She was beautiful, she was complicated, she was strong willed, she wore a veil of many layers, she was my mother, my Mama.
A few days ago marked the 20th anniversary of my mother’s death. She lived almost a year after her 1993 diagnosis of lung cancer. In that short year is the most vulnerable I had ever seen my mom. I witnessed her fears, her illness, her helplessness. This was not the mother that I had known for 36 years.
Helen Ruth Jett was born on January 6, 1930. By the time she was 22, she was divorced with two young sons, Michael and Rocky. I don’t know the details of her first marriage, other than the fact that her husband lacked maturity, and well, sort of liked the bottle. After her marriage failed, my mother moved back in with my grandparents. I feel sure that she didn’t have an easy time being a single mother of two. She didn’t really talk about it while I was growing up, but I did hear few stories of her life as a 1950’s divorce’.
Like the night her date walked her to the door after an evening together. They were standing under the front porch light (that my grandmother had strategically left on), he pulls her close (a little too close for her comfort), and says, “Don’t fight it baby, it’s bigger than the both of us”! My mother couldn’t help but laugh him off, go in the house and give up on dating forever. But, somehow, through the hand of God (I’m convinced), my parents met through mutual friends, dated for six months, and ultimately, got married on June 6, 1953.
Ray Howard & Helen Ruth-Wedding Day
I can’t be sure what my parent’s expectations were when they married, except that the two of them, along with my brothers, would move in together and live happily ever after. That didn’t happen. My brothers, at that point, had lived most of their young lives at my grandparent’s house (particularly, under my grandmother’s influence). Trusting solely on what I believe as a person, most everyone on earth has at least a few redeeming qualities as human beings. That belief gets me through some days, and helps me tolerate the world in general. However, to hear my mother speak, my grandmother possessed very few of these qualities. In those years that my mother had to rely on the goodwill of her parents, my grandmother gladly stepped out of the role of grandparent to Michael and Rocky, and gradually became “Mama” to them. They actually called my mother, well, “Mother”. So, even with all the efforts of my parents, my brothers decided they were most happy and most at home to continue to live with “Mama” and “Daddy Bill” (my grandfather).
Surely, my mom was heartbroken about it, but by the time I came along in 1956, it was just a matter of fact. My mother never spoke to me about her feelings of this, even as I matured into an adult myself. Maybe it was because I never asked her. Maybe it was just life as we knew it and we just kept on living it.
Those was the early years of Helen Ruth. I will continue writing about her another time. My wish is that I had known her more as a person, and less as a mother. I never really understood her. She was not openly affectionate, I can only recall one time that she told me that she loved me. She could be distant, and on more than one occasion I felt like she wished that she was somewhere else.
Just last night, I was talking to my sister Terri (you will hear that name quite frequently in my future writings). I was sharing with her about wanting to write about our mother. I told her about Friday night and how after 2 hours at my Mac, I had managed to write only 14 words. I was stuck. Terri then shared with me a book that she had bought for Mama for Mother’s Day 1992. It was a fill-in-the blank “Grandmother Remembers” memoir. The idea was to learn more about our mother by her filling out questions about her childhood, parents, marriage, children…etc. Our mother was reluctant, but at the urging and insistence of my sister, she filled in just some of the questions. To be precise, our mother dictated while Terri hand wrote the answers. Most of it was pretty straight forward, names, dates of birth, marriages. But under the heading,”As a young girl“, my mother answered the question, “At home I was expected to“, and she answered, “Stay out of Mama’s way. We had to stay outside while she took a nap”.
I was humbled, I was saddened by those words, and yet, it brought a clearer understanding of why she was the way she was. “Stay out of Mama’s way”. I think that was the nature of her growing up years. And sadly, my mother duplicated many of the same maternal traits as her own mother.
Please don’t misunderstand. I value my mother, she was a good woman, she took care of her family, in her own way she loved us beyond measure. I will always love her, forever miss her, and hold dear that she was, after all, my giver of life.
Helen Ruth Jett Turner. 1930 – 1994.
Helen Ruth