My mother celebrated a milestone birthday this week.
Unfortunately, there’s a law that prohibits me divulging her age. That law is murder. If I put her age in the newspaper, the woman will kill me.
Nonetheless, I want to do something to mark her special day. I thought about writing about what a great mother she was and about the great childhood I had growing up in small-town Georgia. Because all of that is true.
She taught my brother and me how to behave in public. I see the way some kids act in public today – with their parents standing right there – and I can only imagine what would have happened to me in a similar situation.
She might have said, “Wait until I get you home, young man,” or she might have taken care of business right then and there, depending on how severe the transgressions was. She certainly wouldn’t have allowed me to run wild in the grocery store.
My brother and I often went with my mother when she went to the Piggly Wiggly to buy groceries. Most of the time, she’d let us come inside. But other times, apparently because she didn’t want the inevitable fight that comes when you take a child down the cookie aisle, she wouldn’t let us come inside.
“Y’all stay in the car,” she said. “I’ll be right back. Do not get out of this car.”
She didn’t leave the engine running so we could use the air conditioning on a hot South Georgia afternoon, but she was kind enough to roll the windows down for us. Of course, in 2017, this would be enough to get her arrested. But back in the day, it was normal behavior.
Of course, the more I think about it, the more I realize my mother did things that showed no apparent concern for my health and well-being.
For instance, I never fastened my seat belt until after I graduated from college, long after I had left my mother’s home.
In fact, my mother allowed my brother and me to climb all over the back seat, lie in the back window and stretch out on the back seat to take a nap. I can remember riding in the backseat of my grandmother’s Buick that had a hole in the floorboard, and no one gave any thought to ever buckling us in.
My mother apparently didn’t care if we drank water out of the nasty water hose. We drank out of the hose all the time. In fact, I don’t think I ever drank water any other way when I was a child. I’m fortunate I never caught the plague.
I ate whatever she fixed for dinner. Sometimes, she’d ask us what we wanted. But if she got a hankering to fix Brussels sprouts, then that’s what we ate, without any regard to the damage it could be doing to our young digestive systems. On the rare occasion, if we had misbehaved badly enough, we’d be sent to bed without dinner.
If I got in trouble at school or at a friend’s house, I got in trouble at home. There were no questions asked. The teachers or the other mothers had complete authority to discipline me. So much for due process of law.
I don’t want to dwell too much on the negative, though. After all, it’s my mother’s birthday, and I want her to have fun today and to celebrate her milestone.
But let’s face it, it’s a miracle we survived.
