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Sunday, May 8, 2022

Mother's Day

(For politics, please scroll down)

Happy Mother's Day, Mom and Wawa.  I miss you both every day.

Family photos below....

Unfortunately, I don't have any photographs of the women on my father's side, probably because they came from the Church of the Brethren.  I do, however, have quite a few photos of the women on my mother's side.

Mom's grandmother, aka "Ma" (circa 1860-circa 1945), whom I never met.  She gave life birth to five sons and two daughters:

Mom's mother, whom my and subsequent generations called "Wawa"(1898-1981). Wawa was a mathematical and computer genius, with only an 8th grade education back in the hills of East Tennessee; she was a master seamstress, as well.  After she no longer care-gave Ma, Wawa went to Washington, D.C., for employment toward the end of World War 2.  Because of her intuition about how to keep those big-frame computers running as efficiently as possible, IBM trained her—never mind her age.  A redhead, she was a force to be reckoned with everywhere she went. Example: Wawa held off the power company at rifle point in Northern Virginia because the power company wanted to put high-tension power lines over her cow barn. Because of what we today call bad optics, the lines got moved elsewhere!

Mom (1916-1987). She went to Washington, D.C., to get a job during the Great Depression. A whiz at mathematics, she took various accounting courses and became a statistician for the federal government. She loved her job at the Federal Trade Commission, but kept getting bumped back to the Internal Revenue Service, a place that she hated to work. She met Dad on December 24, 1950, when she was thirty-four, and fell in love with him at first sight. Mom was never in good health during my lifetime; she had serious heart and kidney problems, and had a series of eight heart attacks between 1960-1964. Mom was the most patient person I've ever known! The photo below was taken a few years before Mom met Dad:

Four generations on Mother's Day, circa 1979. Left to right: my dearest cousin, the daughter of Mom's brother's son (1942-1992), at age 12; yours truly at age 27; Mom at age 63; Wawa at age 81.  This photo was taken in the living room of my maternal family's last "homeplace," which I sold in 2021: 
PS: I still have that loveseat and that side table!

16 comments:

  1. Thank you for posting this; I thoroughly enjoyed meeting the ladies of your family. Happy mother's day to all Mom's ...

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  2. Happy Mother's Day, indeed!

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    1. Identification, in the most radical sense, is to identify with the lost (or rejected) libidinal object. We become the object we are deprived of (we identify with it), and so our subjective identity becomes the reservoir where the traces of the objects we lose are added. - Slavoj Zizek

      -FJ

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    2. Loved the McFarland video. Thanks for sharing! I'm saving it for Fathers Day.

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  3. Full disclosure: people say that I look more like my father's side than my mother's side. True? Probably! Certainly, I lucked out with my father's genes when it comes to personal health.

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    1. Addendum....But I am very much like my grandmother Wawa in that I react with too much gusto to medications and vaccines.

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  4. Thank you for the stories! God bless the women who raised us.

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  5. A beautiful tribute AOW... nice to meet your family. :) Happy first Mothers Day!

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  6. AOW, you are the spitting image of your mom. You looked just like her when you and Dave were married. She is love as you are also. Happy Mother's Day to you and every mom here!

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    1. Layla,
      My looks have changed over the years. Age and stress and weight loss, I suppose. Now almost everyone says that I look like Dad.

      I wish that I had Mom's patience! I have grown mellower with age, but I am still like Wawa -- a spitfire, especially when I am crossed. LOL.

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  7. We wouldn't want you any other way! I am a spitfire too! As for looks they come and they go! :)

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