The author remembers the important role her mother played in her childhood growing up on a prairie farm in the 1940s
I was about four when I first took note of what my mother wore.
She was going to a wedding and she wore a black skirt and a white blouse with a spray of hand-painted flowers on the left shoulder. When told I couldn’t go along, I had to keep back my tears of disappointment for fear I’d spoil those flowers. They were painted in such delicate pastels I somehow thought my tears might wash them all away.
On ordinary days Mom wore a floral print housedress and cotton bib apron, the dress the standard uniform of a homemaker, the apron signifying she was on active duty. Her apron was often dusty with flour as she greased the ball of bun dough in the kneading pan. On bake days, if the “basket” she made from her apron skirt bulged with sufficient eggs when she returned from the hen house, I could anticipate molasses cakes or brown sugar cookies.
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While hoeing in the garden, she sometimes stooped to tuck a few pods of green peas into her apron pocket. Returning from the orchard, she often tumbled an apron full of golden crabapples across the kitchen table. And long after the saskatoon berries had disappeared, the evidence of that first scant picking still stained the front of Mom’s apron.
That apron was a homespun symbol of her willingness to cope with any situation, and she never hesitated to use it to that end.
When the runt from the litter of pigs was finally shipped triumphantly and tearfully to market, I recalled the morning Mom had carried it home in her apron. Near the warmth of the kitchen stove, it soon revived sufficiently to squeal for lunch.
It was the summer of mom’s life, when she coped with children and with chores, with drought and with depression, with being bone-weary and dog-tired, and still carrying on, for the sake of us kids.
I never suspected the real reason she always insisted on walking to town for a few groceries. I thought it was because the roses were blooming at the sand hill or because the pincherries were ripe or maybe the tiger lilies had opened. I romped along beside her, unaware that my constant chatter was her therapy and the things of nature a vivid testimony of her belief in the unfailing goodness of God.
Her trust in me spurred me on to greater heights of achievement.
“Do the best you can,” she would say, and I did. “Oh, good for you,” was her ready response when I would come bounding in after school with a high mark. Her dancing brown eyes left no doubt as to her sincerity.
As I grew older and began to help Dad with the harvests, Mom always carried lunch to us “men” who were working in the field. My sagging spirits lifted as I saw her waiting at the corner of the field in the shade of the windbreak, her apron spread over the pans of sandwiches and cakes, the moisture condensing on the white enamel pitcher of lemonade that stood in the stubble by her side.
But I still think I was happiest to see her the very first time she came to Parents’ Day at school.
Sitting in the Grade 1 row, I was keeping an anxious eye on the door as all the other parents came streaming in. Soon there was a whole row of adults lined up along the back wall, silently observing the teacher as she put us through our paces.
I began to panic inside. What if my turn comes to read out loud and I have no mother there when I open my reader and begin extolling the virtues of Dick and Jane and Sally and Spot? Feeling like an absolute orphan, I might even cry and all the big kids in Grade 3 will laugh at me and recess will be the most painful experience I have ever endured in all of my six years of life and…. Just the thoughts of it all were devastating.
And then just as the boy ahead of me stumbled through the last pages of Puff and Spot, I saw Mom slip in through the door and quietly join the lineup of parents at the back of the room.
The next instant the teacher was calling my name. Flipping my pigtails to the back, I rose to my feet in a mighty burst of courage and launched into the most magnificent rendition of “See Jane run” that has ever graced an elementary classroom.
And it was all because Mom looked so good.
I never even noticed what she was wearing. All I saw was love and encouragement and support and security and trust and satisfaction and all those things a good mother conveys when she makes it a point to look for the best in her child.
