Memories of Mom

Can you remember your earliest memory of your mom? I can’t come up with a specific memory that is my mom from a young age. What I remember about my mom is a presence, a personality, a practical influence in my life.

My mom recently passed away and it has sparked thoughts of how she influenced my life. To some the influences may seem trivial but in reality they are profound to me. The things I remember about Mom helped form who I am and who I’ve been as a mom myself.

Mom was a trooper in the sense that she was game for anything. One memory I have is being taken, with my three siblings and my dad, to Florida for a couple of weeks one summer. She packed our clothes, planned our route, scheduled motel stops, packed lunches, planned dinners (often made in an electric frying pan in the motel room), organized the station wagon, and arranged for games to play along the way. The organization involved in taking six people, including four children, ages three to ten, from Michigan to Florida baffles me as I think about it today. Yet Mom did it, for us, to give us a trip we would never forget.

Mom also developed into a seasoned camper. We bought a camper when I was about nine and never looked back. We would spend long weeks during the summer camping all around Michigan and Canada. Again, Mom organized and orchestrated all kinds of details regarding these trips. I remember her enjoying the camping trips but she was not work-free during these trips. There was still the cooking to do, the dishes to wash (which meant boiling water on the stove), laundry to wash and activities to plan. The lazy days of summer were not lazy days for my mom as she strove to provide us kids with memorable summers of camping fun.

Mom was rightly proud of her professional life. She was a college-educated woman. She was a Medical Technologist at a time when many women didn’t get a college degree. She worked for several years in a doctor’s laboratory and then took time off to have her growing family take priority. After many years as a stay-at-home-mom, she went back to work in a nuclear laboratory which involved getting retrained, right along with the current staff of the lab, in new ways of doing medical testing. She worked for many years after that, using her money to help put all five of her children through college. She loved her job, but that was not the goal of working. She wanted to provide for her family. She valued education and expected each of her children to complete their bachelor degrees as a minimum. That happened, not just because of her financial support but because of her encouragement to achieve academically.

Mom was still supporting education into the lives of her grandchildren. Her financial resources were such that she could give large chunks of money towards college educations for each of the grandkids. I know I appreciate that interest and support as my kids have benefited from her generosity. She will continue to influence her nine grandchildren based on her encouragement to value their educations as much as she did. My kids have strong memories of their Yiayia supporting and being proud of their academic achievements. She came to each of their high school graduations and was proud to be included in the celebrations of their successes. Mom was true to the end on valuing education.

There are other thoughts I have of Mom. Not all of them are positive, but over the last year or so I’ve come to understand that Mom did the best she could and what she did do was not half bad . . . it was much more than half good. I’m successful in the things I do today, in part, because Mom invested so much into my life. For that part, I am forever grateful.