“Blue,” I say.
Mom smiles and nods. The index card is colored with blue crayon on one side. She turns the card over and shows me the word “blue,” written in ink in all lower case letters. Then she sets the card down in a stack and picks up another card.
“Green,” I say…
In the nursery of the church where Dad is a preacher, we continue this exercise of learning colors. It is at this time that blue becomes my favorite color.
***
Wake Forest, North Carolina. 1983.
At Grandma Carter’s house, the exercises have become more complicated. Rather than going to kindergarten, Mom is teaching me to read at home. I will begin school in first grade in the coming months.
She holds up a large card with a series of words that form a sentence. Each word is marked with pronunciation indications for me.
“No, it is the a sound,” Mom says. “Short a, not long a. A. Say that.”
My TV time is limited while I work with Mom during the day on these sorts of activities. I can only watch for an hour.
After we finish the day’s schooling, my brother wants to use his allotment of TV time to watch a re-run broadcast of BJ and the Bear.
I lay down on the floor, with one of the green pillows from the couch over my face while he sits in front of the television.
I peek out from underneath the pillow and also watch the show. I think that Mom does not notice this.
When the show finishes, my brother obediently turns off the television, but I protest that it is my turn for an hour.
“No,” mom says. “You weren’t fooling me with the pillow. That counts as your time.”
“But I couldn’t see anything,” I argue.
It does no good.
After I become an adult, Mom tells me that during the time when she taught me at home, she would often get frustrated with herself and worry that she was not doing a good job with me.
But the memories that I have of her and that part of my life are much more pleasant than my memories of when I began first grade at Millbrook K-12 school. I would have preferred to stay at home with her to continue my education.
***
Lumberton, North Carolina. Mid 1980s.
Many evenings after mom has spent a day teaching school and then come home, cooked and served supper, she stands at the sink washing dishes. The sink has a window to the yard and fields outside, and Mom is content with that.
We do not have a dishwasher in the house out in the country where we live at Route 7, Box 568B.
I watch her sometimes, looking at the back of her head as she gazes out the window and scrubs dishes without looking down at them.
“As long as I have a window, that is enough. I don’t need a dishwasher or want one.”
In addition to her regular State job of teaching children with mental handicaps, she is now also going to teach blind children with mental handicaps. She spends many days over the summer in between school sessions teaching herself Braille.
I listen to the sound of the heavy metal Braille typing machine. Mom has to mash down the keys very hard to create the raised dots on the special paper. It is a loud machine, and she has to lug it around wherever she goes.
***
Lumberton, North Carolina. 1990s. Saturdays.
We live in town, now, in a middleclass community called Lakewood Estates.
After cooking us a breakfast of scrambled eggs, grits, bacon, and biscuit toast with butter and jelly, Mom sets about the task of cleaning the house.
The chemicals that Mom is using in the bathrooms are too strong for me. I step outside onto the front porch and get some air.
After Mom finishes making the showers and sinks and toilets spotless, she starts on cleaning the hardwood floors. She goes over the whole house with a broom, and then a mop sprayed with another cleaning chemical of some sort.
When that task is finished, she does everyone’s laundry. Dad, hers, my brother’s and mine.
In between these activities, she stops to make us sandwiches for lunch. Then in the early afternoon, she cooks dinner for us. After dinner, she cleans up the kitchen and washes the dishes.
We now have a dishwasher, thank goodness, but Mom spends about as much time pre-washing the dishes, pots and pans before putting them in the machine as she did before when she stood looking out the window over the sink at the old country house.
Sundays.
While I am still sleeping, Mom gets up at 5am to study her Sunday school lesson and work on the lunchtime meal.
After church, the family sits down to a feast of barbecued chicken, or fried chicken, or roast beef, or ham, or sometimes all of this. There are green beans, mashed potatoes or white rice with gravy, corn, sweet potatoes, black eyed peas, green peas, and biscuits.
When we have finished stuffing ourselves on the tremendous food with a certain taste that only my Mom knows how to make, I go to the living room with Dad and my brother, and we turn on the television to watch the NFL games or baseball games or college basketball games.
Mom continues to work in the kitchen, cleaning up everything and packaging the leftovers that will be dinner tonight.
Monday morning, it will up again early for her to deal with the kids at school, followed by cooking dinner and cleaning the dishes afterward in the evening.
Dad, my brother and I dominate the television set, watching whatever we want- usually sports if it is on.
Mom does not like watching television. When Mom has finished the dishes, she goes back to the bedroom and reads a novel until she falls asleep on top of the covers of the bed. Many times I walk to the back bedroom and see that she is asleep with an open book on her lap, across her stomach or even across her face. It is not even nine o’clock yet.
***
Present Day.
Mom has Parkinson’s disease, now. It is slowly increasing on her left side. Unless she concentrates on it, her left hand trembles. She notices other people noticing this, though of course it is not something she chooses to dwell on.
“I do the best I can with it, each day,” she says.
Mom has not had a sense of smell for years, and I have all ideas that it was destroyed from all those chemicals she used time after time in cleaning the bathrooms for our family.
I wonder as well if the Parkinson’s disease could come from that. No one knows what causes Parkinson’s, but all those years of working with difficult children in the State school system, all those years of also making meals for us, constantly cleaning the house and our clothes and the dishes, a never ending cycle of exhaustion- that did nothing to help her body and immune system fight off the beginnings of the disease.
“A man works from sun to sun, while a woman’s work is never done,” I have heard my Dad say often.
Mom deserves so much more credit than that- a pithy rhyming expression or a blog entry.
I will never be able to repay all that she has done for Dad, my brother and me, and the love that she has given us.
No comments:
Post a Comment