Guest column: Memories of Mother

“I will never see you married,” my mother said that day we walked in the cemetery.

There was sadness in her voice.

We both knew about the cancer and the last diagnosis. I don’t remember how I replied.

I was 15 years old and a sophomore in high school. The cemetery, just across the street from our home, was our favorite walking place. It contained the graves of her parents, three sisters and a brother who had been killed in Korea.

Life without Mother was never easy, and I missed her my whole life.

But she had prepared me well. She taught me to go places alone and gave me responsibility at a young age. I helped her care for my younger brother. I walked up the south side hill to first grade at Shabbona School. In third grade, she sent me to downtown Ottawa across the old Hilliard Bridge to pay the light bill at the office on the corner of Main and La Salle streets.

My mother worked downtown in the Central Life Building as a stenographer for a local attorney. She met the wives of many lawyers and doctors whose offices were in that building. She learned where they sent their children for “lessons”– all kinds of “lessons,” including dancing lessons from Rosaline Hupp, whose studio was in the basement of the building; “elocution” lessons; and art lessons from the nuns at the high school.

She was very particular about how I looked. She believed that all little girls should have curls, so I had a “perm” as soon as it was possible for me to go to a beauty shop. Later, I had lots of “Toni’s.”

Mother also wanted me to be “a lady” – by her definition, ladies did not shout or raise their voices. Of course, they did not swear or even use slang.

Of course, she expected me to do well in school. I learned to write in the Palmer Method from a teacher named Miss Helen Hodkinson. She was blonde and cute and came once a week to our classroom to teach handwriting and also art – how to draw with “perspective” (like the picture on the south side of the Central Life Building today). When I sign in at the YMCA now and I’m asked print my name to sign in, I think of Miss Hodkinson and how disappointed she would be.

There are lots of other memories, such as when she became a “practical nurse” and later opened a “nursing home” in our home on Ottawa Avenue. I also helped with the older people and learned to love them. I remember Mother saying, “Carole, go and walk with Bertha.” I walked beside Bertha and reminded her she wasn’t in Oglesby and brought her to sit on the bench in our yard.

I still miss Mother – especially on Mother’s Day – when we go to the graves to place flowers on all the family plots. I wish she could have met my husband and our sons, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

My mother was a believer in Jesus, and I know I will see her someday.

I will have so much to tell her!

Carole Ledbetter is a former longtime Write Team member who resides in Ottawa.