40 Years of Motherhood

Last week my dad would have been 74 years old. That is simply unfathomable to me to even consider him an older man because he died when he was 46 years old. But that isn't the saddest part of this post.

I was talking to my aunt, my dad's sister, who happens to share the same birthday as my dad. We were talking about a distant relative that just had a baby - and her eldest daughter was 15. Yikes! Talk about starting over! She then went on to say that my grandmother - her mother, had eight children - and 20 years and 17 days separated the oldest (my uncle) to the youngest - my dad. That's almost 40 years of raising kids!

Why is this so sad? I never knew my grandmother. My dad never knew his mother. She died when he was 7 years old. She didn't live long enough to received the pure gift of being a mother for 40 years. I feel sad for everyone involved. My uncle, the first born - the child that new her the longest. I feel sad for the children in between - 3 aunts and 3 uncles. Their mother may not have been around for graduations, weddings, births of grandchildren. I feel especially sad for my dad who only had his mother for 7 short years.

While I was growing up, we had a picture of my dad standing in front of an old style car. He's wearing jeans that are cuffed, a puffy style coat and some kind of silly hat. He has a slight grin on his face and is staring at the camera. The back of the photo reads he is 7 years old. I always knew that the picture was taken the day his mother died. Even as a little girl I thought that was weird - why would anyone think to take a picture that day? One day I asked my dad why they took his picture. He explained that he was sent outside and someone thought a great way to occupy his time would be to take his picture. 40 years later I think that is an incredibly sensitive way to handle the situation - someone certainly was caring for him and trying to keep him occupied. But, he didn't remember who took the picture. I have it in my living room now. I don't have many pictures of my dad as a child - I would imagine it is because his mother died so young, his father was a farmer, and his siblings were so much older than he.

As few pictures I have of my dad as a child - I have only two of my grandmother. One is her wedding picture. It was probably taken around 1915 or so. She is wearing a high collared lacy dress and her hair is pulled up. We share the same widow's peak - which is precisely why I always have bangs. For years this is the only picture I ever saw of her. A couple of years ago a distant cousin sent me some pictures of her family during the 20's, 30's and 40's. My own daughter was probably 7 or 8 at the time and she was looking at them before I had the chance to examine them closely. She held one picture up of a of a man and a woman holding a baby and a couple of kids standing in a field. She asked why I was dressed in old time clothes and who was the baby? My heart skipped a beat. It certainly did look like me in a 1930's frock. Eerily so. It was my grandmother. And she was holding my father.