Friday, May 8, 2009

REMEMBERING MOTHER PART TWO

Odd, don't you think that we don't think of our mothers as a 'stone cold fox' or a babe. And if you want to talk about grandmothers, well, don't even go there! Maybe it is one of those.....when you get older.

Oddly, (there is that word again) I did meet women at the nursing home that still had the 'look' even well into their nineties. Two of them come to mind, they were sisters and they dressed to the max every day.

Yet when we think about our mother's baking with flour on their aprons, we don't see 'fox'. My question is why don't we see it?

I look back at pictures of my own mother. One is at about 25 and another around 30. She was really quite pretty and I remember seeing her dressed to the nines and how beautiful she looked.

We need only to look back far enough to remember most housewives wore house dresses. When marketing, mother dressed up. Yes, dressed up, including nylons with seams up the back of the leg.

Somewhere in the late fifties, it was vogue to go to the beauty shop and have one's hair done each week. Before that, pin curls in hair that was washed twice a week. No matter what others were doing after dinner on Thursdays, mother was in a shop. The first I remember was LeMoines, then JoAnne's, many followed as operators moved on to bigger cities. Hair cuts were never done at home. The shampoo and set lasted a week. Mother did not look foxy in her hair net as she slept on her satin pillow case, both for the sake of holding the style.

As for Fridays, time to change the sheets and after lined dried, mother would mangle them. After cleaning house, which in the country, meant a ten room house, she would clean up, do her nails and prompt daddy to put on a suit to go to dinner at the Rex.


We knew her as functional. We knew her as the person who ran the house. She stated she had a good life. We gave her credit as a mother but we never knew her as a friend.


Adult to child
then
adult to adult
Let's hope all of you can cross the bridge.

e

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