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Mom, Mom, Mommy!
Could it possibly be the merry month of May? I think, right now, we all really deserve a Merry Month, and May will do just fine. March and April covered the first three hundred days of 2020. May needs to be wonderful and sunny and warm and promising. It needs to be the month when the curve is flattened and the month when we, the isolation bakers, start flattening our own curves. So far it is and, as I write this, it’s only the third day of the month.
So, Mother’s Day is coming. It’s one week from today, May the third. Biologically speaking, we all had mothers. Some of us had good moms. Some of us had bad moms. Some of us had cool moms and some of our moms were a hot mess. If you happen to be a mom, you know moms come in all shapes and sizes. Moms are wrapped around of all kinds of temperaments. My mom registered as a cool mom. She was fairly liberal with us, as far as rules went. But she had deadly aim with a rotten tomato or soapy dishcloth if we stepped over the line. My mom was way ahead of the times in so many regards. When I was a kid, we lived in a family-built house on a large plot of land on the outskirts of Toronto. We weren’t even in the little town of Weston. Our neighbourhood was called Humberlea because of its location near the Humber River. Our house looked like hundreds of postwar homes in Canada. The property was purchased through the Veterans’ Land Act and the floor plan was an off-the-shelf, three-bedroom place. At least a dozen houses in Humberlea had the same floor plan. Of course we thought our house was the best house in the neighbourhood. And we thought our parents were the brightest parents and the most attractive parents, ever. But this is about Mom. My Mom and mom to my three brothers and three sisters. As children we had all kinds of adventures. Many of our adventures we sanctioned by our mom. Most of them were not. Mom encouraged us to build, dig, craft, create and explore, mostly on the property. During the summer months we’d often outline our plans for the day and she’d offer us the use of Dad’s hammers, nails, shovels and buckets, valuable tools needed to build the forts, dig the swimming pools or bury stuff. We were not to let Dad know, however.
As much as my mom wanted us to stay close-by, we never felt limited by the boundaries of our backyard, although our backyard was pretty popular with the kids who lived nearby. Ours was a newer house. Many of the other homes in the subdivision had been built by contractors in the late 1940s. Because our dad, our grandfather and our uncles built 57 Sunset, we didn’t move in until 1952. We were the “new kids on the block” and Mom was the youngest mom in the neighbourhood. Needless to say, the neighbours had well-established lawns and flower beds while we had a quarter acre of weeds and mud. We didn’t have a lawn or pretty flowers, but we had plenty of mud. Show me a kid who doesn’t like mud. Yep, we had the biggest mud puddle ever. Our yard always had at least a half dozen extra kids who were digging holes to China, hammering boards together with nails we’d straightened and creating delicious mud pies to throw at the enemy.
If we played our cards right and looked sweaty and tired, Mom would bring out a pitcher of Freshie and a pile of cookies. Occasionally, if it happened to be extra hot, she’d turn on the hose and spray us down. Now, as an adult, I understand how much work it must have been for my mom to run a household, feed, clean, sew and mend for seven kids and tend a huge kitchen garden all the chores done with few modern conveniences. Most of our laundry was done by hand or in a secondhand, arthritic wringer washer. Every piece of laundry was hung on the line outside, a line that stretched from the septic tank to the back corner of the yard. Every jar of jam, every cookie or cake and every meal was boiled, baked and cooked in a kitchen that, at first, had only a two-burner stove and an ice box. Until I was much older, and had my own young family, I had no idea why Mom fell asleep at church service. I figured she must have been as bored as I was with the sermon. It turns out it was the only place where she got any peace and quiet.
So, here’s to the Moms we know and love. Here’s to the women who chanted, “eat your vegetables” and to “wait until your father gets home” and “don’t to speak with your mouth full” and reminded us that “beds were for sleeping not for jumping” and “don’t us that tone with me” and best of all, “your eyes are going to stay crossed”. I wish you all a grossed-out-free, restful and happy Mother’s Day. Where would we be without you?
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