MAY 6, 2008 -- When we were kiddies we used always to ask Mama what she would like from us for Mothers Day. Invariably she would snap *Peace and Quiet!* whereupon we would drop the subject and pick up whatever seemed likely to please her, plus a nice card each, a practice not easily managed on 25 cents a week. One year we took her at her word and for the day we not only brought no gifts but we decamped for the day to the home of our best friends the Gullas and left her strictly alone. Needless to say, this proved to be the last thing in the world she wanted, and when we got home and asked her how she had enjoyed the peace and quiet, she said we were a bunch of smartalecks. (My parents did not swear in our presence until we were sophomores in university or married.) But from then on our queries got much more reasonable responses.
Mama was a remarkable woman and at age 80 she still is, although we did not realize how remarkable until we were old enough to be mothers ourselves. She was married at 18, shortly after Daddy came home from World War II, and had me at age 20. She was next-to-youngest of a family of 8 and, the South being considerably different in thos days, Mama Long engaged a devoted Black nanny for her and her youngest sister Martha Rose, so she knew nothing about either birthing or looking after babies. (She once told me that her mothers sole advice regarding the birds and bees was *eat a good breakfast on your wedding day. You will need it.*) Nevertheless, by the time she was 30 she had four girls of her own and a foster child, the caboose daughter of Daddys oldest sister, who was the same age as me. Until I was 8, she ran the household on what Daddy could win on the quarter-mile dirt tracks racing stock cars. My earliest memories are of trundling through darkened countrysides in the back of the turquoise blue Henry J that pulled our homemade trailer, following the tail lights of Daddys green Kaiser Virginian pulling the trailer with the stock car aboard. That story is one for Fathers Day; I will only say that Mama managed three small children in a dirt paddock with speeding cars on every side with calm and decision. We also took many trips between our home and the home of our Southern Granny; we spent Easter vacation with her and not only enjoyed the trip -- down Route 6 to the Pennsylvania Turnpike, then to 11E past various landmarks (the Apple in Virginia, Pedroville in South Carolina, a mountainside mansion Daddy called the castle of Baron Von Geiger, a town in Tennessee named Sweetwater Junction that had a positively reeking paper mill, the Rock City birdhouses...) and the stories Daddy told, but also the chance to drink Coca-Cola which we did not have at home, to curtsey and say Yes Mam and No Mam, and to play with our Southern cousins. Mama managed these trips by forbidding conversation in the car which was stocked with books, and with the same force and effect she used in the presence of speeding stock cars. We were known to be exceptionally well behaved and tidy children with very good vocabularies. Mama had not graduated from high school, but she had educated herself and she insisted on good grammar and good manners, with a Mom Voice that no one dared disobey.
Mama was equal to anything, from an irate Mrs. Wheeling presenting her dripping daughter and demanding why Linda and I had once again pushed her off the boat dock, to my bout of pernicious anemia that left me bedridden for an entire summer, to Daddys passion for sudden trips to visit his many brothers and sisters or to Vermont or simply to Pennsylvania for ice cream cones. She made sure we knew the value of money and what our lives would be like if we did not work hard in school; as soon as we were old enough for working papers, we had them and our summers were spent in factory work. The money earned was to be spent on our personal needs -- eyeglasses, dentistry, stockings, school uniforms and any extras the Sisters might require. By the time we were old enough to attend university we knew how to save money as well as how to keep house, mind children and our manners, respect authority and drive. (Okay, I had no driving license because Daddy taught me to drive on a car that had been built for NA$CAR and I terrified the examiner who probably dined out on the story for years. But I did know how to drive.) I had been through a year of charm school at John Robert Powers although I was not charming and thank God the Sixties came along before I had to deal with any debutante nonsense. I did not date because I was one of the boys, and I was a perpetual disappointment to Mama although I was a very good baritone sax player and a nice voice for chamber music.
But through it all, Mama coped with whatever life threw at her. She evacuated us from Hurricane Hazel in a motorboat (*Sit still, hold your sisters hand and say your prayers* she told us as we drifted away from our flooded house, and we did, as always, just what she said.) She nursed us through measles, chicken pox, flu, trichinosis, and other childhood illnesses that meant we had to be quarantined. She created good meals out of whatever she had, and she never said even once that we were poor and could not afford things; she just said No, and that was enough. We had nice holidays, we got adequate Christmas gifts and we had masses of cousins (38 first cousins alone) so we were never bored.
And now that Mama is 80, she can be very proud of what she has wrought. She has brought up 5 girls in the Sixties and not one of us were ever arrested, pregnant or drug users; my sisters have all married at least once and we have produced grand children and great-grandchildren in abundance, all of them intelligent and well behaved and mature and not in any kind of trouble. Mama got her GED at the age of 50 with the second highest score in Alabama history, and when she expressed shock, Daddy reminded her that she had smart kids and where did she think they got their brains. She took us to church and backed us against any foes except Sister at school, who was her ally in keeping us and the Sixties firmly separate, and on one memorable occasion she talked Daddy into not locking the door against Santa.
So on this her 60th Mothers Day, I salute my Mama for not only her heroic duty not only around the house but in the factory and behind the wheel, and I wish to state for the record that I get it. And I do not for the life of me know how she managed.