A Trip with Wifey
Yesterday, my wife and I were standing in the kitchen. I had just thought it would be nice to run to Lowe’s for a few minutes. After all it’s spring and thus, time to dig into preparing my flower containers, a hobby I am certain to discuss with you in the future. Almost instantly, it’s like the thought was just floating through the air, and after it passed by me, it passed right by my wife. She looks at me and says, “We should go to Lowe’s!”
I had no objection and told her I had been thinking about it just before she mentioned it. I called my mom to see if she might watch our kids. That’s another topic I will likely share with you later! Mom agreed and so we ran the kids to her house and headed to Lowe’s. Due to “Coronageddon” we didn’t follow our usual habit of setting down for a meal while it was just the two of us, instead we grabbed fast food and headed back when we were done.
When we made it back to Mom and Dad’s house the kids were having a good time as usual. I have been looking for a particular item, a little bag, from my childhood that I wanted my kids to be able to enjoy. I’ll actually tell you about that bag later because just thinking about it brings back so many memories and important people in my life! Knowing the progression of items and time in my parents home, I figured there really was no option other than for that bag to be in the basement. I headed downstairs to search…
Momma’s Basement
Now, my Momma’s basement is not an area of my parent’s home that you just wander into. Instead, it is locked up like Fort Knox when someone arrives. When no one is around the door to the basement stays open, but when the doorbell rings, there are two things that will never change at my parents house. First, Mom will peek out the window of one of the two bedrooms on the front of the house. Second, as she heads to the living room, you will hear that basement door shut. And when you go inside and reach for that door handle, you will find it locked every time!
Rewind to the mid-1980’s before I was born and my parents lived in the basement. My grandpa conditioned my mother getting married at 16 on that my dad and she had to have a place to live because they weren’t moving in with either of their parents. My other grandpa (on my Dad’s side) gave them a small piece of land before they were married and Dad started working on a house. They dug the basement and built the outer walls on the main floor and roofed it. When they moved in, the basement had finished walls but the main floor was just a shell with only the outer walls. They lived in the basement which has a full kitchen, the garage (which has never had a car in it!), a bathroom (that was never actually finished), a living room, bedroom, laundry room, and a toy room.
By now you probably realize that I tend to have to give a lot of detail to tell a story…I can’t apologize, that’s just me!
Now days, that basement in many ways looks the same as it did in the 1980’s, except that over the decades since then, it has become the family vault. Momma keeps everything any of us kids have ever done. Hair from our first hair cuts, every piece of art we have ever done, newspaper clippings of every single time our name has been in the paper, every program from anything we have been in, every picture she has ever taken, every important paper she and dad have ever had, basically EVERYTHING that might have any level of importance.
Not Just Junk, But Love
When I moved to college, I realized via apartment living that you can’t keep a lot of stuff. You keep important and cherished stuff and toss the rest. I am somewhere between my momma and my wife, who’s motto is to keep birth certificates and social security cards and that’s about it…she actually put our marriage certificate in the garbage once! My mother-in-law bought a bunch of clothes for my wife one year for Christmas and after my wife opened the gift, my mother-in-law grabbed the bag and threw it all in the garbage. Both she and my wife don’t pay much attention…if it looks sort of like garbage, then take it to the dump!
So over the years I have a sort of process for what stays and what goes. I am very sentimental though so I struggle with some things. Like cards, for example, I would keep all of them but I have no clue what to do with them! So I follow my wife and they stay where I can see them for a couple weeks and then get tossed. As I have gotten older, I have picked on my momma many times for keeping all the things that she has kept. Her basement is piled full of stuff that until last night seemed like junk to me.
Last night, when I went into that basement, I started going to the places I expected my little bag might be. As I moved a box here and there or opened a cabinet, closet, or drawer, I started realizing that while I thought momma kept everything, she really had. Little drawings or pages of schoolwork filled boxes. I found several totes full of clothes from our childhood.
Looking through this stuff I realized, momma doesn’t keep stuff, or junk…she keeps prized possessions. You see, my momma got married at 16 years old. My daughter is 7, and I have a sister who is 21. I cannot fathom someone getting married at 16 years old. I’ll add here that my parents are still married and I expect they always will be and they are happy. Momma didn’t go to college, she finished high school because my dad basically made her and she worked at the grocery store and cleaned my aunt’s house until she had me. She stayed home and raised me and my two sisters for 18 years before she went back to work.
Momma has always told us she loves us and she to this day calls us her babies. At times it seems embarrassing. She tells everyone that comes in where she works now, that her son (me) has graduated law school and you couldn’t tell my momma that her kids aren’t perfect unless you want be on her bad side for the remainder of her life. My ex-girlfriend once told her I was too babied…she still hasn’t forgiven her!
So often I listen to my momma talk about me or my sisters and I think to myself, “Momma has no clue that aren’t perfect…she has no grasp that we are all grown with spouses and two of the three of us have kiddos. I think about that basement and I hear her shut that door when I show up and my first thought is always, “We need to throw all that crap away and get this place in order.”
I realized, digging for that little bag, that Momma has everything, not just the pretty stuff, the good grades, the successes, but she has the failures too. (Just for the record, I am in tears right now writing this.) My Momma, who sometimes drives me crazy telling people about her perfect baby boy (I’M 33 MOMMA!), loves me and my sisters so much that she will never clean out those totes. She will never part with those clothes. She doesn’t have the law degree I have on the wall next to my desk. She doesn’t have awards from work…she has us, she has that treasure trove of joy. She has kept it all, not because she’s a pack-rat or a hoarder, but because she is proud of us. We are her accomplishments.
I have kids so I understand the love a parent has for their child. What I don’t think I really understood until last night, is how much we take that love for granted as a child. For many of us, we just know our parents love us and would do anything for us. We know they will be there when times get tough. But do we really realize how much they love us, how proud they are to see us grow and move through life. What an accomplishment that truly is, to express your love for your spouse in such a deep way as sex truly is, to become pregnant and grow a child in your womb, to bring that child into the world, and to raise them. To see them grow and succeed, and fail, and to be happy and sad. To provide them the environment that they can count on you and to be there when they need you. It is such an accomplishment and now I understand why I am the only one embarrassed when my Momma talks about her baby boy…it’s because I didn’t fully understand how proud she is of her accomplishments, her babies. My kids are 7 and below so we haven’t had to watch our kids hurt or fail much, we haven’t had to love them through hard times and such. But my Momma has, and so have all the other momma’s she shares about us to.
I am going to cherish those embarrassing moments when she introduces me, the lawyer, as her baby boy, and I am going to spend time with her and love her and pray my babies learn to love like her. My Momma’s proud of me, and I am so proud of her! I love you Momma!