StoryWorth Mother’s Day Stories: “Big Mama”
In honor of Mother’s Day, we’ve received so many terrific stories from our StoryWorth community members: each one is unique, but all were written with love. Through your stories, you introduced us to some very creative, brave, loving women — let’s hear it for the moms!
Without further ado, we present one of our favorite stories, by J.T. Hill.
“Big Mama was an awesome woman.” These words were said by my brother’s wife at Mom’s graveside service. And she was right. Big Mama, as her grandkids called her, was awesome.
When I was four years old my Dad was transferred to Alaska, still a territory back then (1951), and the Air Force considered it overseas and no place for the servicemen to take their families. Mother had to have been heartbroken: there she was with two little girls and a third baby ready to be born in August, and Daddy had to leave at the end of June. This meant Mother had to go to her mother’s, a little town in Arkansas where Mother had grown up.
We rented a little house not far from my grandmother’s, a town with a population of 997 people. Everything was “not far” from everything else. My grandmother wanted us to stay with her at her house, but Mother was an independent woman, a rare thing in the early fifties (well, almost non-existent, truthfully), and wouldn’t agree to that.
We settled into the little house, ready to live there until Daddy was to come back home in two years. Mother had my baby brother and we brought him home to my grandmother’s house for a couple of weeks, then went back to the little rental house we called home. Now we were three children: I was not yet five, my sister was two and a half, and my brother was a newborn. Mother handled it all.
I was lying down beside her one afternoon, supposed to be napping, when I noticed a tear leaking from her eye. I asked her what was wrong, and she said, “Oh, nothing, I’m fine.” Then she got up and made dinner.
I didn’t think she was “fine,” but I didn’t know how to find out what was wrong. And if I’d asked, she would have fluffed me off — these were not things to tell a child. I am sure that her heart was broken by the circumstances, for how could it not be? She worshipped the ground my Daddy walked on and he thought she was the greatest woman he’d ever known.
Months later my Daddy wrote to Mother that the Air Force rules had changed and now he could have us with him. He could not come get us, so he thought she might stay in Arkansas. HA! He was so wrong. She packed us up, loaded the car, closed up the house in record time. She was a whirlwind! Then she took off driving us to Seattle from Arkansas. There was not one second of hesitation on her part.
It was winter at this time, February (1952). I was five and a half, Cindy had just turned three, and Buzz was 5 months old. We got to the Rockies and ran into snow. There were no interstates then, just two lane highways full of snow and ice, hairpin curves, and steep drop-offs down the sides of the mountains. They were so dangerous. Then there were sheep and goats, and herds of them traveled the highway too. They were not afraid of cars and Mother might have hit one if she hadn’t had her wits about her. But we were safe.
Now imagine you are driving a car full of cranky children who are tired, hungry, bored, and whining, baby crying, and you are not thirty years old yet. You are driving on a lonely highway in a strange place, sheep and goats everywhere, ice on the roads, and no husband to help you. I would have been a basket case.
Not my mother. She was energized, with not one bit of fear — I don’t think she was scared of the Devil himself, (however, he should have been a little wary of her)! She was formidable. Strong and determined with a backbone of tempered steel.
We just kept moving on. She bought food at little grocery stores and gas stations along the way and fixed us sandwiches and drinks for meals. We would stop by the side of the road and she’d lay out an old quilt on the ground, gather us all together and feed us, then load us all up again and off we’d go.
We spent the nights in little roadside cabins. There were no restaurants at those and nice clean motel chains were non-existent back then. She would buy breakfast items at a little store or gas station and feed us before we left the cabin in the morning, cooking a little if there was a kitchenette.
Mother did this every day for two weeks until we finally got to Seattle, where we boarded a ship to go to Anchorage. This wasn’t a modern cruise ship, and certainly no Carnival Cruise Lines or Royal Caribbean, no White Star Line. My mom would read stories from little books she had brought for us (The Owl and the Pussycat was one). There was no entertainment on board, no movies, no shows, and no help for her.
Every meal time she dressed us all in heavy coats and clothes, bundled my brother up, held onto him and both my sister and me and made her way across the frozen deck that was bare to the elements, struggling to make the trek from our cabin to the dining room for meals. It was an adventure just getting there and back! The bitter winds blowing icy snow kept whipping at gale force strength, trying desperately to send us all overboard, and yet Mother tramped on like a soldier.
She was on a mission, and that mission was to get to my Daddy with all of us intact. She never backed off, she never gave up, and you best not get between her and her goal.
Finally the ship pulled into the harbor and we landed in Anchorage. I looked at the people on the dock desperately trying to see Daddy, but couldn’t make him out. The crowd was too big and too far away for me to tell which face was his. When we finally got to him, Mother was happier than I’d seen her since he had left. Now that we were with him, she allowed herself to relax.
I don’t know why she didn’t collapse into a little puddle of exhaustion, but she didn’t. She was determined to keep a good face on it all, never complaining about the hardships or the worry or the fear she must have felt. She’d had a job to do and she never shirked a job.
I have painted her as a woman tough as nails, and she was, but she loved her husband and her children above all else. She was very outgoing, extremely funny, made us laugh a lot, made us feel loved every minute of the day.
When we were sick the first thing she did was bathe us and change the sheets on our beds. “You’ll feel better with clean sheets.” She would strip the bed, put the extra set of clean folded sheets from the closet on the bed immediately, and put us in it. She had no dryer, but she washed and hung the sheets out to dry, watching over us closely to make sure we were getting better, and then she would fix us whatever our favorite food was to entice us to eat enough to get well.
Birthdays and holidays were extra special because she wanted them to be. She was an only child and treasured holidays and special days with us, and made over us greatly. Birthdays meant a cake (whatever flavor was each child’s favorite), which she baked and decorated for us, a supper of our favorite foods, and presents, always presents. We weren’t rich by any stretch of the imagination, but she made us clothes and managed to get toys and things she thought we’d like, and of course we did. They were always wrapped in gift paper with bows, and a card, and we loved opening them. She had as much fun at these little birthday parties as we did.
And Christmas? She went all out for that. She would sew for months, shop for toys, wrap everything in pretty paper with ribbons, bows, and gift tags. She’d bake and fix food for an army for weeks ahead of time, and when Christmas finally came she was right in the middle of it. Santa came to see me until I was in the eighth grade! That was because she wanted it that way. She loved every minute of it.
She would have given her life for any one of us, and though she never said that, we always knew it by the way she treated us.
So yes, my sister-in-law was right, my Mother was an awesome woman, and a great example of strength and determination for me all my life. A light went out in this world when she died in 2004, and I miss her every day.
- J.T. Hill
