IN MEMORY OF MY MOM

My mom was very special to me. It is hard to find a place to start but I guess the best would be what she told me of her life.  This is something I am going to try and remember as she told me so long ago.

My mom was named Lillian Patricia when she was born, but called Patsy by everyone. She came from a very large family. My grandparents were having tough times with all the little ones so one of my nana's sisters offered to take my mom for awhile to help out. My mom was very young as she didn’t remember it at all. Her aunts husband really didn’t want children around but he grew to love my mom and when it came time to give her back they refused. Made my grandparents feel so bad that they allowed her to stay with them. My mom was raised as an only child and she thought her brothers and sisters were her cousins. She used to tell me how whenever they would go there, she was glad to leave because they were so noisy.

When my mom was about 17 her aunt passed away and my mom just happened to look in a box that she had been forbidden to go near and found the papers about her adoption. She was dismayed to find out that her cousins were her brothers and sisters. Her uncle decided she should go back with her family then.

Mom used to tell me how hard she found it. Everyone was so rowdy and she was used to everything nice and quiet and in its place. She had a very hard time dealing with the move but she did become close to her sisters.

I honestly believe my mom was like a snob at that time and she believed it too. I went to visit my nana when I was young and she took me into her room and showed me a bottle of perfume. She told me that it had been my moms. I guess my mom wore that perfume when she would come to visit and my nana took it so she could have something that was her child's. She missed my mom terribly. The sad thing is, they did what they thought was right but they lost something as my mom was never very close to them. My nana wouldn’t give me the bottle of perfume as she held it so dear.  I told my mom about it many years later and she was so surprised and she cried as if she had known, it might have made a difference as she told me, she felt like a stranger in that house. It wasn’t her home.

 My mom at some point was training to be a nurse but I don’t know what happened, I think the war. She ended up working in a factory making things for the war. At the time she had a boyfriend and they were engaged. He ended up getting TB and was placed in a sanatorium. My mom would visit him every day and eventually he died from his disease. He was in his early 20’s and my mom was devastated to lose him.  

At work there was this guy that was always asking her out but he came from a rowdy family too. My mom worked with his sisters and found them to be loud and unruly as she told me. When mom lost her boyfriend she finally gave in and went out with this guy (my dad). Shortly after they were going out my dad was informed he would be sent overseas and he asked my mom to marry him. She told me that she never really wanted too but she knew he loved her and she didn’t know if he would come back home. So they got married a week before he left. She was left living with his family while he was gone. I guess in that week I was conceived and when I was born it was just mom and me. I was the first thing she ever had that was truly hers and we were so close. I don’t know if that is why I bonded so tight to my mom but I sure did. She was everything to me.

When my dad come home from overseas, I guess he was so excited to be seeing me finally. At the time he arrived I wasn’t used to many men around as this was at the end of the war and I turned from him when he tried to pick me up. In later years my dad told me how bad he felt as I was only a child but we never were close after that. It changed him and he become quite hard. I could never get close my dad until a few years before he passed away when we got it all out. My mom was glad that we had as she always felt she had caused the rift between my dad and I. It didn’t help that I looked like her too. I was constant reminder to my dad.  

My mom and dad went on to have 6 children altogether but mom and I had something special between us. It is sad, as my sister never got that with her, as my mom was gone when my sister was very young.

One of my moms sisters was very close to her and they spent a lot of time together, she also had 6 kids, this was my Aunt Edie. I loved her dearly, where my mom was special, she was number two.

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