Lessons from Mom

Thanks to my mom I’ve learned a variety of things…important things. When thinking about the different lessons that have been passed down from mother to daughter I’m able to come up with five solid, enduring understandings. I think of them as The Principles of Pie.

Think Outside the Box

It had been about twenty years since my family had taken a vacation together. We were together one more time in Ocean City; the same place we spent a week every summer growing up. We were sitting around playing a game of Pictionary when my mom showed her partner a picture of a golf club. As time ran out my mother was unable to provide any other illustrative clue. She could only continue to point at her original drawing. When time expired she was frustrated. “It’s a golf club…an iron.” We all laughed. Only my mother would see the word iron and think of something in her golf bag. The rest of us would have gone for the domestic triangular thing we use to get rid of wrinkles.

Have Fun

One winter day after a good three hours of sledding on the local hill my brother Joe ran in the door with his friend Eric. They were clearly boys on a mission. Their mission: locating my brother Mark’s canoe. The one he had “found.”

“What do you want with the canoe?” my mom asked.

“We’re taking it down the hill!”

“I’m in!” I yelled.

My friend Phyllis and I ran out the door behind Joe and Eric followed by my mother. We climbed up the hill across the street with the canoe in tow and somehow managed to squeeze us all in. With a final push from Joe as he hopped in we were off.

We screamed and laughed as the canoe sped down the hill at twice the speed of any Flexible Flyer. What a ride it was.

It was also the only ride we ever had in that canoe. As the yellow piece of fiberglass neared the bottom it hit a bump. The canoe went airborne, the bodies went flying. When it came down in a crash the fiberglass split right along the bottom seam. The pile of bodies rose slowly, shaking…with laughter. We still talk about that great ride. We’re just don’t talk about it in front of Mark. Twenty years later he’s not quite over the loss of his canoe.

Simplify When Possible

My mom taught me early on that when it comes to volunteering to bring items for a class party sign up for napkins, paper plates or anything else that can be easily bought.

Protect Your Home

In the early 70s Halloween was big. Just as big was the mischief that went along with it. I was never an egg thrower or a pumpkin smasher. I stuck to window soaping and some occasional toilet papering. My mom didn’t seem to mind being the victim of a window soaping here or there. However, pumpkin smashing was an entirely different thing.

One year my mom got wind of a bunch of kids who were ready to go out on Halloween and smash up some pumpkins.

Her response to the tip was something to the effect of “well they’re not smashing my pumpkins. Just let them try.”

That Halloween when most mothers would have been stationed near the front door handing out candy my mother was holed up in the laundry room. Conveniently the windows were on the ground level, hidden by the bushes that lined the sidewalk to the front door. She stayed by that window, with hose in hand, her grip sure and steady on the sprayer nozzle. With the window cracked she sat and listened as kids scampered up the sidewalk toward the door. It took only one comment for her to spring into action.

“These are some nice pumpkins….”

The poor girl didn’t know what hit her. To her the spray of water came from nowhere. “What the?...did I step on a sprinkler?” she screamed in confusion.

It only took that one spray. Our home and the pumpkins were safe and in tact the next day.

Use Your Resources

There are two things that I keep in stock at my own house at all times; Q-tips and Band Aids. My mother never seemed to have either one. I’m not sure what happened when we were bleeding but I have no trouble remembering my mother’s own version of the Q-Tip. It involved a bobby pin with a piece of toilet paper twirled around the top. It wasn’t a very soft tool, but it did the trick. Although the painful memories of the hard metal curve of the bobby pin in my ear keep me from using the same trick today I am not afraid of improvising when needed.

The shag carpets of the 70s provided many frustrations for someone that aspired to have a clean, orderly house. The fibers would stand up tall, like soldiers at attention, when vacuumed correctly. Unfortunately, once a bunch of kids ran through the house it looked like the recent sight of an alligator wrestling match. Undoubtedly, this dilemma caused my mother some frustration. She’s a woman who likes things clean and orderly.

It didn’t take her long to ease her frustration. Her cure? The garden rake. Raking the shag would return all soldiers to attention in seconds without needing to haul the vacuum cleaner out of the overstuffed closet.

Care for Those You Love

That seems like kind of a no-brainer. Any mother would care for her loved ones. It’s just that my mom took this principle quite seriously.

When I was about 7 my grandmother, my mom’s mother-in-law, suffered a serious stroke that paralyzed her from the waist down. Before the stroke Mom Mom had lived in a two bedroom apartment with her sister, and my namesake, Mary. She never returned to that apartment again. Instead we moved to yet one more rental property, one that had a basement apartment big enough for my grandmother and great aunt.

While my mother was caring for four children under the age of 12 she was also caring for her 70 year old mother-in-law. She did what she could to prevent bed sores and to make her comfortable while she kept up with her family.

Some twenty years later she stepped up again when it came time to care for her own mother. She helped her mother move into a trailer on her brother’s property when it became apparent that it was time to give up the big house that my mother had been born and raised in. As time wore on and got the best of my grandmother’s health and mind she made the agonizing decision to put her in a nursing home. She visited her twice a week, logging many miles between her home north of Baltimore and the nursing home in Centreville some 90 miles away. My mother would take Granny out for a drive whenever she visited. It was the same one every time. The first stop was Hardees for a sandwich and a shake, and then they were off to the cemetery to visit with relatives and former neighbors. From there they drove down the same roads my mom had driven as a kid. The last stop was the wharf where they could see how many boats were out on the water and find out who caught what.

Mom made that same trip many times of the span of more than three years. When her mother’s health took a turn for the worse she sat by her side for three days comforting Granny in her final hours.

Parents often try to force advice on their children. My mom never did that. She just lived her life and I watched.