I saw two very young mothers pushing their babies in carriages down the middle of the street in our small town. "What will those babies," I wondered, "tell the world some day about their mothers' heritage for them?"
It doesn't take me long to say what my mother taught me and gave me in character and virtue. In one word, DETERMINATION!
Mom may have inherited some of it, no doubt, but she traded in it, and multiplied it many times over, like a merchant specializing in one product.
She was the oldest daughter in a poor pioneer family, of 11 children, who had to carry an adult load of work by the time she was ten. She married at 29 and the work didn't let up.
I was not going to school yet, but big enough to stand on a chair and do dishes while she went out to milk the cow, feed the chickens, and so forth. Dad was working as a farmhand for others.
One morning, when I was standing on a chair helping Mom do dishes, when she saw the cows were being turned out to pasture over at her parents' barn. But the gate at our end, near our house, was open. Mom ran out to shut the gate, but not in time. the cow came running up and gored her, first in the front with her hard head in Mom's stomach, and then, as she tried to get up, once more from the back.
My mind is blank as to what happened next, so I may have screamed and shrieked my heart out.
Mom's uncle Jacob, at the next farm over, was coming out of his barn and saw this. He sic-d his dog on the cow, and help arrived shortly. Carried into the house, Mom was laid on her bed. With all her internal injuries everyone expected her to die. No doubt my two younger brothers and I were hustled off to our grandparents' house on the next farm to the west.
Mom had not died yet a couple of weeks later, so she was taken to a doctor at Rosthern, and then sent to the much bigger university hospital in Saskatoon. Even there the doctors didn't expect her to live so just did some temporary repairs of her messed-up internal organs.
Many years later Mom said that she had begged God to let her live to see her children grown up and able to care for themselves. She did her part with a strong will to live.
Sometimes her determination came through as a terrific stubbornness. Though physically weak the rest of her life, if she made up her mind, no one could change it! Mom still managed to give birth to another two girls, helped Dad build several homes with wood from older houses they tore down, and had large vegetable gardens.
I'll skip over the 15 to 18 operations she had and numerous hospital stays she had as an after-math of that experience. But there was another time when Mom showed her inner strength. It was three years before she died in 1997, and I'd already been home to care for her 11 years, and been part of many instances when we thought, "this time she's down for good."
She had a hospital bed, and suffered chronic congestive heart failure, weakness, allergies, and more. Mom hated to be in bed in the daytime no matter how sick she was, if she was home. It was enough to have to do that in her hospital stays. But she'd been lying down because of a flu or pneumonia coming on, and tried to get out of bed to go to the bathroom, when she fell right beside the bed, and broke her hip.
Her doctor didn't think she'd survive an operation, and I told the specialist that the surgeon who did her last hernia operation had told us she'd never survive another. So they didn't operate. She got congestive heart failure and was in intensive care that night, but she pulled through once again! They said she'd never walk though.
By February she was sent home with a pole to transfer in and out of bed, a wheelchair, a walker, etc. and Mom managed to get to the living room by herself frequently, trying to make it before I could help her.
The night before Valentines, we were talking about her walking and she wished for a walker. I told her I'd put it out of the way in the sunroom. "Well, I want to see it." she said. When I put it before her, Mom pulled herself up out of her favourite chair, and leaning on the walker proved that she could walk again. A hobble, yes, but moving her own feet forward! She didn't do a lot of hobbling, but for a few months she did short trips from one room to the next.
Mom did live to see all five of her children grow up. Three got married and gave her six grandchildren too. She crocheted heaps and heaps of gifts for them!
One day I mentioned to a woman at church that Mom and I sometimes had clashes of wills. I sure hoped I would be more reasonable when I was an old biddy, and needed care. The woman retorted, "No, we all know you're just like your mother."
Gulp. I asked myself if that were true? I've been watching with more detachment in recent years, and I now admit that I've either inherited or learned Mom's persevering ways. Probably both!
I can't predict what will happen to those young moms behind the baby carriages today, and I certainly don't wish them all the problems my mother had, but if they give their children a strong spirit of hanging on, and getting up and trying again and again - of dogged perseverance, they'll give them a fine gift.
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Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada