Dear Mom

Hey...let me start this by saying that I still miss you! Robin's birthday would have been your 90th birthday, had you lived that long. You always said you didn't want to live to be 100, but I thought 67 was a bit young to leave me. I know you didn't mean it...but why did you have to leave me the bad genes and give Shari all of the good ones???

What I am really writing about is: how did you manage to raise three of us?? I had one. She was plenty. Now, I am helping out with my two grandchildren (whom you would love, btw), and every day I wonder how you did it. I understand a few things better now...

I remember so many times, traveling across country to meet Dad's ship in California...in an un-air-conditioned car (they didn't exist in those days)...and sans radio. Windows down. Two siblings in the back seat, and a baby in the front (in the days before Pampers). There were the crayons that totally melted in the car's back window ledge...the Skunk game that stunk up the whole car...the water canteen that didn't last past a childish run on water in the desert (which caused me to say that you were trying to make us die of thirst). There was Shari's strep throat as we looked for a doctor in a one-horse town in Wyoming, the cascade of crickets on the ground at one gas stop (and I didn't have shoes on)...and only hot water in the fountain there. Then there was the time on the way back to Illinois from Hawaii that I threw up all over the floor of the motel...and in the car as we ticked off the miles for the farm...home. How did you survive it all???

When we settled in Oak Park, I would come home from school and find you up on a ladder, washing walls. Or fixing supper. Or just finishing washing a floor, and complaining when we walked on it, still wet. I get it now! Today, Ryan dropped his banana bread on the floor after I had washed it. He dribbled food all over his clean school shirt before I could catch it. I had to clean filthy fingernails before I could send him off to school. When both children came home, they kicked their shoes to the wind and starting asking for this thing or that thing before I could even catch my breath. They are good kids, Mom...and WE were good kids. I mean, we turned out okay. Is this a pattern??

I'm trying to keep my head on straight. I never, ever, felt that your clean house was more important that we were, but I know you had to have been frustrated. God bless and keep you, dear Mother...and may He grant me the same patience that you had, via experience!