Women are powerful

When I first saw this challenge I immediately thought of my grandmother.

She was a depression era farmer. Someone who conquered the “half-breed” stigma in rural Oklahoma. She left her family for love and never looked back. She survived domestic violence. She walked miles with two small kids to see her mom when she was dying only to be turned away. She supported a family of 5 by herself as a cotton farmer, a pie backer and ironer of others clothes. She kept her family together after their house burned. She mowed her own grass until she was 95 and she lived to 99.75. She was visibly strong. She was determined. She was a survivor.

But that was a story, I felt had already been told. Many women during that dirt bowl era had to be strong. They had to survive because the alternative wasn’t an option. So, if not this amazing lady, then who?

Who could top my Granny?

It is my mom. Raised by this strong woman, she was influenced in a very different way. The qualities that my mom learned and carried forward with her were those of strength but not physical, but of character. She learned to love and to be faithful. She learned to see thing through. She learned to bear what my feel unbearable but is the right thing to do. She learned how important family is and will always be.

My mom, Ethel Frances, was born in 1924 in Asher Oklahoma. Third oldest of what would make its way to a family of 5. Her father was an alcoholic and native American. A really bad combination. The good news is that he disappeared and never came back. The bad news, money was always tight. Two more kids came along with daddy number two. Daddy number 2 wasn’t much better than number one and soon took off too.

My mom told stories of hard work in the fields, cooking and cleaning for the younger kids while her mom worked and often not having shoes to wear if the corps were bad. She talked of spending a winter in a cow shed with a dirt floor, no running water and a pot belly stove for heat the year their house burned. But through it all she graduated from high school and got a good job book keeping at a hotel in a near by town.

By now her brothers had gone off to war and left her mom and younger sister back on their share crop farm. So, my mom worked and saved and saved some more and through sheer determination was able to put down a down payment on a house for her mom, her sister and herself. The first home that they had ever owned! Her sister soon married and moved off to start her own family while my Granny and mom stayed in the house and fell into the rhythm of work and house keeping and city life.

Fast forward some years and my mom had married an Air Force recruiter and moved from Oklahoma to the east coast with her air force love and I was born shortly followed by my brother. But my brother didn’t make it. His life though remembered was a very brief 9 hours. Shaken and sick, Frank Jr was buried without my mom being there at Arlington cemetery. It was more than fifty years after Frank Jr’s death before my mom was able to visit his grave site. My dad had thought it unhealthy for her to visit and thus she had obeyed. On the day that I took my mom to the gravesite, 50 years of loss and regret was released as we hugged and grieved for the loss of a son and brother. A loss she had never talked about through the years but had born with acceptance of what is.

Here life was a life of doing for others. As a mom she was on the PTA, she volunteered at school, helped with science fair projects, choir costumes, orchestra practices and bake sales. As a daughter she called her mom every Sunday without fail, she visited every summer and when her mom was unable to care for herself, she moved back to Oklahoma and brought meals and oversaw her care for over 10 years. As a wife, she took care of the house, she ironed and cooked and saved. When my dad had his first heart attack at 40, she became his primary caregiver too. She drove to doctors’ appointments. She fought for the care that was best. In return for this dedication, my father kicked her out of their bedroom because she bothered him. He timed her outings when she ran to the store or to check on her mom. She gave up friends. She gave up her freedom to make peace. But that wasn’t enough. At one point, he even accused her of having an affair. Because she was gone every day at noon. I remember when she confessed this to me years after my dad had passed away. She admitted that divorce had crossed her mind, but that her marriage was her duty and she couldn’t give that up. She made the best of it.

When my mom turned 84, I received a call that no one wants to get. She called to tell me she had cancer. Lung cancer. Stage 4. She had gone to the doctor for the past several months as the test were tallied without telling a soul. Now “she thought I should know”. My mom moved in with me and my husband and we began treatment. We did chemo, we did radiation, we contemplated surgery. But the cancer had spread. To her brain, to her lymph nodes, everywhere. When she got this news at our last doctors’ appointment, she reached out for my hand and said, “I am not ready to die.” Still die she did. From start to finish, 3 months’ time. She was brave. She was determined, but the cancer was more determined. On June 5th, she was down in weight to 90 pounds. My son, her most beloved grandchild, called on skype that morning from Afghanistan. Then just as I went in to tell her I was going to work, I knew. I knelt down beside her, took her hand and she breathed her last breath. She had been waiting.

My mom was a woman of silent courage. A woman who faced challenge. A woman who didn’t give up. Not ever.