Mother’s Day 2024 by Susanne Severeid

Photo courtesy Susanne Severeid all rights reserved

Mother’s Day

By Susanne Severeid

Copyright 2024

This morning, I lit a pink, rose-scented candle and I now sit quietly in my bathrobe, sipping a cup of coffee, and thinking of Mom.

Mom had no college or university degree, no alphabet soup of letters after her formal name, no fancy sign on an office door. She held no public office, never had a building or park named after her, nor, to the best of my knowledge, did she win any prestigious awards. She was born in Missouri the year the stock market crashed and grew up in Iowa. Hers was a tough childhood with a hardworking mother and an absentee father who drank too much. My grandmother raised Mom and her sister on her own while working as a maid in a downtown hotel, bringing home scraps of used soap and half-empty bottles of shampoo left behind by hotel guests. Mom didn’t talk much about her childhood, but she did tell me once how she used to throw her sandwiches in the trash on the way to school because she didn’t want the other kids to see that she ate home-baked, not store-bought, bread. Home-baked meant you were poor.

She was happy to leave that life behind when she and Dad (he fresh back from serving in WW-II) loaded what few belongings they had into their car and headed west on Route 66. They landed in San Francisco and never looked back. Both would remain in California for the rest of their long lives, where they raised my brother and me.

Mom and Dad both worked hard throughout their lives. They raised us two kids and reached an upwardly mobile financial status through smarts, sheer determination, and Midwestern grit. When I was little, Mom worked full-time during the school year, taking time off during the summer months to be home with us, take us to swim classes, and just be our Mom. She had a professional career as an office manager, cooked the meals, and managed the house. Eventually, the American Dream collapsed under the forces of Dad’s office work pressure and his alcoholism.

After Mom and Dad divorced, she worked full-time during the day, and—for a time—waitressed in the evenings to earn enough to pay off bills and save for a condo down payment (roughly $5,000). She’d come home late in the evening to the 1-bedroom apartment and single bed that she and I shared and we’d count out her tips—in quarters, dimes and nickels in those days– in little piles on the dining room table. I remember her saying that after 25 years of marriage and paying half the bills throughout, when she got divorced she had no credit to her name.  (In the 1970’s, women still had virtually no economic parity in America.) When Mom remarried a few years later, I was happy for her.

I won’t say there weren’t bumpy times in our relationship. Mother/daughter bonds can be fraught with emotion and frustration. But we always forgave each other, and sometimes, we even managed to keep our mouths shut and not say the kind of wounding words that can fracture a relationship. And as the years went on, we became very close.

Family meant a great deal to her, and she always kept in touch with her kin back in Iowa, meticulously saving Christmas cards and announcements from various nieces and nephews and their growing families. Even though she lived a very different life in the sunny climate of California, she never forgot her roots.

She died two years ago at the age of 93. It was only after she was gone that I became acutely aware of how she had always been there for us. Death is so final, so profound. You love someone. You are intertwined. And then, you have to let them go. My brother and I miss her deeply.

For me, Mother’s Day is a time to reflect on how fortunate I’ve been. There are so many ways in which mothers sacrifice for us over the years: things they do, choices they make, burdens they’ve carried and pains they endure that we may never even know about. Parents are human; therefore they are far from perfect. I think of Mom with gratitude and with deep love. She lived her life well and at the end of the day she was a solid woman who did everything she could for us. She loved us and we always knew it. And, to me, that is an achievement as great as trophies on a shelf or one’s name carved into the side of a building.

One last sip of coffee. Blow out the candle. Time to begin the day.

Award-winning author/performer Susanne Severeid lives in the beauty of the Pacific Northwest. www.susannesevereid.com