And yet, every morning, before the coffee had finished flowing, Mom called me from her room in that determined paper voice: “Come on, Sarah. Standing. We have a whole new day to go. “
She said it whether the sky was bright or gray, whether she slept well or not, whether her hands were firm or trembling. She never looked like a poet. She looked like a woman who had been through enough hardships to know that waking up was not something to be taken lightly. I came to understand that this attitude was not produced by age. Age had only made her easier to see. It had been forged in her long before I was born.
Mom grew up during the Great Depression. She never idealized her. It was something I loved about her. She did not transform trials into folklore. She could tell you exactly what it felt like to wear the same coat three winters in a row, patch your knees until the fabric underneath loosened, rub your cold feet together under the covers because there was no more coal to waste on another fire that night. She could tell you what flour bag dresses did to the skin in July. She could tell you the difference between hunger and appetite, and why only those who have never experienced the former confuse the two. She married my father before he left for war, and for years,she lived with this particular fear that women of her generation carried in their bones: the fear of telegrams, ration books and men who returned changed in ways that no uniform could explain. She kept the bacon grease in a coffee can, hemmed the clothes until the fabric gave up, and knew how to turn stale bread, onions, and a little milk into a dinner that made you feel like you were being taken care of you.onions and a little milk in a dinner that made you feel cared for.onions and a little milk in a dinner that made you feel cared for.
She wasn’t sweet like movies like to make mothers sweet. She wasn’t suffocating. It wasn’t spreading. She didn’t call me her best friend or ask me to share all my feelings as if confession itself were intimacy. She loved with action. Love, in his language, meant getting up before dawn to knead cookie dough. This meant ironing my school blouse after a ten hour day because she knew I felt uncomfortable with the wrinkled sleeves. This meant sitting next to my bed with a cool washcloth when I had a fever and never mentioning the sleep she was losing. This meant walking into the principal’s office in a waitress’s uniform, her hair still pinned from work,when a teacher decided I was “too quiet to care for” and reminded him in a voice as clear as broken green beans that silent girls deserved education too.
When I was young, I misunderstood her. I thought love should be louder. I envied the girls whose mothers snickered with them in department stores, used the word “darling” every two sentences, and knew how to talk about crushes like they were the weather. My mother taught me how to can tomatoes, how to hem a skirt, how to recognize when someone was flattering me because they wanted something, and how to get through disappointment without theatrical collapse. At sixteen, I took it as emotional poverty. At eighty, I know better. She gave me the strongest thing. It just took me almost a lifetime to appreciate its true strength.
