Mom

I wanted to post this on Tuesday, but my web access was problematic, and yesterday I was too busy, so here it is, better late than never.

July 24, 2007, would have been my mother’s eighty-eighth birthday had she not died in 1990. Mom lived in a very different world than we do, she was a throwback to an earlier era. She actually wasn’t even modern for her own era. Let me give you some examples.

She never learned to drive.

She was born in Staten Island, NY (part of NYC) and lived there her entire life. She died within a few miles of where she was born. The furthest she ever traveled from Staten Island was into New Jersey near the Pennsylvania border. Think about that for a moment, she never once, in her entire life, had to reset her watch because she’d entered a new time zone.

She dropped out of high school. Actually, her parents TOOK her out because she was the second oldest of ten children (and the oldest girl) so she needed to be home to help care for her younger siblings. This was considered no big deal because the experience she’d get with child rearing and household management was more useful than the stuff she’d learn in school.

Despite her lack of education, she was an incredibly intelligent woman. She could handle household finances better than anyone I ever knew.

She talked about roller skating with her friends over the Bayonne Bridge (connecting Staten Island to Bayonne NJ) the day it opened in 1931. She was 13.

She talked about riding in the “rumble seat” of a car.

The only time I knew her to sleep in a bed outside of her home was when she was hospitalized with the illness that eventually killed her (brain cancer). She did so when she was younger and her parents had a house in Flanders, NJ (imagine people going to Flanders NJ on vacation?). I don’t think she EVER stayed in a hotel.

In 1949, at age 30, her first husband died suddenly, leaving her with two sets of twins and a baby on the way. She went on Welfare. Welfare then wasn’t like it is now, she wasn’t permitted to buy “real” milk for her children, she had to buy powdered milk. No cookies, candy or other treats. The Welfare office would send people to her home to check.

Some time later she took a job as a housekeeper in Edgar Lutheran Home, part of which was an “old people’s” home. Basically it provided a room for an elderly person, with meals in a dining room, but no nursing care. The other part was a nursing home. One of the people in the “old people’s” home was a woman by the name of Gertrude, she was a widow of a Lutheran minister. Her son Harold would travel from Hoboken, NJ to Staten Island to visit his mother. He joked that the first time he saw my mother she was on her knees cleaning under his mother’s bed, that’s when he decided he had to marry her.

They married on January 7, 1960. I came along three and a half years later.