How I envied Tanya whose mother was always home after school.

A Gesture of Love
by Myrna Beth Lambert

My mother, a single mom, was a career woman. She was Chief Executive Officer for a well-known cereal company and she never had time for her only child. I was raised by housekeepers and Nannies.

We lived in a trendy neighbourhood in downtown Chicago where I attended a private school. After school I usually went home with my best friend Tanya.

How I envied Tanya whose mother was always home after school passing out chocolate chip cookies as she listened to us recap the day’s events.

Mama and I usually spent Saturdays together. Her idea of mother and daughter bonding was having a cup of coffee and a large croissant at the corner bakery café near our apartment building. Our discussions usually centered on her latest project.

One Saturday afternoon at the café while Mama slowly sipped her coffee and expounded her newest campaign I interrupted and nervously stammered, “I have something to ask you. The freshman class is having an assembly next Friday to introduce our unit on Marketing and Advertising and we have to dress as a figure from an advertising commercial. I will need a costume and we have permission to ask a parent for help.”

“Well that s great,” chuckled Mama.

“We’ll buy you an appropriate outfit. There’s a darling shop nearby.”

“Wait a second, you don’t understand. The costume has to be homemade.”

“Oh how provincial,” she exclaimed.

I could feel my face turn bright red as anger built up inside of me.

“Just forget it,” I said as I picked up my jean jacket and fled the café.

Nothing more was said about the costume and the week passed swiftly. During school I listened with envy as the girls in class discussed their mothers’ creative inspirations. I had a few ideas as to the theme of my costume but I didn’t know how to begin. Mama was away on a business trip most of the week and Tanya was ill. I came home from school each day and went directly to my room to brood over my dilemma and lack of motherly love.

“When I’m a mother I will be home for dinners and help my children with their homework. I will listen to their problems and be there for them,” I muttered to myself.

The night before the assembly I decided I would skip school the following day. I just couldn’t appear without a costume.

Mama arrived home that night at 9:30, dropped her briefcase on the marble tiles and sighed.

“I m drained, what a week. Lets have a snack and you can tell me all about school.”

“Why?” I questioned. “You don’t care anyway. You re not much of a mother and I hate you!” I yelled.

Mama s face blanched. “That s a terrible thing for a 14 year old to say to her mother. I work hard to give you everything I can and this is how you show your appreciation?”

“Mama you work hard to give me everything you think I want, but you never give me the things I need, such as your time, your affection and your interest in my life.” I couldn’t believe these words were coming from my mouth. “Tomorrow is an important day for me and I don t even have a costume. Every mother I know has been helping her daughter to create something special, except you.”

Teary-eyed Mama asked, “What were you planning to be?”

“The girl on our salt carton. I thought this might be an easy costume to make but I don t even know where to begin.”

Mama studied the girl on the salt box and said, “I’ll be back in half an hour.” She returned with rolls of yellow crepe paper, scotch tape and a freshly brewed cup of coffee.

“Quickly find your old pink dress with the empire waist,” she instructed.

I ran to the closet and dragged out this old dress that was two sizes small for me. Mama began opening the seams.

“Now get my lavender umbrella from the umbrella stand,” she ordered.

I was stupefied. Mama was going to scotch tape a costume for me. After causing such a ruckus I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I didn’t think this would work.

As Mama slowly drank the hot brew from her Styrofoam cup she took measurements of my arms and waist and then ordered me to bed. She gave me an affectionate hug and said, “I promise you will have a costume by morning.”

The following morning I hurriedly dressed, wondering anxiously if my mother had fulfilled her promise.

There sat Mama in the same place I had left her the preceding night, head resting on her desk surrounded by her empty coffee cup and scraps of yellow crepe paper.

Lying on the sofa was my costume; a yellow dress of crepe paper and a lavender umbrella with a sign attached that read, “When it rains, it pours.”* This costume was the most beautiful, yet ugliest costume I had ever seen. I loved every yellow piece of it and wore it to the school assembly with pride, crinkling as I walked.

To me this costume was the world, for it represented my mother’s love. The thought of her staying up all night drowning in her coffee to finish this costume epitomized all I thought a mother should be.

I never again questioned my mother’s love and I believe our relationship strengthened because of her magnanimous effort to help. We both learned something from that episode.

Now, whenever I visit the corner bakery café I order a large cup of coffee and let the aroma of the brew stir up those warm memories of my unconventional mother and her noble effort to prove her love.

* Quote on the Morton Salt Box

Award-winning author, Myrna Beth (Micki) Lambert, is the mother of three grown daughters and nine grandchildren. She had been married to her husband, Stan, for 48 years. Micki writes poetry and short stories and has had several poems and stories published. Her writing has received many awards including the Tom Howard Short Story Contest and Voice Net Poetry Contest. She has had several Christmas stories published in Bread ‘n Molasses. Myrna divides her time between homes in Chicago and Florida.

Mommy Susie

Mommy Susie
by Debby Frost

We called our grandmother Mommy Susie. We called my grandfather Daddy Bill. Dad was Daddy Jack and Mom was Mommy Renie. She was born Susan Margaret Ross in 1901 at Oak Point and married Bill Bowie. A formidable woman, she was married at 18 to a man who was 14 years older. She had one son, my father, when she was 20. She loved music and loved to dance. My grandfather played the fiddle and she would accompany him on the piano.

Mommy Susie always worked and was always busy at a time when not many women went to work. She was a midwife and delivered a lot of babies in Oak Point. She drove ambulance in the First World War. My grandfather used to work at the base and she worked right along with him. She cooked for several restaurants in town and always said the best tomato sandwich was made by someone else because it was a pleasure to sit down and have someone else make her meal.

My grandmother helped raise us seven kids as she got older because she lived with us and Mom worked. I remember when I was small, travelling around to the neighbours with her when we went to visit before we lived there. We would go to Donald and Virginia Ross’s or Tick and Meely’s and have a meal. Donald made really great homemade bread. Sometimes we’d go to a house party and they were great, lots of fiddling, guitars and stepdancing.

Mommy Susie (far left)

Mommy Susie was such a good cook. Molasses cookies always abounded in the buffet. There was usually sugar cookies too and cake. She cooked up a storm at Christmas time with gumdrop cake and fruitcakes. She used to make wedding cakes for people too. My father was a good cook too. He must have gotten it from her.

My grandparents were one of the few in the old days who had a car so if anybody wanted to go somewhere it was her they called.

In 1959, she was with my grandfather and some nieces on their way home from town and there was a bad accident. They hit the side of the Bartibog Bridge and went through it into the river. Everyone had minor injuries but Mommy Susie had a compound fracture of her leg. Daddy Bill splinted it until she got to the hospital but the bone had pushed through the front of her leg. She had multiple surgeries on it and at one point they wanted to amputate but she wouldn’t let them. After a year or so of casts etc. they fashioned a brace that went from her toes to her knee. She wore this and used a walker for the rest of her life. She learned to walk again with the walker and never let it keep her back. She had a stroke in 1960 and even though she lost the use of one side, she came back and made the most of the movement she did have. She learned to walk again, this time with the added burden of having a hand that wasn’t doing too good hold her up on the walker.

She lived with us at the base after she came home from the hospital. I remember I was scared of her cast (I was only 5) and so before I went into the room, we had a little game. I’d knock on the door and she would call out, “Who’s there?” I would say, “It’s the happy gang!” (From the TV show) and she would say, “Come on in.” While this was going on, she would hide her cast with a towel or blanket. We would then proceed to play cards. She taught me to play rummy. We played a lot of games of cards during that year.

My dad was in the Air Force and when we moved back from Bagotville, Quebec in 1967, we moved in with my grandmother. My grandfather had died when we were in Bagotville in 1965.

Every night she would climb on her hands dragging the bad leg up the stairs. One of us kids would take the walker up. She would unlace the brace and take it off to go to bed and put it on in the morning and make her way downstairs the same way she went up–pulling with her hands and body. Perseverance personified. She would not give in and sleep downstairs.

She never complained but she did get short tempered sometimes. I remember her being upset one time and she took off down the driveway and back the road. The road was muddy and her shoe stuck and came off the bad leg. She waited for someone to come and get her out and by then the temper was gone. Sometimes she would just go out to the garage and sit on a chair. Stubborn was a good way to describe her and that’s what got her through life.

She did for everybody. From the days when she delivered babies or when she drove the ambulance, to the days she cooked in the restaurant or when she drove people to town for their groceries. She was a member of the St. Anne’s Altar Society church group in Bartibog.

When we lived with her, she was crippled but still wouldn’t let it get her down. It was a familiar sight to see her sitting at the end of the table with a board wrapped in cloth, ironing. She still cooked some and loved us kids. She would do anything for us that was in her power. We were the usual children, good and bad by times. Trying her patience was one of our pastimes.

Mommy Susie and baby Dale

In later years she had another stroke and couldn’t stay on her own so she went to Mount Saint Joseph nursing home. By then she was in a wheelchair and was quick to say a word or two to anybody she knew, and she knew a lot of people. My son was a baby and my mom and I would take him to see her every Saturday and she would put him on her lap with pride and show him off to the other residents as she wheeled him to the fridge to pick up a dish of ice cream.

She was a kind brusque old woman, who grew from a kind hardworking young woman with many trials and tribulations along the way. Many people came through her life and nobody forgets her. We named our youngest after her in the hopes that she will have the strength that Mommy Susie had.

Born in Chatham, NB, Debby Frost has also lived in Oak Point and for the past 35 years or so in Barryville. She is a Provincial Registry Coordinator for Service New Brunswick and has worked in the Land Registry for 32 years.