My two-cents worth and then some. An online journal by LP Brown.

Posts Tagged ‘Mother’s Day’

Reminiscing About My Mom and Mother’s Day

by on ·Nostalgia

I always thought my mother was a beautiful black woman. Need I say that I use black relevant to her racial group, not her complexion, which was the color of coffee with cream.

Mother had beautiful teeth. Until the day she died, she had all of her natural pearly whites, minus one molar, and it was hardly noticeable in the back of her mouth. Still, she felt self-conscious and often told me she wished she had not told the dentist to pull that tooth years earlier. I don’t know why he didn’t fill it or do a root canal. From our conversations, I know that mother was strongly opposed to root canals, so if her dentist had told her that having one was the only option for saving her tooth, she likely would have refused.

Mother’s hair was her crowning glory, and she always took pride in it. Before age began to thin it, she had a beautiful thick, ebony-colored mane.

As much as I longed for hair like hers, I mostly envied her long, natural fingernails. She didn’t wear nail hardener or polish, yet she managed to grow lengthy attractive nails. When I’d ask her how she managed to have nails like that when mine rarely extended beyond my fingertips, she’d say, “I don’t know. They’ve always grown like that.”

Even beyond her middle-aged years, after birthing four children and being blessed with six grandchildren and some great grands, mother’s slender frame, high cheekbones, and piercing brown eyes still turned heads.

Decades ago, before her faith became the focus of her life and curtailed our occasional outings, mother and I would go places together, like shopping or to a movie, and we’d often be mistaken for sisters. One humid summer day, after an outing, seeking refuge from the heat, we grabbed a taxi back to her house and were glad to get one with air-conditioning. After we settled in, the driver looking admiringly at mom in the rear-view mirror, said, “Is the AC too cool for you and your sister?” Mother and I looked at each other and smiled before she replied, “It feels fine, and she’s my daughter, not my sister.” That led the gray-haired gentleman, who looked about 75, to display a wide gap-tooth grin and then start the black don’t crack conversation.

Unlike some of her sisters who went to college, my mother had only high school education, yet she was an intelligent, resourceful woman, a doting mother, and a good wife to my dad. She was also very generous, especially for her children, but otherwise shrewd with money. She could pinch a penny until it turned white.

Mom also had a green thumb. I think my siblings and I inherited our love for houseplants from my mom. When I was a youngster mother had plenty of potted plants lining the windowsill in the living room. My favorite was the beautiful purple passion. She also had a tall, resilient snake plant that sat in a large pot on the floor beside the armchair.

If mom ever had a mission, it was maintaining a clean house, and she insisted that her other three rambunctious children and I help keep it tidy.

Although she was a full-time homemaker when we children grew old enough to be somewhat responsible, mom started doing part-time what was called days’ work. And at one point, she worked as a cashier at Drug Fair on upper Connecticut Avenue.

I remember mom telling me many times about leaving that drugstore one evening during a fierce snowstorm. There were already inches of the white stuff on the ground when she walked outside. She said she waited at the bus stop forever for the DC Transit bus (renamed Metro in the 1970s) to arrive and bring her back across town. Never in her life, she said, had she ever been as cold. She thought she would freeze to death before the bus finally arrived. Dad was at home babysitting us four children. Our family didn’t have a car at the time, and even if dad had tried to drive through the storm with us kids, it would have been a dangerous undertaking.

As good mothers tend to do, our mother made sacrifices for her children; some were small, some were large, and occasionally she tried to do the impossible, like one Easter Sunday when I was around 8 or 9 years old. Mom was hot-combing my hair and getting us kids ready to go to Sunday School. After straightening my hair, as she was preparing to give me some curls, I began pleading with her, “Mom, make me Shirley Temple curls? Pleeease!”

My mother knew – but I refused to believe – that it would take an Easter miracle for her to transform my short, thin, kinky naps into golden coils like Shirley Temples.

Before she began curling, mother explained that my hair was too short for curls like that. It was only about three inches in length; it was not long enough, but it also wasn’t thick enough, and of course, the texture, well, you know. But in my naïve mind, my mother could do anything. Since I refused to hear what she was saying and kept whining that I wanted Shirley Temple curls, mother made an effort.

Slathering on Royal Crown Hair Dressing and using a stovetop burner to heat the curling iron, mother began parting my hair and creating skinny curls about the thickness and half the length of small link sausages. When she finished, I rushed to look in the bathroom mirror and then dropped my smile.

Mother had laid down some neat and pretty black curls sideways on my head, but it looked nothing like Shirley Temples. Despite shaking my head hard enough to rattle my brain and give myself a concussion, I was even more disturbed that my short, stiff curls remained immobile. They would not shake or bounce like little miss curly top’s golden, voluminous tresses.

Over the years, mother and I often laughed about my Shirley Temple Easter wish.

That was decades before TV programs featured any little black girls. (Even Buckwheat, on The Little Rascals, was a boy playing a girl.) There were undoubtedly no girls like Lyric Ross (who plays Deja on This is Us) who debuted on the program proudly and boldly wearing a short afro and inspiring black girls in their formative years to embrace their natural hair.

Over the years, Scrabble became my mother and my favorite pastime. Both of us were, and I remain, fiercely competitive. Sometimes on the weekend, we would stay up past midnight battling it out on the Scrabble board. How I miss those times. How I miss my mom. So many memories. Not enough pages or time to write about all of them.

To my readers whose mother, like mine, has passed on, treasure your memories with her.

And to all of you who are moms yourself, Happy Mother’s Day!

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Planting Memories

by on ·Family, General, Nostalgia

I don’t have my mother’s green thumb, but I surely inherited her love for flowers and house plants.

For years, I’ve told my daughter about how, when my siblings and I were growing up, mother kept an indoor garden of beautiful house plants. When I was still in grade school, most of those flowers flourished year round on the windowsill in our living room.

The one plant that was too large to sit in the window occupied a place on the floor beside the roll-arm upholstered chair. Its sturdy, bright green leaves must have been at least three feet tall. It was a Sansevieria trifasciata. (“What the…,” you say. My thought exactly, that’s why I prefer to call it by it’s familiar nickname “mother-in-law’s tongue” or “snake plant.”)

The snake plant is native to the tropics of West Africa, and while its average lifespan is 5-10 years, some have been known to live as long as 25 years.

I’m not sure if that particular plant was my mother’s favorite, but it sure was mine. The beautiful flower thrived for years, even surviving the move our family made from the cramped apartment in LeDroit Park to our more spacious house in Petworth; but like all living things, it eventually died.

Some weeks ago, my daughter surprised me when she presented me with the snake plant pictured above. “Had she grown tired of hearing me share memories about her grandmother’s snake plant?” I wondered. No, she’s just that kind of thoughtful person. I almost cried because the plant resurrected old memories. I purchased a snake plant early last year, but it came to an early demise shortly after I brought it home, probably due to my overwatering it. I didn’t know then, but I do now; water is not the snake plant’s best friend. (I did say that I didn’t inherit mother’s green thumb, remember?)

I am not one of those eccentric people who name their plants. However, I made an exception and named this one Millie, after my mother, Mildred, because my childhood recollection of my mother’s beautiful snake plant is as vivid as if I were standing in front of it today. Isn’t it strange how things that some people would consider insignificant are, for others, a lasting memory?

Lately, whenever I walk past and look at that plant gifted by my daughter, I think of my mother nurturing her plants with the same tenderness that she bestowed on her children, all those years ago.

Next month, May 12, is Mother’s Day. When that day comes, mother won’t get flowers from me as she did for many years, because (as some of my readers know) she deceased four years, nine months and 20 days ago. But this year, I’ll look with gratitude at my daughter’s (early Mother’s Day) gift, and smile as I always do, because it rekindles pleasant memories of my mother and her fondness for plants.

Plant-lovers will tell you that plant tending takes root in our mind, and just like every pleasant moment in our life plants sow something sweet in our soul.

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Mother’s (Birth) Day and other Special Occasions

by on ·Family, Holidays, Nostalgia, Parenting and Grandparenting, Religion

Had my mother lived she would have turned 91 years old on her forthcoming birthday, October 22nd. Instead, she slipped into eternity early on a warm summer morning four years ago.

I’ve seen where many people wish Happy Birthday, Happy Anniversary or post other heartfelt greetings to their deceased loved ones on social media; and if that works for them, that’s fine. But I can’t help but wonder – why?

When my mother’s birthday arrives in three weeks, I won’t wish her Happy Birthday on Facebook nor will I post it in any other public place. Because if the Bible is to be believed – that the dead know nothing (Ecclesiastes 9:5) – then mother won’t know that I wish her a Happy Birthday anyway. And as much as she expressed her disdain for social media when she was alive – by the off-chance that there is Facebook in the hereafter, she surely would have nothing to do with it.

My mother’s chosen religion forbids their members from acknowledging birthdays and other so-called pagan holidays; so when she was alive wishing her happiness on such an occasion often led to a repetitive interchange between us.

Mother would say, “You know I don’t celebrate (whatever the holiday in question).” And I would protest, “But I do.”  The conversation usually ended there, until the next time. Yet, to my pleasure, she never refused to accept the cards or gifts that I gave her on those days. And she always (perhaps begrudgingly, although she didn’t show it) acknowledged the gesture with a polite, “Thank you.”

I regretted the fact that mother would not allow me to take her out to dinner, to a stage play, or someplace special on her birthday, but it bothered me more on Mother’s Day. Even before I became a mother, I relished Mother’s Day and considered the day to be a special occasion for honoring and showing reverence to all mothers and especially good mothers like mine.

Since my siblings and I were adults when mother decided to convert her faith, I have wonderful memories to cherish of earlier times of family get-togethers at my parent’s home on holidays like the Fourth of July (Can you say crab fest?), Thanksgiving, and Christmas. And for a few years, even after my siblings and I married and had families of our own, we’d all bring our kids to the grandparents home on festive occasions. Unfortunately, those happy get-togethers dwindled and eventually stopped; too soon.

In three weeks when mother’s birthday arrives, I won’t publicize it on social media. I will acknowledge it privately. And before the day is over, I know I will smile with tear-filled eyes as I remember a recurring dialog that she and I shared many times in the years before she died.

“You know I don’t celebrate birthdays.”

“But I do.”

 

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Tough Love: Reflecting on the Sadness of Mother’s Day after Mother’s Gone

by on ·Family, Holidays, Nostalgia, The Way I See It
Mother C
Mother in her youth.

I’ve always liked Mother’s Day. Next to Christmas, it’s my favorite widely celebrated day.

When I was a child, in elementary school we kids made Mother’s Day cards and sometimes simple little gifts, like plasters of our hand for our moms. When I grew older and began purchasing cards, I’d spend significant time at the card display in the store trying to choose just the right card, the perfect card, for my mom. Mom always expressed glee and appreciation for the cards, flowers, and gifts I gave her each year.

Fast forward a few decades and my middle-aged mom, daughter of a Southern Baptist minister, joined a religious group that refuses to acknowledge what they call pagan holidays, including Mother’s Day. Regardless, I continued to purchase cards and gifts for my mother. Sometimes I offered to take her out to a Mother’s Day lunch or brunch, but she refused, saying “You know that we don’t observe Mother’s Day.”

My polite response to her was always, “But, mother, I DO observe it. And I only have one mother.”

My unspoken but resolute thought was, and as long as I have a mother, I will continue to observe Mother’s Day. I was determined that no (what I perceive to be cult-like) religion was going to interfere with my relationship with my mom.

The irony is that although mother frequently reminded me of her allegiance to her adopted faith, she never refused to accept the cards or flowers I sent. Perhaps purposely showing me her reluctance, she didn’t gush over the gifts the way she had done in the early years, but nevertheless, she accepted them — offering no fuss, no gush, just a simple “Thank you, Lo.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. Perhaps at some point we had reached an unexpressed compromise.

I continued sending my mother Mother’s Day cards until 2014, the year she died.

I won’t expound here on the resentment I feel for a purported religious group that instead of strengthening family ties dictates silly doctrines to rip them apart. My close friends and family members know exactly how I feel about that, so I won’t harp on it here.

Now, it’s Mother’s Day again, and my heart aches for my mom. In spite of our disagreements on so many things – and our resolute similarities, like stubbornness – we loved each other. And I miss her. Happy Mother’s Day, mom.

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Thank A Mother — Revisited

by on ·General, Lifestyle and Culture

If you are in a relationship with — or married to — a man who you love because he respects you, provides for you, and treats you like his queen – thank his mother. While no rule of behavior is set in stone, there is much truth to the adage that the way a man treats his mother reflects on how he will treat you.

We’ve all overheard conversations among women where the subject is mother-bashing — not their own mother, but his. Some women feel that they have exclusive rights to the man in their life, whether he is their husband or longtime boyfriend, and they view his mother as the “other woman.”  Perhaps it never occurs to those anxious women that

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