Confessions, Part 3

Mom


My mother has been gone for 4 years now, and I miss her a lot. She was a devoted mother and wife and saw these roles as her most important calling in life. I will be forever grateful to God for a mother who sacrificed for her family.

Mom was the next-to-youngest of 4 children and the only daughter in the family. She and grandma were at the same time as close as mother and daughter could be and intense rivals for the attention of the rest of the family. When grandma died, mom had no rivals.

Though born in Ohio and having spent most of her life there, she was proud to claim the title of “country girl.” We never lived on a farm or even in the country, but, by virtue of the DNA that ordered our genetics, we were “down-home” people. In mom’s world, there were but 2 kinds of people: down-home people and “not our kind of people.” Down home people were those who were always welcome at your house and would welcome you in their house, even if unannounced. No visit would conclude unless food was exchanged. Adults would be lost in conversation about the major events of the day: “I can’t believe Sister Skinner would wear that new dress and sashay in front of the deacons like that.” Down Home people knew what was important.

Mom was fiercely defensive of her heritage and determined to raise her kids as down home kids. In later years, our favorite TV shows were The Beverly Hillbillies and Hee Haw. This was not entertainment in our home, it was indoctrination. These were not comedies; they were dramatic series or documentaries. We knew people like Elie May, Cousin Jethro, Junior Samples and Grandpa Jones.

The other class of people was those who were “not our kind of people.” This was a neat category in which were placed all sorts of ethnic and racial groups. Mostly, however, this group consisted of those who shared 3 major characteristics: they had stayed in school past the 8th grade, they had no experience with outhouses or chamber pots, and they were in possession of most of their teeth. Growing up, the only adult in my family that had all his teeth was my dad. Mom, grandma, grandpa, and my uncles (not to mention the aforementioned aunts in the previous post) all had dentures. Note: this was on my mother’s side of the family. My relatives on my father’s side of the family for the most part, did possess most of their teeth. However, our social interaction with that side of the family was severely limited by mother’s decree. The proximity of dad’s homestead to the West Virginia State Mental Hospital may have had something to do with mom insuring that we keep a safe distance from that part of the family.

The hardest thing that mom ever had to deal with was when I brought home the girl who was later to become my wife. Lois was from another city; her parents were college graduates, they had their teeth; they were not “our kind of people!”