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closeFrom the Editor: My mom was definitely her own person
Heather Meier
“I hate you,” a 5-year-old version of me yelled. “I wish I had a different mother.”
Without so much as a startled look crossing her face, she silently left the living room, pulled a suitcase out of the garage and headed back to her bedroom while I sat sulking on the couch.
A few moments later, she made her way down the hall and headed out the front door, giving me a brief look before leaving. My wish was coming true.
I wasn’t alone long. The doorbell rang and when I looked through the peephole, there was a woman who looked vaguely like my mother but with a different hairstyle and clothing. She gave a brisk knock and then, through the door told me to let her in.
“I’m your new mother,” she said before launching into the list of chores she expected me to complete — wash the dishes, do the laundry, vacuum the whole house, clean the windows, scrub the toilet, mop the floors and when I was finished, I could use my extra energy to rub her feet.
This mother was definitely not my dream come true; I was hoping for Wonder Woman and got Cruella De Vil.
I’m not sure when it occurred to me it was all a joke, but it is my earliest memory of my mother’s unique parenting style.
This is the same mother whose favorite phrase was “If wishes were horses we’d all be patoots” when things didn’t go according to plan. I was never sure what it meant exactly but it was said with such frequency and conviction that I grew up thinking it was a common Southern expression taken from my mother’s childhood in Roanoke, Va. Imagine my surprise and disappointment to discover that no one other than my mother is familiar with the saying.
She insisted on singing on a daily basis despite the fact that she couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. Like her phrases, some of the songs were her own personal creations while she simply butchered the lyrics in others (I’m still not certain which is which).
In her rendition of “Summertime,” her signature song, the fish were jumping all the way to the sky. She knew only the first two verses from Gershwin’s famous “Porgy and Bess” song, and obviously not all that well considering in his original version it was the cotton making its way toward the heavens, but I was comforted from many a tumble or heartbreak by those fractured eight lines.
Long before I was born, my mother determined she would never lay a harsh hand on any child. I have no recollection of what I did to drive her to the point where she bent me over her knee, but I’ll never forget the sound of her hand coming down hard and quick on the side of the bed as I stared at the floor. As I looked up, tears were streaming down her face.
Really a spanking or a grounding was unnecessary. My mother’s preferred form of punishment was guilt. All it took was a look or a sigh with the words, “I just expected better from you.”
Despite her occasional emotional moments, she was one tough cookie and wouldn’t stand for me to be anything else. Whether it was a bee sting or a scraped knee, she would tell me to shake it off and move on with life. With a gentle hand she would smear meat tenderizer or an antiseptic on my skin and then send me back out into the world.
My mother should have had more children than just me and, in a way, I guess she did — she’s been a first and second grade teacher for more than a decade.