Beautiful Old broads celebrate Mother's Day

Dear Ones,  
       With Mother's Day on Sunday, I thought I'd share a piece I wrote about my mom.  Yes...we love our moms, but do we ever really know them?  What do you think?  

 Mother’s Voice

            Where was my mother?  When I sifted through my memory bank, images were dim, voices dulled by time.  I was mother’s pet.  And in her last years, Mother spent much time with me.  So it only seems reasonable that I should be able to tell her story, yet when I set out to capture the Irish lilt in her voice I falter.

            Mother didn’t have a brogue.  When she arrived in New York from County Wicklow after WWI, her first goal was to speak perfect English and to that end she took elocution lessons from her older sister, May, who was married and settled in a brownstone in Brooklyn.  Thank goodness that despite May’s diction lessons, Mother couldn’t erase the lyrical cadence that bespoke her Irish roots.  And when it was story time, the voice was all Irish.  Like most Irish, Mother was a born story-teller and adored relating tales of growing up in Baltinglass, in a two story stucco house on Edward St. with a garden that backed up to the banks of the Slaney River.

The story I’m aiming at is the life of Essie Ann after she marries Edward  and moves to Detroit in 1926.  It’s about a women’s struggle to find her bearings and raise her family in a different culture stripped of the support of her three sisters, May and Margaret (Billie)  in New York, and Gertrude back in Ireland.  It’s about the booming twenties.  My dad started his own business.  They bought a Model T Ford.  Ed tried to teach Essie how to drive but she never took to it.   And it’s about the stark depression years of the thirties. They lost their home. And the forties when their oldest son is in the infantry in Italy.  When he goes missing in action, a star hangs in our window.

This is her story and I want to bring it alive but when I start, I stall.  I can’t hear my mother’s voice.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  I hear whispers, fragments, wisps of long ago conversations.  For instance Mother always always added ‘Please God’ to every statement she made about the future.  “We’ll have roast lamb next Sunday, please God.”  Or, “Your brother will come home safe and sound, please God.”  No matter what the request, large or small…please God was the end tag.  Her other favorite divine intervention clause was “May God direct me.”  Whether it was which hat to wear to church Sunday morning or where to buy our first television, she fervently asked God to direct her.  Schooled by the Sisters of Presentation at the convent on the outskirts of Baltinglass, she remained steadfast in her faith. But it was faith laced with humor.

Exiting church one Sunday during all the immense changes washing through the Catholic Church during the sixties, I asked her if Father’s sermons about new customs upset her. “Oh no dear, not all all.  I haven’t listened to Father in years. I turn my hearing aid completely off when he begins his sermon, bless him.”

Yes, her faith was strong, but tempered.   How strong was her faith?  Well, on Thanksgiving, working with a tight budget most years, Mother would produce a huge turkey dinner with all the traditional trimmings.  Then at midnight Thursday, the turkey and all the trimmings would be sealed in the refrigerator not to be touched until Saturday for Friday was a fast day and no meat would be served at our house on Pingree Ave.  No indeed.  Now that’s faith-- begorrah!

So I sit.  I ponder.  I know the Mother who raised me.  I know the grandmother of my children.  But I don’t know the dark haired Irish girl who arrived in New York full of hope and high jinks. I don’t know the girl who went out to Coney Island on Sunday afternoons with her sister Billie. I don’t know the woman who struggled to fit in when she moved to Detroit.  How can I capture her loneliness, her loss of sisterly comradeship? Neither do I know the woman who lost her dearest baby Robert at one year old and sunk into depression.

Can I peel back time and record the essence of her being?  Maybe.  I’ll read old letters, look at pictures, tug my memory strings.  But in the end, I know I can only preserve her memory as I knew her.