Memories of Mom

Some time ago I wrote here about struggling to come to terms with the death of my mother in the sense of not having many memories of those special moments. Last night a friend sent me the following and gave me permission to post it here. Savor the reading of it as I did:

My Mother--Margitta Maria Albert Newman

by Ruth Golden


My mother used to crack me up. Margitta, or Gitta as her friends called her, was a feisty German woman who came to live in the United States after marrying my Army father.  They were wed a few short months before my birth.  He returned to the States and my mother stayed in Germany until after I was born.  Six weeks after that monumental event, she left her tearful family and hopped a plane to follow my dad first to Mississippi (where she first encountered severe racism and then culture shock), to France, then to Virginia, back to Mississippi, and then to various other locations in Virginia before my father left the service for good after 12 years' time. They finally planted roots in Virginia.

During her travels, my mother picked up another language or two besides her native German; first English and then French. It was hilarious to hear her on the phone with our former French neighbor from the farming village outside Paris where we had lived; it was not unusual for my mother to start the conversation speaking French, pepper it with a little English, then switch back to French, and I swear I once heard her throw in a side of German. What her friend though of that, I'll never know.

When I was little, my mother had a saying that she would use a lot at bathtime. My two sisters and I would strip down and get into our big claw-foot bathtub to play in mountains of bubbles. She would always call us "naked chabers," as in, "You're a bunch of naked chabers!" Even though I hadn't a clue, I never asked what it meant; at the time, I figured she knew what she was talking about.  Can you believe that, just in the past year, I finaly realized what she was trying to say? Have you figured it out? What she had somehow been able to mangle between hearing and repeating was "naked as a jaybird." When I finally got it, I laughed and laughed. (I'm laughing now as I write this.)  I wish I could let her know that the riddle has been solved.

My mother was a very funny person, even when she was not trying. She once sneezed 37 times straight – we know, we counted. To this day, I love a good sneeze, just not that much, although I do a three-count sneeze that knocks me off my feet sometimes. 

We used to play a word game, you know the one, where you would start with the letter "A" and name something you could bring camping and then go around the circle, with the next person repeating what you said and then adding their own word that began with the next letter.  My mother got the letter "W" and after carefully reciting the full list from the others, she yells out for her entry, "Met watches!" (Wet matches.)  A few years ago, I visited the friends in North Carolina we played that game with (I consider them as my second set of parents), and they still get a chuckle out of my mom's "met watches."

She never quite got the hang of pronouncing the letter "J."  So, she'd tell us to "chump" into the bathtub, instead of "jump." She could never remember how to spell the word "eight."

My mother's favorite song was "Shenandoah"; her efforts at warbling it were just awful, but she would keep on singing, much to the family's chagrin. Last year, after tying up our sailboat at a marina after a full day of sailing, my husband and I heard a sailor sitting in his cockpit in the next slip playing "Shenandoah" on his harmonica. The tears that sprang to my eyes startled me, even though they should not have; I cry every time I hear that song.

One of my favorite things to do now is to look at old pictures of my mother as a child, teenager, adult, and see how much of her I can see in my own children. One trait that was definitely slipped into the gene pool was her sense of humor. There are also some quirky facial expressions in my kids that take me aback until I realize where I'd seen them before.

Becoming an American citizen was a very, very important event for my mother. I remember her telling me that when she was asked the current President's name at her swearing-in, she stuttered horribly because she was so scared: "K-k-k-k-kennedy!"

My mother died suddenly the day before Mother's Day in 1980.  She was 43 years old. She'd had heart trouble, but never took it seriously enough, nor felt her own self worth enough, to regularly take her medications or to change the habits that were slowly killing her. It took me a long time to finally accept that she was gone from my life for good.

I am thankful for the good memories of my mother—I won't kid you, we fought like cats and dogs (both being Geminis . . . enough said), so there were bad times, too. But I can block those memories out in favor of the good ones; there are enough of those to keep me busy for a long time. Thanks, Mom, and, even though this time of the year is bittersweet, Happy Mother's Day.