The Amazing Woman Who Built Me

The Amazing Woman Who Built Me

Shirley Layne DeMumbrum

I wish I could have known my mother as a young girl. I’m pretty sure we would have been friends. She was the middle child, sandwiched in between two brothers. Her father was a farmer and her mother was a homemaker and caregiver for her mother-in-law. They didn’t have indoor plumbing but they did have a two seater outhouse (I’ve never figured out why you would want one with two seats) and their heat came from a fireplace and a wood stove. They raised huge gardens and canned vegetables, raised and killed their own chickens and hogs, and milked their own cows.

This is one of my favorite pictures of her. Her brothers and some of their friends and neighbors are the other bike riders, but she was (at least in this photo) the leader of the pack. Even though I don’t know a lot about her childhood, I know she fell out of a tree when she was about 12 and broke her arm. I know that one of her chores was milking the cows and I remember her saying that sometimes she didn’t finish until after dark and she was afraid on the walk back to the house, but she had to walk slow so that she wouldn’t spill any of the milk out of her bucket.

For Christmas they might get some oranges, nuts and a few peppermint candies but that was all. I don’t think she knew how poor she was until she got older. Most of her friends and relatives lived similar farm lives and hard work and poverty was common place.

She had a horse named Traveler that she loved and she would it to visit her friend Judy, who also had a horse. The two of them roamed around the wooded, hilly countryside together on horse back and became very good friends.

That’s about all I know about her childhood.

Her Teenage Years

I picture mom in her younger years as sort of a tom-boy with a mischievous sense of adventure. What amazes me is that I never ever saw that side of her as an adult. I never saw her climb a tree, ride a horse or a bike. It’s like that side of her evaporated the moment she got married.

When she was 16 she married my dad and by the time she graduated high school, I was on the way. My brother arrived 3 years later and my earliest memories of our home life weren’t very happy ones.

After I was grown and had some perspective I could understand how hard those years must have been for her. She was a very young bride with two children and a husband who was never home, except to eat and change clothes. He worked all the time and didn’t understand her loneliness. They fought….a lot about a lot of different things.

Because I was young I didn’t understand adult problems and the fighting terrified me. I thought they were either going to kill each other or get a divorce. They didn’t, but mom was unhappy and it had a lasting and profound effect on me. I suppose my dad was unhappy too but I didn’t see him very much and so I had no way of knowing.

Back to College

When my brother and I were both old enough to be in grade school, mom went back to college. She and her friend Anita took classes together and drove back and forth to Western Kentucky University. They both got degrees in Elementary Education and both taught at the same grade school my brother and I had attended as children.

Some of her happiest times were spent with Anita or talking to her on the phone. I can remember lying in bed and hearing my mother’s laughter drift down the hallway. It was a sound I didn’t hear very often.

Mom loved teaching, children and reading so when she became a 6th grade reading teacher she had finally found something that had been missing in her life, a career she loved.

Mom Becomes a Grandmother

Bill and I married in 1980 and in the fall of 1981 our first child was born, our son Robert Nicholas. I have never seen a woman as crazy about a baby as my mother was about Nick. She adored everything about being a grandmother and was just as thrilled the second and third time we made her a grandmother.  Her grandchildren loved her dearly and she spoiled them as much as she could.

All the things she never had as a child (toys, clothes, whatever) she lavished first on my brother and I, and then on her grandchildren. She loved giving gifts and Christmas and birthdays were always huge family affairs.

And Then She Got Cancer

At the age of 50 she was diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer and within a year she was gone. That was 1990 and her grandchildren were 8, 5 and 3 years old. Nick remembers more than the others. Our daughter who was 5 when she died has tiny flashes of memories and Justin, who was 3 has no memories of her at all.

Her death was the hardest, most difficult, most painful event of my life. If it hadn’t been for my faith, my husband and children, my brother and sister-in-law Kelly, and my friends, I don’t know what I would have done. The first year without her was excruciating and every year after just a little less so.

During her last year she and Dad mended their fences and were at peace with one another. They loved each other and when they said “for better or worse” they meant it. They may not have always agreed on things but watching them say goodbye to each other reminded me that in the end love is all that really matters.

Goodbyes hurt the worst when you have to say them to the people you love the most. 

I may not have known my mother as a child or a teenager but by the time she got sick she was more than my mother, she was my best friend. I wanted her opinion on everything and we talked on the phone several times a day. We lived close together and never went more than a few days without seeing each other. She loved my kids the way my husband and I did and wanted to know every cute thing they said. She was the first visitor at the hospital when our babies were born and when they were sick she wanted to help care for them.

The doctor who told her she had cancer had been treating her for depression (which she did have) and he had her on some sort of supplement to help her lose weight. By the time it became obvious that something was physically wrong and they did tests it was metastatic colon cancer. I remember sitting in her hospital room listening to him ramble on about how he decided to become a doctor and wanting to wring his neck. Instead of trying to comfort her or offer a treatment plan he was telling us his life story. He finally shut up and left the room and I followed him down the hall. I had to know how much longer I would have her in my life and so I asked him how much time. He said he didn’t know for sure but maybe one year. That was the one thing about her health he got right. She died the next July but not before she took us and her grandchildren to Disney World.

She might have been in terrible pain and weak as a kitten but she still found the strength to climb through the Swiss Family Robinson’s Tree House and to be bounced around in the little boats from the It’s a Small World Ride. After we got home it was about one month until she died. I was in the room with her, my dad, my brother and his wife when she died.

Even as I right this all the anguish, sorrow and sadness washes back over me like a swollen river that just won’t stay in it’s banks.

In the 28 years since my mother’s death there have been so many things I have wanted to show and tell her. She missed meeting my brother’s 3 boys and our twins. She missed watching all her grandchild grow up and graduate from high school and college and get married. I hate it that my children and nephews never had the chance to know her. She would have loved them all so much.

If I had to describe her to them I would use words like determination, passion, commitment, loyalty and faith. Beneath her picture in her high school annual each senior was to share a quote. Her’s was, “Always be a live wire and you’ll never be stepped on.”

I always thought that quote suited her life well.

I know I’m not alone in mourning my mother on Mother’s Day. There are thousands, probably millions of us around the world who have said goodbye to our mothers. I don’t know if those folks have a gray cloud hanging over their heads on Mother’s Day like I do. We are all different and some people handle the death of a loved one much better than I do.

In one way I wish I didn’t have to experience this pain and heartache so strongly on a day when I should be celebrating the fact that I am a mother, but like a friend of mine is fond of saying. It is, what it is.

I think about her every day but the day I mourn her most has always been and will always be Mother’s Day.

There’s a country song by Miranda Lambert that I love called The House that Built Me.

One of the verses says,

“I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing.
Out here it’s like I’m someone else,
I thought that maybe I could find myself.
If I could walk around I swear I’ll leave.
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that, built me.”

When Momma died something inside me broke. I wouldn’t call it a broken heart because I still had my dad, my brother and sister-in-law, my children and friends. Maybe instead of breaking my heart just cracked. Either way, broken or cracked, it was a hurt so painful that no cast or bandage could ever mend it.

I know some people may find me strange and think that by now it shouldn’t bother me so much. That I shouldn’t have to place flowers on her grave and sit for hours talking to her and remembering. I can’t help it if they don’t understand. It’s like Miranda’s song says, I keep thinking maybe I can find myself there and that the brokenness might start healing. I look forward to when we meet again inside the gates of Heaven because that’s when I’ll really be healed, when I’m home at last and back in the arms of the amazing woman who built me.

To read a poem I wrote about the loss of my mother you can click here.