Mom - March 2020

It’s not an exaggeration to say that when I was a child my mother was everything to me. Everything.

She fed me, kept me clean, and doctored me when I got hurt…which was just about every time I went outside. 

She taught me how to ride a bicycle, tie my shoes, feed the chickens, shoot a basketball, put on a tie, peel an apple… and countless other valuable lessons. She helped me with homework, told me to hush my mouth when I was being sassy…or spanked me from time to time when I was being a pain in the neck or not doing my homework or tormenting my sister. 

Tammy would say she didn’t spank me enough for that last part…and she’d probably be right.

From time to time my mother was my only friend.

Mother recognized pretty early that I was a lonely child. I spent a lot of time indoors watching television or reading comic books. I was restless, though, and not happy and there was no one around to play with. When elementary school started, I did not make close friends—no one I could invite home to play. No one to talk to. Mother picked up some of that slack. (Let me jump in here to say that my mother was extremely preoccupied with her business. Crowe’s Grocery demanded she and my father work from 6am-9pm for 364 and a half days a year. She and Daddy couldn’t sit around all day worrying about how happy and well-adjusted I was. We all had to eat and keep a roof over our heads, well-adjusted or not.) She considered me, though. I could see it in little things:

She took me to Eckerd Drugs in Carrollton every Wednesday to buy new comic books because she knew it was the one thing I lived for all week. She took me to the Neva Lomason Library to get a library card even though it was on the other side of Carrollton and I never once returned anything on time. Swim lessons. Piano lessons. Anything to encourage me to engage with other people. I showed no aptitude for basketball but I enjoyed playing, so she rallied behind me and went to games and practiced with me in the driveway. “There is no excuse for missing a lay-up or a free-throw” she would say. She had been a marvelous player when she was at Heard High. 

During a particularly bad fourth grade year, Mom found extra time to take me to movies…just the two of us. We saw Superman: The Movie, Grease, Bad News Bears, The Black Stallion, The Fox and the Hound, The Great Muppet Caper. I remember once going on and on about wanting to see this Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton movie, and afterwards she was so mad at me she could spit. I had tricked her into taking her 10 year old to see The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. I can still hear her voice, quiet and angry, as she dragged me across the parking lot. “Davey, that was NOTHING like Smokey and the Bandit!”  

Throughout my childhood, my mother kept an eye on me and reached out (like a good friend) when I needed her. She did the same for all of us – Daddy, Tammy, and for me. Our family was full of strong personalities and we were all very different from each other – we made for an unlikely family. My mother kept us together, though. She was the foundation.

Years later, after my father died and I was grown up and working in Atlanta, I made a conscious decision to visit more often - in case my mother was lonely without Daddy. I started going home two or three times a month on the weekends to keep her company. Mama was never one to dilly dally, though. She was a mover and a shaker. She played cards with her friends every week and remained active in the local American Legion. She kept the farm running almost single-handedly. She cooked, she entertained, and she continued to keep close tabs on my sister and me. After a few months, I realized she didn’t really need me at all.  She was doing what she had always done: work hard and keep moving. By then, a funny thing started to happen...I started to enjoy spending the weekends at home with her. I had spent the first twenty years of my life trying to get out of Heard County, and now I couldn't wait to get back. Mother and I became friends again and I found out we had a lot in common. 

Late in life, my mother became a rather remarkable painter. She took one oil painting class and in about a month was ten times the artist I ever hoped to be. We painted together, and I showed her tricks I had learned in art class and she showed me how Bob Ross painted a beautiful summer sky. We cooked together. I learned how to make cornbread, chicken and dumplings, fried green tomatoes, fried okra, dressing, apple jelly, and just about every kind of cake or pie you can imagine. 

Mother was always up for a project and I was her sidekick. One summer she bought a fancy, high-powered pressure washer, and we got a little obsessed with it. Mother LOVED to pressure wash eveything: chairs, exterior walls, outdoor rugs, every square inch of the driveway and pool area - you name it and we tried to wash it. We tried to pressure wash an old pair of my tennis shoes and blew them apart...which made me glad I had the presence of mind to take them off first. The only thing Mother loved better than pressure washing was watching ME or Tammy pressure wash…and pointing out the spots we were missing. Keeping up the homestead (as she called it) made her happy, so we did it.

We worked in the yard and planted a garden every spring. Every Easter, Tammy, her husband Steve, and I would meet at the house and work all afternoon in the yards getting her garden ready for the summer. Each weekend after, when I drove home, she would meet me at the car and take me straight out to the garden and show me what was coming up, what the bugs were getting to, and what "just wasn’t going to make it". If I could re-live any day of my life, I would pick a day when the first tomatoes are ripe enough to eat. I would pick a day when when we were all young and healthy, when Mother, Tammy, Daddy, and I could eat tomato sandwiches together. White bread, mayo, and plenty of salt and pepper.

During these weekends at home with mother, I was (again) learning lessons – different lessons than those of my childhood, but no less valuable.  I was learning from my mother how to iron a shirt, plant a real garden, hem a pair of pants, put on a button, thread a sewing machine, bake a darned fine pound cake – flakey on top and moist on the inside. She, Tammy, and I re-covered patio chairs and mended barbed wire fences. We once poured a concrete slab and built a stone walkway. If I ever needed to build something, I brought it home and Mother and I did it. She always said, “If you and me can’t figure it out, Davey, it can’t be done.” We were a good team like Lewis and Clark or Thelma and Louise. Sometimes more like Lucy and Ethel. 

One summer we decided to paint the screen porch out back – something bright, elegant, and relaxing. Somehow we ended up with Lime Green walls and ceiling and a bright blue floor. About halfway through the project I looked at Mama and I said,

“Lord, Mother, what have we done?” and she never stopped painting. She just said, “Well…it’s green. It's definitely green.” 

One Christmas not long ago, Mother decided she wanted us to make a coconut cake like “grandmama used to make” so I got all the fixings and brought them home with me on Christmas Eve. Heck, I got a real coconut and we opened it up with an ice pick and hammer. We went all out. The cake layers – made by carefully following instructions written in “old-lady cursive” on a faded sheet of notebook paper - came out beautifully. Things were going great until it came time to frost the cake. The recipe wanted us to boil sugar and Karo syrup to some ungodly hot temperature. We kept checking it with a candy thermometer. It took forever. But we kept at it because we had decided this coconut cake would be one for the ages---one that people would be talking about for years to come. When it was finally hot enough, we poured the coconut icing over the cake, and something funny happened... everything just…came apart. The beautiful cake just melted away into nothing. It…DISSOLVED before our eyes. It was like pouring lava over butter. Our beautiful cake was now just a big lump of fuzzy white goop. We stared at it a minute as the cake melted and trickled off the plate and puddled on the counter. Finally mother said,

“I think we might have needed to let that icing cool a little bit first”.

As Mother’s health declined, Tammy and I both began to take on more around the house. It was uncomfortable for both Mother and for us. Not because we didn’t want to step up, but because Mother had always led us. She led the family for as long as I can remember, even before Daddy died. Now, she was sick, and everything was suddenly flipped on its head…and we were all scrambling to adjust. 

One night, not too long before she passed, I woke up in the chair beside her bed. My phone told me that it was 4am (in between medicine times). I could see Mother was awake and staring at me.

“Are you in any pain?” I asked her.

“Not right now.” She replied.

“What are you thinking?”

“I dreamed I was stuck in a circle. Isn’t that crazy?”

 “A circle?” I asked. 

After a few seconds when she didn’t say anything else, I asked, 

“Was it a bad dream, Mama?”

No, she said. “I was just stuck and ready to get out, but it wasn’t bad.”

We talked for a little while longer and she finally drifted off to sleep, but I lay awake thinking about what she had said. Because the idea of a circle wasn’t new to me. It was something I had been turning over and over in my head since she had been sick.

It’s certainly not a new idea, that our lives, our experiences in this world are cyclical, but it was suddenly laid out in front of me, this circular pattern our lives together had taken. She had brought me into the world, after all, cared for me, raised me, became my friend as a child when I needed someone and as an adult because we shared history and common interests. And I was responding in much the same way she had: making meals, cleaning up, comforting. Just as she brought me and Tammy into the world and prepared us for what was to come, we were helping her as she left, doing our best to ease her passing. We were in a perfect circle…that was closing on itself.

And that morning in that little rust colored recliner by my mother’s bed, I watched the sun come up, and I understood and embraced another truth: these last months spent with my mother, as awful and scary as they were…they were a blessing. What a privilege, a gift to be able to do even a fraction of all she had done for me. To care for her and keep her company. To be a good son. 

To be a friend.

Mother never lost her sense of humor. Chemotherapy had a lot of nasty side-effects…just a long list of terrible things, everything from dry skin to nausea to headaches, to bone weary fatigue. She had them all and then some. Whenever something new popped up – dizziness, forgetfulness, she’d look at us and say, “It’s the chemo.”

Eventually, we blamed everything on the chemo. Bad moods, short tempers: Chemo.

Stubbed toe, wrinkled shirt, poorly seasoned vegetables. All chemo.

The Christmas Eve we melted the coconut cake, as we were mopping up the mess, she looked at me and said,

“If anybody asks we’ll just blame this on the chemo.”