Fun Facts About My Mom
When you're not a fan of Mother's Day.
First, a couple of facts about me. 1) I’m not a huge fan of Mother’s Day. I was a food server for more than a decade and Mother’s Day was the nightmare shift: Amateur diners, families who despised each other, bad tips. It was a day I came to dread. 2) I may not like Mother’s Day, but I am blessed with a perfect (though dead) mother. I can’t think or write about her without going all squishy and wet-eyed. So I will stick to the facts.
She was born Marguerite Ann Rose in Sioux City, Iowa. She was the oldest of four kids including brother Jim and the twins, Tom and Nancy. Her dad took off and her mother Kathleen raised the family herself through the Great Depression.
Mom rarely talked about growing up pitifully poor, but sometimes she’d share a memory. She once collected enough RC Cola bottle tops (with help from her neighbors) to win a bicycle. She chose a boy’s model so her brothers could ride it too.
She loved swimming and wanted to swim competitively at East High School in Sioux City but the only option for girls was synchronized swimming, which she thought was boring.
She worked for the railroad after high school and enjoyed her freedom. She shared an apartment with her sister and loved having lunch with the girls at the drugstore. She briefly dated Leave it to Beaver’s real-life dad Norman Mathers in Sioux City until he took her with him to a job interview. Deal breaker.
She felt forced into marriage at age 22 and told me over and over not to wed until I was ready. People would ask her, “Why’s a pretty thing like you not married yet?” and she’d answer; “Just lucky I guess.” Her wedding photo was featured on the front page of the Society and Women’s Section of the Sioux City Journal. She wore a simple lilac-colored tea-length lace dress, which I also wore when I got married (much older than 22).
She had her first baby at age 23, exactly nine months and one week after her honeymoon in Omaha. She spent the next 20 years having five more kids: three girls and three boys all together. She was a laissez-faire mother and encouraged us to figure things out for ourselves. She was intensely optimistic, which sometimes annoyed me when I was a teen, but now I’m grateful to have inherited that trait.
She used many of her own mother’s parenting techniques. She would always ask us twice to do something before telling us. She would say things like, “can you please finish reading that page and then eat your lunch?” We weren’t allowed to say we hated anyone.
She was an unabashed democrat. Dad was a republican back when fewer republicans were monsters. They agreed to disagree and didn’t discuss politics in the house. But dad traveled a lot and mom wasted no time indoctrinating us with her liberal, egalitarian values. To this day, all six of us vote on the left side of the spectrum.
She was one of the founding members of The Little Theater of Owatonna, a community theater in Southern Minnesota that’s still going strong 57 years later. She was always behind the scenes but did appear in the very first production: “Three Men on a Horse.”
She had several hobbies and excelled at them all. She competed in flower shows, often bringing home a blue ribbon for her roses. She knit six Irish fisherman sweaters one winter for me and my five siblings. I still have mine. She was expert at refurbishing furniture and could even cane chairs. When she was in a bad mood, she made chocolate fudge, stirring the chocolate like she was beating something to death. She didn’t like cooking or cleaning though, and thought perfect housekeeping was weird and sad.
After raising us kids, she went back to work and had gigs at interesting places such as the art rental team at the Indianapolis Art Museum, the DuPont fabric division and the Oregon Zoo where she was the volunteer coordinator for a time.
Her favorite movie was “Breaking Away” and, like the mother in the movie, she got a passport and never used it.
Mom died six weeks before her 90th birthday. Beneath her senior photo in her high school yearbook was the axiom “still waters run deep,” which is what I named this Substack.
Love this homage. What a woman!
What a beautiful homage to your mother. She sounds like an incredible force of love, independence, and grit. Happy Mother's Day.