My beautiful mother never liked Mother’s Day.
She watched her grandmother’s body wither away with bone cancer, causing her terrible pain towards the end of her life, when my mother was a child, and these memories never left her.
A little girl in the 1950s and 1960s, my mum thought her grandmother always had a funny laugh and dance after, but it was the old lady’s shrieks every 10 or so minutes from excruciating pain spasms and subsequent shivers, shakes, and jolts of misery and ache, sending her body feet above her hospital bed after that my mother was recalling. The doctors would eventually amputate my great-grandmother’s leg to stop the spread of the cancer that would kill her, but their efforts failed and she would be in so much pain that she eventually begged to die.
There were no mercy killings for cancer patients then in rural Missouri, so my great-grandmother eventually chose to be lobotomized. She died in a vegetative state a few months later...on Mother’s Day, 1961. My mom was barely 10.
When my mother’s mother got off the phone after hearing of her mother’s death, she did not shed ONE tear--just said "neither she nor I could have asked for a better Mother's Day present,” meaning her grandmother and the family were free from my great-grandmother’s horrific suffering and pain.
As a result, they never really celebrated Mother’s Day again and my mother never enjoyed the day after, despite her kids always wanting to do something for her.
Here she is pictured with my father, looking flawless, probably circa 1969-1972. I don’t honestly know.
What I do know is I celebrated today in honor of the woman who raised me, a fashionista and style icon in her day. And a ferocious mother when she could be. Even if she didn’t always care for the day, I always cared for her.
I love you mom.
❤️❤️& 🌸🌹& AML! Happy #mothersday ❤️ ♈️ ♉️ 👩🏾🎤 👩👦
