My Ever-Changing Mom
My mom was a kind and loving woman who passed away in 2009, a few days before Christmas. I came along when she was 22, eleven months after my parents married. It was the 1950s. She followed my dad to Germany, where he was an officer in the US Army. When I look at the old black & white photos, I’m struck by how young my parents were. Mom kept reinventing herself. During the 1960s she was a mother to 4 kids and was a homemaker. We could count on clean
clothes, home-cooked meals, and someone to protect us from our dad if we forgot to do our chores.
Mom changed again in the 1970s. After my baby brother started kindergarten, mom returned to UT and got her teaching degree. We still got good meals and
love, but it was on her schedule.
She then embarked on a 29-year career as a kindergarten teacher in Sylvania. As if 4 kids weren’t enough, she had to fend off and educate one group in the morning and an entirely different group of 5-year-olds in the afternoon.
In 1999 my mom retired from the school system. Was she inclined to kick back and relax? No, she decided to write children’s books.
Talk about a tough task. She started to write at age 64 and persevered numerous rejections before publishing “Punctuation Celebration”. She was working on a second book when she lost her battle with cancer
