Our Matriarch is Gone and Mother's Day Won't Be the Same

Things, Life, Whatnot: Volume 1, issue 2: Fierce Love and Fierce Independence

Normally this would be where I share all the random things related to real food and cooking - food stories, travel, tips, my favorite cooking and food finds - basically anything that doesn’t go along with my exclusive recipe for the week. In honor of Mother’s Day, we’re instead talking about the recent loss of and the legacy of the Matriarch of our family.

Mother’s Day has a special meaning this year. The matriarch of our family, my Gran, passed away at 102 in February. Is matriarch too dramatic, too strong, maybe a misnomer? I mean, she wasn’t the powerhouse of a wealthy, well-known family, but she truly left her mark on my mom, my sister and me, so I think it’s completely apropos.

We learned strength from her. Though she was raised on a farm and became a farmer’s wife, after my Papa Jim died when she was only 52, she left the farm to find a job in town to support herself; working full-time, taking care of everyone around her (she outlived her entire family) and even mowing her own lawn until she was 90.

She taught us how to love and laugh. Though she was fiercely independent having lived on her own for 50 years she was also fiercely loving and loved nothing more than sitting around the table laughing for hours with her family.

Loving and laughing…even in her last two years, these traits were intact. Our evenings at the dinner table were more recently replaced with a small conference room table at her assisted living center.

The staff told stories of how she would stand at her door and tell the other residents they were loved or ask “How you doing, Baby?” On her 102nd birthday in January, my mom said she was so overwhelmed with the party they threw and was more concerned that the other people with birthdays weren’t being celebrated.

She had a quick wit about her even as recently as the last time we saw her two days before Christmas. To keep the conversation rolling and change the topic up a bit from her asking the same three questions over and over, we would ask her questions. My husband’s question “what do you do in your spare time? Read books or just sit and think?” was met with “Well Kyle, I don’t read anymore and I certainly don’t think!” and then she just busted out laughing as did we! Her laugh was contagious for sure because once she started it was unstoppable.

Though her mind prevented her from remember the question she asked just one minute ago, she remembered and told stories from childhood in detail. In our visits over the year, we grew to love these stories the most and began to record our visits with her.

She would describe the pot of beans on the stove and cornbread every night because that’s what Papa (her dad) loved. How her Mama would sing all the time. And what could have been part of a 1930s era movie screenplay, her family playing instruments on the front porch, dancing and the neighbors coming down to join them.

The phrase “we didn’t have much but we sure loved each other” was repeated often in these story times and spoke volumes of the legacy she left on our family.

To be completely honest, it described my immediate family, too.

My parents were artists at heart and had grown up in farming families with no money for college. As a result, they scraped money together for my dad’s graphic arts degree. For my entire childhood they did what they could do to make ends meet, but loved being with their family more than chasing thriving careers. There were many things I missed out on during high school because we didn’t have the money which, then, I thought was unfair. Of course, I grew up and quickly realized having two parents who were still very much in love and who have loved me intensely was so much more valuable than having a trust fund or no college debt.

My mom, like her mom, has always been a hard worker and at the age of 77 is still running her own business designing playgrounds. She uses the term “hoe to the end of the row” when she’s trying to get things done and we can’t tear her away from it. It comes from when she was a little girl on the farm and picked cotton and had to wait til the end of the row to drink water. She doesn’t remember this as torture as so many kids would these days, she remembers the times in the field very fondly. I believe this along with her mom’s loving example caused her to also be fiercely independent and fiercely loving.

Then there is me and my sister, the last of the females of this beautiful family. We both had boys and never saw it coming. After the initial shock, we have fiercely loved every minute of raising them and now each have two young men going out in the world on their own. We’ve learned so much and have so much to lean on when our sons have families of their own.

We both for sure are fiercely independent and have been entrepreneurs for 25+ years each. We both love to laugh and when we finally do get to all be together (she’s in Colorado and I’m in Texas), we sit around the table eating, telling stories and laughing just like when we were with Gran at her table.

This Mother’s Day rather than a quick brunch then my parents rushing off to see Gran, we will enjoy a leisurely brunch on the porch, drinking mimosas (or espresso martini for Mom) and sharing more current events than past stories. We know though Gran’s enjoying her family in heaven and the one person she said she couldn’t wait to see, her Mama.

I will always remember my Gran and the legacy she left for the women of our family. My prayer and hope are to live in her legacy with a long and full life, fiercely independent and fiercely loving!

To all you Mom’s - Happy Mother’s Day. May you be celebrated this year and remembered well in the future!

Mother’s Day Menu (And a peek at what’s coming on Monday)

I was thinking about a quiche. Why, I don’t know. But everyone in our family likes it except my youngest son who will not be here on Sunday since he’s still away at college so it seemed a perfectly acceptable idea for Mother’s Day Brunch. Contrary to my normal nature, I decided to try it ahead of time, mainly to see if what if the recipe conceived in my head would be successful. Thankfully, I did try it ahead…. Monday I will continue this story, tell you what we ended up doing instead (spoiler…I’m not a baker) and have an exclusive PDF of recipes for paid subscribers.

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