Blog 22: My Mom in Her Younger Years

I felt like my last post was a little heavy on the emotion and frustration, so I wanted to change it up a bit and lighten the mood by posting some pictures of my wonderful mom when she was younger.  She is such a beautiful person inside and out and her beauty remains today.  She may be older and suffering from dementia, which has changed her somewhat, but she is still beautiful!  Her voice and her laugh and some of her mannerisms are exactly the same as they've always been.  I love her so much.

Here's a picture of my grandma holding my mom. My grandma was a short little Irish woman who stood about 4'10" tall.  Even with her short stature she carried herself proud, and was a strong woman, who spent most of her life working on the farm and caring for her family. My grandma and grandpa were both such amazing people, who were always there for me and my family.  They are both long gone, but I still think about them every single day.  It was because of them that my mom was the loving and nurturing mom that she was.  She had a great upbringing and she was close to her parents.  I just had a flashback of my mom talking on the phone to her mom.  They talked every single day.  And then when I moved out on my own, I talked to my grandma every day until her cancer got so bad and she passed on.  That was in 1979, and I can still recall the last time she called me.  I was getting ready to have my second child, and the last call I got from her was the day my son was born.  She passed on to heaven three months later.  After all these years it still makes me sad.

I remember a story my mom told me about when she was a little girl, she was going to pick up a stick and scare her mom with it, pretending it was a snake.  When she reached down to pick it up she realized the stick was actually a real snake.  She went screaming up to the house and into her mom's arms.  I remember she was always so scared of snakes.  Mice, too.  When we were kids a mouse had gotten into the house.  We were sitting at the dining room table eating supper when I saw a mouse quickly crawl up the curtain behind my mom.  I said, "There's a mouse behind you!"  My mom literally climbed on top of the table and screamed while all of us girls laughed.  That mouse stuck around in the house for awhile and part of that was because of me.  We had a babysitter one night and she trapped the mouse under a glass bowl under the sink.  She walked away and I let the mouse out.  I felt sorry for it.  The babysitter told my mom what I did and I don't remember her getting that mad at me.  She asked me why I did that, and I said the mouse was running in circles and crying.  Mom knew I was a huge animal lover.  I used to have pet mice (in the gargage of course) hamsters, rabbits, turtles, fish, frogs, even spiders (ewe), and cats and dogs.  A day or two later the mouse got snapped by the mousetrap, and his fun with torturing my mom was over. 

This is a picture of my mom around the age of six, I think.  I can definitely see a family resemblance to my sisters, me, and even my kids in this picture.  She had gorgeous blue eyes.

Here's my mom's high school picture.  She left the one-room schoolhouse in the country and attended a large high school in town.  She loved it there and she got a part time job after school, working for Woolworth's.  She lost touch over the years with her best friend from school, and we found out many years later that her friend's grandson was in my daughter's class at school.  We thought that was really cool when we realized the connection, and Mom looked her up and gave her a call.

I think my mom was 18 years old in this picture.  It was taken at the family farm.  She used to love to dance and she said her uncle used to drive her into town so she could go dancing with her friends.  That is where she met my dad and a year later they were married.

And then I came along.  Here's Mom holding me.  I'm the oldest daughter and within eight years my mom and dad had four more daughters.  My parents divorced when I was eleven and it was just Mom and us girls.  We had visits with our dad but it was Mom who took care of us. Life was wonderful with Mom even though we had some hard times for lack of money.  We had an abundance of love and respect and appreciation for each other.