel guilty for being 1500 miles away and I want her to live in a damn condo but she won’t do it. She is eccentric in a general way and really does not give a rat’s ass what anybody thinks about her. She likes fantasy and science fiction and tries to make me go to yoga when I visit. She is anti-technology and has no cell phone, no cable TV, no internet connection and has NO interest in acquiring any of those.
She is frustruating and stubborn but an interesting person. No cookie cutter Mom that is for sure. Obviously I love her very much.
But it has no magic button.
Thanks for this.
I am particularly partial to Emily’s son!
So I have one in thing in common with her, heh.
Happy Mother’s Day to all.
this might fit.
Billie (rest of her name here)
My mother didn’t call herself a seamstress, but she sewed. She talked about putting labels inside our clothes that read, “Handmade, not homemade.” She was an artist with fabric. I loved her in ways that were primary, basic, not thought about, not thought out.
When I lost her, I lost the stitching of my life, the binding thread. For years I couldn’t do anything with the pieces left scattered about. She was the one who had held everything together. She was the pattern. She was the seam. She was the whole. Then she was gone.
I was sixteen when I witnessed her leaving. I was astonished to see her vanish from this earth, this world she had brought me into, and I told her so. “Don’t go. Mom, don’t go.” Her hand was warm but the noise that rumbled out of her was a wild creature intent on escape. That’s when I first met Ruah. He comes eventually for all of us, and He had come for her then, swept up and swallowed her breath. He ripped open the fabric of her life, and she slipped from this world into the next.
In my life since, some people are red threads, some yellow, some blue, some gold. Now when they go, I gather the remaining ends and tie them together. I know there will always be a knot where the hole was, but the threads are bound tightly there too. A patched garment true, but handmade, just like my mother taught me to sew.
~~kj
written for a private publication titled “Women Honoring Women” in 2000.
please forgive the sentiment. it is the only thing i’ve ever written that was overtly about my mother.
*Ruah is a Hebrew word for the Holy Spirit
how beautiful ek!
but the list of myriad accomplishments by dear emily are sadly lacking.
she raised a damnfine boy!
Happy Mothers Day Miss Emily
thank you for your son.
♥~
I need math homework help! lol
Q:
What number, when divided by eight less that the number, is 1 4/25?
Im stumped. So’s the kid.
That’s so wonderful, all those incredible things about your Mom. My mother-in-law (now 84) was a Kindergarten Teacher… and talented with the multi-tasking like that too. 🙂
Im in awe of those kinds of Moms. My own mother was not quite like that, in those ways, but she sure held it together for the family when times were hard, which was most of the time, for us.
thanks, ek, you’re a good son!
Emily and Luke, favorite ‘Gilmore’ characters.
the daughter of an eccentric herself. Reactionary to her mother’s style creating her own brand, The two of them formed my reactions a hybrid of style and substance. The thread that bound them was the earth. Mad gardeners. My mom fancied herself a Lady. As in a Lady does not wash her own floors. She grew up in the San Fernando Valley when it was a series of ranches/farms and movie lots. She wanted glamor and class, never realizing she contained both.
My grandpa was a rancher and she yearned to be a socialite, a party girl from the east coast, instead of one of the original Valley Girls. Off she went to William and Mary where she was majored in sociology, and learned raucous songs involving combination underwear worn in Bowling Green. The ‘damn war’ brought her back to California and made the best of it becoming a social butterfly LA style.
Her children were raised in a environment which allowed imagination and body to roam free like my grandpa’s chickens. Periodically she would quit mixing up chemicals in the turkey roaster, have a luncheon, and drag me out of the eucalyptus trees, and dress me up in crinolines like a lady and tell me to ‘behave’ for the rest of the ladies. She was a fierce Democrat in counter to my Dad’s Republican, we grew up amongst fierce debates, ending with my Dad saying ‘Gretchen, get off your soapbox’.
We never had a TV as it bored and stunted, she read the National Review of Literature took me to see Elton Clever, and sent me off to heaven every summer at my gandama’s trailer in Laguna Beach. She loved the arts as much as she loved the parties. She covered my back with the school system by proclaiming ‘But she’s creative’ every time I got busted. She was fun, big fun. She taught me everything from restoring a broken down sailboat to gardening and art, but she never made a Lady out of me. I miss her.
I seem to mention my mom a lot lately, either in comments or discussions, with my political re-awakening and all. So, I decided to write a bit about her here, today, Mother’s Day.
She passed in Nov 2003, a month after she turned 89. And I miss her, more these days than ever, in some ways.
She was, as she put it, a “tough old bird”… lol. She was lifelong Kennedy-style Democrat, raised in Lenox, Mass, through The Depression, and she lived some of her single twenties in NYC, and went to Business School. Then came The War. She signed up with the WACS and shipped out. She met my gregarious, artsy, fun-loving, Leo, Ohioan Dad in Manila. They married in 1946, had their first (of four) daughters in 1947. “My Cool Sister” as I cyberly refer to her, is the classic Boomer hippie, my fellow heathen sister. (The other two are xtians). I am the youngest, a piggyback Boomer, born 9 years later.
My 4’10” Mom had many of those classic Massachusetts Irish Catholic traits and quirks. Pillar of strength, fiercely loyal, snark-o-licious yet lethal when directed at YOU (her aim was true), and her abilities to express her love were somewhat restricted. I think now that she was, in many ways, just a very private person.
A few of the ways she did demonstrate her love for us, and her values, was her adamant insistence that all four of her daughters obtain a good education and a college degree. (A College Degree, DAMMIT! Come hell or high water!) As #4 of 7 children herself, college was never an option even, for her or any of her sisters. She worked as a secretary and sacrificed a lot to send all four of us to Catholic schools (not for the jesus but for the quality education) and later, college at state universities.
My “Catholic twin” sister (she’s one year older than me) and I went to an all girls Catholic high school. It was during the end of VN and the heat of the watergate years, early 70’s. We, of course, were total peace and love hippies, but at the same time, very conscientious and compliant students. We had the uniform, classic pleated skirts and the rest of it. Im not sure the year, maybe 1972?, when a small cluster of us peaceniks (maybe 10 or 12 girls) decided to wear the black armbands on whatever day that would’ve been (I want to say May Day) to honor the war dead, and protest the war. We were fairly nervous, knowing we were likely to be reprimanded by the nuns, for “being out of uniform” (let me explain, dangle earrings were “out of uniform” and would get you detention!) but we held steady in our determination to make this statement. It was important.
We did, they did, and Mom backed us up. By ten a.m., the nuns made the decision to allow it. Woot. Victory!
Then, there was my Purple Shoes. Lol. Maybe I should save that story. But Mom backed me up that time too.
Dad was the storyteller, the raconteur, and a pretty good one. As kids we had our favorites that he would tell over and over again. They were pretty silly mostly. I never really fully realized how many of my mother’s stories went untold until after my Dad died in 1999.
But there were always the photos. (now in sister #2’s possession). They both, during WWII, were in the Pacific Theater and had been to all kinds of “exotic” places… New Zealand, Auchland, New Guinea, and the Phillipines. Before she met Dad, Mom was stationed somewhere near NG. Having been to Business School (NYC) she was a helluva typist and her job was Stenographer. When a US plane went down in a remote jungle valley, off on a Sunday joy ride actually, the rescue was on. Almost everything I know of this story I learned from reading the book, now out of print (still need to get my hands on a copy to own), Rescue at Shangri-la, by Major Ed Imparato (played, in my imaginary movie of the story, by Sam Sheppard…lol)
Not from Mom ever telling it. But she’s in the book: “Itsy” they called her …. her WAC nickname apparently. I’d NEVER heard it before in my life!! She was the stenographer who rode along on the rescue missions and documented the radio calls and various details of the mission. Sis#2 (in 2003, after Moms funeral) pulled out the old carbon copies Mom had saved of some of those reports that she had typed back in 1946, and she keeps them now in a safe place. Sis#2 had also done some things to ensure Moms name was in the WAC database and some of those kinds of memorial things, together with Mom in those last years. (Mom lived with Sis#2 & her family after Dad died.)
I sincerely hope that Sis#2 and her 3 daughters (now in their 20’s) will remember enough of whatever Mom may’ve told them about it all, while she lived there, that they can re-tell the stories to my own daughter someday. And me.
Itsy.
One tough old broad.
May God bless her sainted soul.
I think Ill go order that book now.
Stand the F..k Up budhydharma
TM
A) Still have the bulk of the family farm estate intact had she listened to me about the engineered and planned financial “crisis”.
B) Have a place to live at my house in the event she looses her eyesight.
Try as I did dealing with a sociopath is dealing with a sociopath. It is something most people call me an asshole for even thinking it.
But she chafes at neocons, all things Fox, and Rush Limbaugh. She’s a social conservative who is pro-life, but she supports Roe v. Wade and thinks that gays should be allowed to get married.
The difference between her and the usual conservative lot is that she can hold a complex idea in her head.
Happy Mother’s Day, mum.
My mom went back to school in her mid sixties, became a published poet and started yoga. She is my rock, muse and inspiration. I can’t imagine a day without her.