Commentary : Mom’s Small Gestures Live On
Cabrillo Marine Museum. Fullerton Arboretum. A train ride to San Diego. All my friends who are parents make those extra efforts: finding the best schools and moving into the district, supporting extracurricular activities from ballet to baseball, taking weekly trips to the library, including children on exotic vacations.
But, what do we, as adults looking back on childhood, remember about our Moms?
Sometimes children take for granted those Saturday classes and excursions that parents take great pains to provide. Perhaps children believe that’s the way family life is supposed to be. My parents took us to national parks, to the seashore, to San Francisco by station wagon.
Yet, I also remember the daily moments as equally cherished, my Mom’s involuntary acts of kindness and love. Those moments are what I have found most influential in my adult life.
My mother grew up on a sugar cane plantation in Oahu and decided, despite parental pressure (her parents said girls don’t need college educations), to put herself through college. Both my parents valued higher education. (My mother became a social worker, my father a teacher). College was not an option in our family. Mom always presented the idea of college matriculation as a natural requirement progression, like graduating from junior high to high school. As a result, five of her six children have graduated from USC and three continued graduate work at other universities.
I remember that no matter how busy Mom was, she always had time to encourage and praise our accomplishments. Once, my third-grade teacher organized a reading contest; every child who read 10 books (any length) during the fifteen-week semester would win a special prize. She put up giant thermometers on the bulletin board and each Friday for the semester we would stand on a chair and advance our red marker up the thermometer for each book read. By the time the contest ended the thermometer “mercury” in mine had bubbled over, my marker reaching the top three times.
The awards day arrived and I received a prize for reading the most books. I rushed home to tell Mom. I recall that particularly joy because at last I was good at something. The kick-ball dunce could excell at something. Once home, I waved the hand-lettered, gold-bordered certificate in my mother’s face. She looked up from the ironing board where the arm of one of my father’s dress shirts dangled.
“Mom!” I called out. “I broke my thermometer!”
I am still surprised--although I shouldn’t be--that Mom did not question that cryptic announcement. The hot iron nuzzled a shoulder seam and she smiled. She almost always smiled at me.
“Very good, Ruthie.”
She made each one of us feel special and whenever she interacted with us individually , she really listened. Today, I call our penchant for sharing news with her “the Mom grapevine.” If any of us wants to know what’s going on with the other family members, we just call Mom--she always knows.
Her praise given in the midst of chores for a family of eight, in the midst of financial challenges and life’s hectic whirl, her words and smile, I see now, were the real prize I was seeking that day.
A few weeks later, I wrote about that reading accomplishment in my first short story, a fable about a family of mice who lived in our walls and slept. The eldest mouse daughter won a reading prize and she also had five pesky siblings. After writing the story early one morning, I remember making my way to the kitchen.
Slices of perfectly square white bread lined the sandwich board, seven pairs. A package of bologna rounds spilled across the yellow Formica counter. My mother stood at the stove, shifting and turning bacon slices.
“Mom, would you read my story?”
There was the family breakfast to prepare, my youngest sisters to dress, and all of our lunches to pack. I remember she did not answer me for a minute and I repeated the question, much louder.
She only smiled. “Why don’t you read the story to me?” she said. Today I wonder how she could have appeared so leisurely, so unruffled and calm.
I read aloud while she fried the eggs which sizzled and seethed in the cast-iron skillet. Afterward, she looked across at me sitting on a low wooden stool. “That’s very good, Ruthie,” she said. That afternoon, immediately after school, I wrote another story to read to Mom while she ironed.
I look back now and find that there were many activities I’ve done and skills I’ve polished because Mom liked to see me doing those things.
Several years after the mouse story incident, Mom returned to her career as a social worker. But she never lost the ability to share in our prizes, to encourage us during setbacks, and to praise us for every accomplishment. She inadvertently helped me decide in third grade on a career in fiction writing and teaching, doing so in the most common acts of daily encouragement.
Those gestures and words of Mom’s could be considered the simple and small, perhaps the forgettable acts between mother and child. Except I’ve never forgotten them.
