My sisters and I are the descendants of a woman who didn’t realize the skills she was inadvertently leaving us.
Nor, for years, did I.
Born to an abusive mother, Mama spent her childhood learning to dodge flying skillets and abusive verbal barbs. She left home at 17 and bore four daughters in eight years. She weathered a difficult marriage for six more years and dared to divorce in conservative 1960s South Carolina.
Mama went on to put herself through nursing school, but not before taking up the mantle of motherhood in the manner of the times. She made our clothes and took us to church, led our Girl Scout troop and created homemade Easter cakes in the shape of a basket.
When my father left without a promise of child support, and she had to work overtime as director of a nursing home, Mama was forced let go of many of the responsibilities of family life. Not only was the cooking and cleaning left to us, we also had to learn how to mother ourselves and each other.
One might think the gaps in caring, the confusion of sometimes longing and sometimes fulfillment — she continued to be excellent at tending to us when we were sick and taking us to Grandma’s for holidays — might have made us bitter and detached.
Instead, there was a coming together in sisterly solidarity. In one typical photograph, eldest sister Sharon, at 6, is pictured with her arms reached out around us, while Mama, who never learned physical affection, sits behind, hands in her lap.
The four of us played like best friends in the backyard. We learned how to make spaghetti and Hamburger Helper, and how to vacuum and clean the bathroom.
There came breaks in our relationships as we grew older with different interests. But the depth of those early experiences kept us close, leading the way to a deep empathy and care for each other that resembled mothering.
This was no more evident for me than in the last three years as my husband began to deteriorate and eventually die from early onset dementia, and I began to suffer a number of serious health problems that left me bedridden and my young adult children with too much responsibility.
I was astonished and humbled, as each sister, yet busy with her own life that included struggling with her own demons, showed up to help without being asked.
Sharon, the eldest and the night owl, who I typically talked to only a few times a year, became the sister I called at 3 a.m. at her house in Mississippi, when I was scared, in physical pain or otherwise needing my older sister. Susan, the middle sister who hated to fly, booked a flight from her home in New Orleans at one crisis point. She also became the sister who would stay on the phone with me for hours with her signature sense of humor, determined to make me laugh. Kim, the youngest with a husband, two children and a demanding work schedule, became the sister who dropped everything to drive six times last year with her husband from her home in Memphis to ours in Ohio to help.
Local and longtime friends were part of my healing village, too, bringing food, sitting with me at doctor appointments and generally supporting me and my family.
But when all is said and done, what remains to be truest, is that my sisters and I are from the same tribe.
Only we remember what it was like growing up Catholic, the product of divorce in conservative South Carolina.
Only we remember hand-cranking ice cream on the back porch with berries we picked from the woods behind our house.
Only we remember what it felt like when Mama made magic of Christmas.
And when she yelled at us.
And how much we loved her anyway.
It took me some time to see the full truth of my mother, who I spent years in therapy forgiving.
It was only in recent years that I saw her for all of who she was. Despite the tragedy of her life, despite never knowing the love of a mother, she managed to survive, even thrive at times, until she was 68 and involved in an accident with fire. Even then, even with burns to 38% of her body, she fought to stay alive for four days, until one by one, her systems began to fail. This, in the midst of poverty, depression, hepatitis C and memories of defeating cancer some 20 years before.
Mama, as it turns out, gave me and my sisters much, including the will to live, which may be why I am still here after 13 years with leukemia.
She also gave us something even greater:
She gave us each other.
