Mothers' Day

My wife Sandy, my partner of almost 32 years and the mother of three quite wonderful adult children is very ambivalent about Mothers' Day. She thinks it is too commercialized and also tends too much to put women and mothers on a sort of revered, but ghettoized pedestal. She is probably quite right about all of that.

But it is a day when it is hard not to reflect at least a little bit about our own mothers and the dear but complicated roles they usually have in our lives. Let me start with a list of words prompted by my own mother's memory (she died at 91 in 1996 after a several year long bout of dementia that resembled Alzheimers). And add a few photos.

So I think of my mother as:

loving - I always knew that my parents were pretty fond of each other, it seems like that became more the case as they got older -- here is a picture of them in their 20s in the 1920s, farmer and flapper




And I don't think I ever doubted that both she and my father loved me, that is quite a gift, the kind you can never fully repay












encouraging (this is her with me at a Boy Scout court of honor in about 1963, mothers always got pins representing the ranks we earned, reflecting this encouragement)


smart (she started Teachers College but quit to marry my Dad)
quiet but strong
quiet but probably a little depressed (after they moved off the farm into town, she had lost a lot of the role and critical economic importance she had had as a farm wife and mother)
a good reader and someone who encouraged me to read a lot







loyal to her family
patient with children, grandchildren, husband, and all
(here is another picture of my mother and father, after a long life together, after they had retired from farming, by their car on the street where they lived in Nampa, Idaho



















very good cook
unbelievably good and prolific gardener (these are the flowers that lined the lane leading to our house alongside an enormous vegetable garden, which was mostly her job to take care of)