Mom's Day

Ok! Talk about timing! How ironic, I have this brain lapse about how old I am and then I realize it's just because I'm in some sort of denial or something about my Mom's death and here it is Mother's Day!

So I've started my "journey" and as Bette Davis said in "All about Eve"," Fasten your seatbelts, we're in for a bumpy ride!" Or at least I am. I'm just going to post some memories - not all the time, just now and then when something pops up! I promise to still be cheerful and sarcastic about other things! So...this is some of what I remember. If anybody notices a big elephant in the room at times, you might need to call my attention to it. I will probably just be standing under it and not even notice. I want to thank everyone in advance for supporting me through all of this. I must say, I am so happy to have found my Blogger friends! I tell you guys things that I never have the courage to bring up to people I see in person everyday!

By the way, I haven't yet learned how to load old photos up on my blog so...as bizarre as this may seem...the photo is NOT of my Mother. it's Loretta Young the actress.My mom looked so much like her that it was very hard for me to ever watch a film with Loretta Young in it. I would always be just transfixed on her.

SO! Here we go!

 My Mother died after several years of battling cancer. As I try to look back now, it's like remembering an old black and white movie. The movie "Rebecca" comes to mind. One of those Film Noir movies. An air of mystery, intrigue and ghosts. She died two weeks before Halloween. She had been at home until September of that year until the day came when she could no longer handle the pain and had to be rushed to the hospital. I remember it being a cool day and the windows were open in my classroom at the Junior High. I heard an ambulance and I thought to myself, they are going to get my Mom. My sister told me later that she heard it at the Elementary School and thought the same thing. We never knew for sure, but it was about that time, in the late afternoon, that they came to get her.
Before that she was at home. I would help her in and out of bed. I would help her change her bandage over the ugly oozy scar where her breast had been. I would sit with her and listen to her stories and instructions. She always told my sister and my father that she would beat this thing AGAIN and be well. She said that there were new discoveries everyday and she would just hold on until they found a cure.
But to me she would tell me what I needed to remember and what I needed to do when she died..
She wasn't like most Mothers. She was a stay at home Mom who I never saw without make-up until she was very ill. Even then she would have on her lipstick. She had beautiful hands and well manicured polished nails. She looked like an elegant movie star to me. Actually she looked like Loretta Young. I can not look at a photo of that actress without feeling my heart hurt.
My Mom could draw any dog or animal in pencil on my school paper and make it look just like the real thing. She was always crafting and decorating.  We were the only ones in the neighborhood with a pink living room. Our bedrooms were our favorite colors with canopy beds. I can remember how she would throw our P.J.'s in the dryer for a few minutes to make them warm for us before we went to bed. She was always doing special things for us.
Her name was Violette, with two T's as she always said "That's the French way of spelling it" She was half French. the other half was Swedish but she said that the Swedish half didn't count. She hated her father who was Swedish and who had died before I was born. Apparently he was an alcoholic who would go into drunken rages against HER mother. My mom had to drop out of high school in her senior year to care for her own mother who was dying of cancer. That was a shameful secret that she wanted no one to know. She was always embarrassed that she had never graduated. She always wanted to be a nurse. She wanted me to be a nurse. But that's not what I wanted to be.
She was the most supersitious person I have ever known. I can remember her crying to my father because of an owl hooting outside the window and how it meant someone was about to die. We couldn't let a rocking chair rock without someone in  it, an umbrella couldn't be opened in the house and no shoes on a table.
She also heard voices. Deceased family members talking to her. And once she saw the Devil in the ceiling exhaust fan at the end of the hall. Yeah, I could never look up at it when it was going. It terrified me. She had premonitions and told me stories about strange things that had happened in her life. My father was just the opposite. He never believed in God or superstitions, ghosts or the afterlife, dreams and always said "When you're dead , you're Dead. He did admit how once when they were first married that they heard the floor board creak outside their room and watched the door handle turn and then nothing. He had sprung out of bed and ran through the house only to find it locked up tight. He had no explanation for it.
So...all the time that that my Mom was talking to me about dying, I would be reassuring her that she wasn't. I can remember finally making her promise that if she did, that she wouldn't come back and haunt me or talk to me. She was geniunely hurt. But I explained how that it would scare me. Finally she promised. I have always felt ghosts in the house we grew up in. The house wasn't old and my parents actually built it just before I was born. But I know there were ghosts.
That's enough remembering for now.