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my many mothers
by barbara hooley

Motherhood is a tricky business. We want to teach our children everything we think is important to their being a success in life before they’ve flown from the nest. We tell them to be honest and kind, to work and study hard, to be polite and respectful of others, to set high goals, to live with joy and humor, to be responsible. But in the end it is what we model to them that sticks. I was lucky to have had many mothers who showed me many courageous ways of being in the world.

My mother, Almeda (Troyer) Hooley, who trained as a nurse may have been familiar with the medical ethics term “first do no harm.” But if she never took it as an oath while practicing nursing, she certainly modeled it in her mothering. She wasn’t the kind of mother who smothered me with hugs and affection every time I walked in the door and at eighty-five she still isn’t quite comfortable saying “I love you.” At twenty-five I would have said she was painfully distant emotionally. But it took me fifty years and my own experience of mothering to realize what an incredible force of mothering she really was and still is. Anyone who has raised a child knows making mistakes, even serious ones, usually comes with the territory. I know I have lain awake more nights than I can count on my ten fingers worrying that something I did or said caused irreparable emotional damage to my daughter. “How much therapy am I going to have to pay for down the road? What will be the cost to my daughter of all my mistakes? I know I could have done that more kindly than I did. Was it really necessary for me to yell at her that way?” I berate myself. But my mother NEVER yelled. I don’t believe I have ever heard her raise her voice. I don’t know what it sounds like. That alone makes me wonder how she managed such a feat. She was calm always. She had five kids and a demanding husband to care for and I cannot recall a single occasion when she actually raised her voice in anger, though there were plenty of opportunities and justifications to have done so. I do remember one time she might have wanted to, maybe even tried to had she been a bit more practiced. I had had a year of college under my belt and was trying out a little first-time and I thought at the time sophisticated swearing at the dinner table. My mother’s only swear words were “blast” and “drat” and those were reserved for such dire occasions as returning to a kitchen with soap suds and water covering the entire floor or sitting in a broken-down car with five hungry quarreling children in sweltering Georgia heat and no air conditioning waiting for a two-hour delayed tow truck. On that night when I used a swear word at her dinner table, she rose from the table to her full height of 5’ 2” (she must have weighed about 110 lbs. at the time), pointed toward the stairs and told me very forcefully and very slowly, “Go to your room!” Now that was also the first time she had ever ordered me to my room and I wasn’t sure I really lived at home any more, but I did leave the table in spite of the fact that her voice barely made it above a quivering whisper. If she had lived in the South, she would have been considered a steel magnolia, a woman who rules with a soft voice, a compassionate heart and a rod of steel for a backbone. Being of Amish stock, she had practice in the art of speaking softly while expecting respectful attention. Practical and frugal and patient, as a mother she was a model of industry and dependability. If she said she would do something, it was done. She didn’t forget.

Always shy in public, extremely reserved even in private, she kept her opinions mostly to herself. Over the years I’ve learned she has very strong opinions, even if she didn’t force them on her children. She was and still is a force of quiet strength and grace.
I loved and admired my mother, but my mother was shy and reserved and took her marriage oath of obedience to my father seriously. Susie Smithers was a woman who could do anything, a Renaissance woman before Martha Stewart had tilled her first garden. She was a friend of my mother’s and the mother of one of my best school friends. I spent many after school and summer afternoons at her home. Susie taught classes in the local school; helped run a radio station; and with her husband, managed a horse farm called Rollicking Hills. The two of them also ran a summer horse camp for city slickers who learned how to ride horses, haul manure, milk goats, live in tree houses and tents, and eat at table with impeccable manners. Susie could saddle a horse in three minutes and ride with one arm tied behind her back and if a horse bit her she taught him a lesson by biting him back hard. I learned how to ride with Susie’s instruction. Though I didn’t turn into a great horsewoman, I learned that to take a fall was to be expected and one need not cry over such a trivial matter. Susie was no coddler, made of tough stuff, she expected no less of anyone else. She could also knit a cabled cashmere sweater in the dark while at the opera. She could make an eight-course dinner then sit down and have it served while keeping up a lively conversation. She was completely outspoken and candid but rarely rude. Plus she had an amazing sense of style. There were many times when I saw her working hard, sweat and dirt dripping off her during the day, then completely elegant, beautiful and at ease that same evening. It seemed to me at the time there was nothing she could not do. She was gritty and sophisticated and intelligent and beautiful and not afraid of anyone or anything. She believed in humor and imagination and creativity and inspired it in everyone around her. She was everything I wanted one day to be.

About the age of nine or ten, I started spending most Sunday afternoons with Janie, one of my best friends to this day. We attended the same church and afterwards one of us would nearly always go home with the other. Later on when we attended the same school, we spent even more time together. Margaret Yoder, Janie’s mom, came to be like a second mother to me. A hard working farmwoman, she was unassuming and affectionate and comfortable to be around. She laughed at our jokes and calmly tolerated our rambunctious adventures. She permitted us to eat pie for breakfast and watch occasional scary movies on TV. From her I learned about the joys of southern style cooking with bacon added to beans, real cream over home-style oatmeal, and chicken-fried steak. There was always something on the back of the stove that smelled rich and supper portions were always generous. But it was her ability to tolerate our giggling craziness that made her a standout in the mothering department. On one wet summer afternoon when Janie and I had slipped in the mud in a back lane then decided to invent mud spa bathing—we literally rolled in the mud and flung it at each other without regard to what consequences might follow—we came back to Janie’s yard. There was Margaret busy tending a flowerbed. She took one look at us, started laughing, got out the garden hose and sprayed us clean. But if that wasn’t enough, we went back and did it again! The second time around, she hosed us down and told us as sternly as she could manage that we better not do it again, but she hadn’t quite wiped the smile off her face. That was typical of Margaret. She simply accepted our antics with all our mess and fuss and silliness as normal.

Lu Anne Rupp and Joyce Wise were church youth leaders who I came to know as a teenager. Both of these women seemed genuinely interested in me as a person with ideas and opinions and the potential to be whatever I wanted to be. At the time I was already questioning the theology of Christianity and trying to make sense of a “God of love” with a world at war. In a small extremely conservative community like the one in which I grew up, there wasn’t often much room for disagreement, and certainly not doubt about the basic precepts that seemingly the entire community took for granted. I sometimes felt like an alien in a world I didn’t understand. They both made me feel accepted. Ironically, they were both also the greatest walking testaments to Christian faith. Lu Anne laughed and joked and prayed all at the same time. And all of it was genuine. Her joy for living life at its fullest radiated in everything she did from leading a discussion on the Vietnam War to chaperoning game night for a bunch of rowdy teenagers. Joyce had spiritual depth, intellectual curiosity and a clear understanding of herself as a woman with power.

For a teenager trying to understand what it means to be a woman—especially in the 1960s when everything was changing for women—it was profoundly important for me to see a woman who took for granted that spirituality, equality and sexuality were not incompatible. I often baby sat for Joyce’s children. Once she returned home to find me paging through her copy of Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask. She didn’t blink, didn’t appear the least bit embarrassed, didn’t scold me for getting into her book left by her bedside. No, without the least bit of embarrassment and no preachiness, she told me how much she thoroughly enjoyed sex, that over the years she and her husband got better and better at it, and she expected to savor all its joys well into ripe old age. I admired both Joyce and Lu Anne for their honesty and candor and joyful spirits and both granted me the freedom to get to know myself without shame or apologies for who I was, who I was becoming.

Pat Ratleff came into my life towards the end of my high school years. She was the mother of my first real boyfriend and became another important mother to me. Pat was smart, fierce, strong-willed, independent in thought and action, full of integrity, fun-loving, incapable of compromise, tireless, courageous, hard working, creative, civic minded, determined to make her community a better place, the world a better place for her children, and her children a success in the world. Like Susie Smithers, she seemed to have the ability to do just about anything she set her mind to and sometimes that meant against all odds. When she was told that her children as African Americans wouldn’t be allowed to swim in the local pool, she immediately marched them down to the pool to push the issue. Technically it was a private club pool, but the public at a nominal charge used it. When the club didn’t back down, Pat called in the NAACP and threatened the city with a lawsuit, forcing the city to build a large public pool open to everyone. [Ironically, I remember the day when my mother pulled me and my brothers and sisters out of that private pool and took us home because a couple black kids had been turned away at the entrance. “They can’t swim here, we can’t swim here either,” is all she said. I only learned with the writing of this story it was most likely that exact same incident that I too remember.] Later she ran for City Council and served as Council Woman for ten years. She let her children know early on they would be expected to study hard in high school and go on to college, which they all did. She helped her son secure a college football scholarship. She worked long factory hours to help pay tuition costs. After she saw her children through college, she went back herself at age fifty to become a nurse. She and her husband, with the support of their three children, agreed to adopt four-year old twin boys who had been shuffled around to various foster homes. She challenged the learning-disabled label that they arrived with by spending hours each night tutoring them. They both graduated from high school and went on to college. She knew before Nike what it meant to “just do it!” One day she decided the family needed more space. That very day, with no better plan than “just do it,” she took a sledgehammer and knocked down the back wall of her house, resulting in a 30 x 30 foot family room two months later. (You can imagine her husband was a bit of a saint as well since he only learned of this plan when he arrived home that day.) She opened her home as a welcoming place in the neighborhood for all her children’s friends and for a several kids who got little support at home. She was serious minded, but it never stopped her from having fun. On Saturday nights a gathering of adults and teenagers were often found playing tonk, eating pizza or homemade soup, talking and laughing and generally having a very merry time. She attended all her children’s various sports activities. She was an expert seamstress and could whip up a tailored suit or new slipcovers for her couch at a moment’s notice. She had the energy and strength of a tank with the wisdom of a sage. Sometimes I asked her for advice. Once I asked her how to know you are really in love. She could have given me a long-winded speech about everything she believed in and how important it is to make responsible choices, and on and on, but she didn’t. She looked at me and very quietly responded, “Barbara, you have to look in your heart and listen very carefully to that still voice of truth that’s already there for you to know.” That I already had the answers inside me was the best advice she could have given me about anything. I have tried to follow that advice in many areas, not always successfully, but it has served me well. Stop and listen to the truth in your own heart; it will tell you what you already know.

My husband sometimes laughs at me for saying crazy things. I once said, “I wish I could open up my head and pass on all the information I’ve acquired inside during my life time.” “You mean like a computer chip where you just download it all?” he joked. But that is what all these many mothers did for me. By showing me who they were and accepting me for who I was, they opened up their hearts and heads and shared with me the wisdom of generations of women and the acquired knowledge of their own lives. Thank you so much to my many mothers.

Barbara Hooley is a fiber artist, teacher and freelance writer. She lives in Asheville, NC.
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