05/04/2010: "Two Mothers"

I am drawn to the calendar in late April and May. It begins with the new life I see in the garden around me, but it is something deeper, for these are the months of the birthdays of my mothers.

My mother’s name was Mary. By the age of 24 she had outlived her parents and her twin brother James. She had married my father and by the time I came along, number 7 of 8, Mother had buried her first born daughter, my sister June.

I believe the losses she endured so early gave her a heightened sense of the need to love us as we were, which she did. Mother possessed a quiet grace and graciousness I don’t have. She was an encourager of people and a believer in their inherent goodness. She looked for hope where others dared not, and found it.

When I was still a child, she, along with my older sister Ann, were killed by a drunk driver. Three of my five remaining siblings and I were injured as well -coma, multiple fractures; glass embedded in arms so deeply it took three years to work to the surface. There were no minor injuries sustained by my family that night.

My father was a superintendent on a construction job hours away. He was put in the untenable position of having to manage, long distance, a family without a mother. It didn’t work. With the threat of foster care hovering over us he loaded us up and returned us to our roots and family in Greene County, Mississippi.

My father became a man on a mission -to find a woman willing to take on a battered, splintered family and make them whole again. Enter Nola Meadows, a 42 year old, never-been-married-working woman who was somehow drawn to our scarred and pain filled family. I called her Mama.

We moved often in my childhood, our lives a constant state of grim flux. When I became an adult, I asked Mama why she had stayed with us. It wasn’t an easy job on the best of days. I stayed because I loved you, she told me with her trademark frankness.

Mama filled the role of mother without once trying to take our Mother’s place. When she died, she was surrounded by the children she had helped to rear. The records of time may reflect she died without having borne a child, but she surely didn’t die without loving and being loved by many.

I think of Mother in the spring, the raven haired, high cheek boned woman whose blood courses through my veins. I think of Mama, too, the mother whose stoic character and simple rules of life helped guide me to adulthood.

I am the product of the love of two extraordinary women. Each spring on their birthdays, when new life abounds everywhere, I go down to the azalea bush in my garden, sit for the longest time on the rock step and thank them both.