AN ODE TO My MOM, My HERO

Ramblings from the empty nest

Ann Ferro

I wrote this many years ago and I think that I’ve asked that it be printed twice because it says what I know to be the truth about mothers…not all the truth but enough to mean something.

I can see her standing in the light from the kitchen window, dust motes dancing around her as she washed the family clothes. She stood at that sink every Monday and washed the clothing of four small children, her husband and herself on an old fashioned wooden washboard.

At five, I was intrigued, carefully noting her wash day methods. She would scrub each item and, when it was sufficiently cleaned, she would put it behind the washboard and begin to work on another.

When there were no more clothes to wash, or, more likely, when there was no more room behind the washboard, she would drain the sink, fill it again with clean water and rinse all that she had just scrubbed, finally wringing each with her hands. She would take each sink load of wet clothing outside to the porch where, in all but wet weather, she would hang the wash on the line, carefully adjusting the poles that held it up under the weight of the clothing. Wash day sometimes took all day.

At five years old, I wanted to be just like her. I wanted my hands to look like hers, reddened by the water and the cold. I couldn’t wait until I could wash clothes at the sink.

She was faced with raising four children born in less than five years virtually alone. My father was spirited away by the state of New York to a tuberculosis sanitarium in Otisville when I, the eldest, was six years old. She struggled with little money, and was even the recipient of welfare for a time, accomplishing heroic deeds with the help of her mother, my beloved grandmother.

I can remember them conferring over the remaking of second-hand clothing, ripping apart an old sweater to get yarn to knit mittens or make an afghan to warm our beds, making inexpensive meals out of bizarre ingredients such as chicken feet or kidneys.

I can remember not knowing that we were poor, wanting things like paper and crayons, but thinking that only the very rich had these things. I wanted to be just like her, making do, making everything safe. I saw my mother go off to work, leaving the house at 10 p.m. to work overnight as a telephone operator. She was, for many years, the primary breadwinner. My Dad’s tuberculosis was closely followed by heart disease and the dissolution of the company for which he worked. I was there to take over part of the burden. I had learned as much as I could about her motherly arts. I could cook and clean, and even sew. I didn’t have to wash clothing in the sink; my five-year-old childhood dream had been transformed by a front-loading GE washing machine. The clothes still dried on the line in the backyard and it took a while before I could help with that chore, but I grew as fast as I could. I helped her as often as possible, focusing on growing up and getting good grades. She was still my hero. She was tired when she got home, but still had much to do while we were at school. But then, well into my teens, I no longer envied her and aspired to something more than the drudgery of her life. Her vision of life was colored by her experience. She counseled me, “Learn a trade, Ann, so that when your husband gets sick you will be able to support your family.”

I, at 15, wanted so much more than that and was annoyed at her lack of imagination. At 15 I was too concerned with my own ambition and dreams to see the woman who lived that work-a-day life for the heroine she was. My adulation was replaced by teenage