Categories: uncategorized
Date: 20 February 2005 07:25:17
She's petite. I'm no giant, but I dwarf her. Even now, after the "Middle Age Spread" has hit, she is still a little dab of a thing, my Mama.
I remember her eating mayonnaise sandwiches.
I remember looking up at her standing at the kitchen counter, making herself a snack, and the best she could do was mayonnaise on white bread.
I thought she had odd tastes at the time, but now, looking back with an adult's eye, a mother's eye, I know she did that because that's all their was. She left the little meal she'd cooked to us, to my two sisters and to me.
The pantry was probably echoing bare, and payday was afar off, or perhaps there was no transportation available. Likely both.
For years her wardrobe was... minimal. I remember going cheerfully with a friend of Mama's, and her little girl, the day we reported to school for first grade. I made up some silly rule about going with Rhonda's mother because I figured the teacher might think my little Mama was a student too! Really, though, it was a sort of shamed/protective feeling about her. I didn't want anyone looking down their nose at my Mama!
She didn't seem to mind staying home with my little sisters. But who knows what was in her heart?
She got me back, though. Only 4 years later, she masterminded me receiving my first bra in an extended-family Christmas gathering. I had to hold it up before me to take a picture. The very part in my hair blushed tomato red, as red as the holiday-colored clothes I wore that night.
But then I got her back back. A few years ago, when I went to stay with her a few weeks after a lung surgery, while she was helpless and druggily recovering, I mailed her cigarettes to President Clinton.