My Mom

 Me, my Mom, and my Mema- the last picture ever taken of us all together.

My Mom has lived in the same town for her entire life;  all of her homes have been within a 10 mile radius of each other and within a 5 mile radius of her parent’s old house.  My grandparents were very strict with her; strict even by the standards of other devout Baptists circa the 1950's.  She was not allowed to go to any school dances, concerts, wear makeup or skirts that were more than one inch above her knee (my Papa often brought out his measuring tape if there was any doubt in his mind). My Mema made almost all of her clothes for her until she was a teenager- then my mom was old enough to get a job and she decided that she'd use her money to buy the clothes she wanted.  Although they weren't really the outfits she wanted since they had to conform to the above mentioned rules.

My mom would tell me these stories over and over again as I was growing up, as if she were willing me to understand how different her life had been from mine. I couldn't believe she was talking about the same people who were my Mema and Papa. I never understood why she always followed every single one of their rules- didn't she ever just want to be herself?  But she never did; my mom was the quintessential good daughter who truly loved and respected her parents.  If they said no, she wouldn't do it. 

Her parents were both larger than life types, with dominant personalities, whereas my mother was more submissive and eager to please.  She never rebelled against them or disobeyed,  always showing them the proper respect.  But she dreamed of one day becoming a mother and doing all the things with her daughter that she did not get to do.

My mom thought she would love her daughter in all the ways she had felt unloved by her mother, and in return, her daughter would love her in the way she had unfailingly and loyally loved her mom.  I think she saw the first crack in this dream when her only daughter, me, informed her at the tender age of two that she didn't want to be rocked to sleep anymore.  She tried for the next week to keep rocking me, hoping it was a one time thing, but I kept telling her no until she eventually gave up trying. A few years later she signed me up for dance lessons and after the first class I begged her to not make me go back.  As a child she'd always wanted to take ballet lessons, something she never got to do.  Naturally, she assumed I would feel the same and be excited about it.  These types of occurrences would happen again, many times over, as I grew up.

As I got older I became very close to my Mema and I could tell that our close bond sometimes upset my mom.  Being the wonderful daughter that I was, I would often flaunt this in front of her. In my mom’s eyes, the relationship she had longed to have with her mother was the one I had with her and the relationship she had longed to have with her daughter, her mother had with me.  I was nothing like the girl she had imagined having; I was more like her mom, minus the uber strict moral code.  My Mema and I, we just had a different relationship- I think granddaughters and grandmothers do, it's just how it is. But to my mom, she didn't have the mother who appreciated her or the daughter.

It was always an issue, especially after my Mema died.  I remember the day that the funeral home gave my mom my Mema's possessions that she'd been wearing when she passed-  one of which was her engagement ring and wedding band.  My mom clutched it in her hand, looking down at the ring she had stared out for a lifetime on her mother's finger. With tears rolling down her face she took a deep breath and handed it to me, saying that my Mema had told her she wanted me to have her ring.  She could have kept it for herself- she loved that ring- but she didn't.  That's not the kind of daughter she was.  My mother always did what her mom wanted and asked her to do and death certainly wasn't going to change my mom from being the daughter she had always been.