A different kind of mother

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mother and daughter photo
Mom and me in the 90s.

My mom’s birthday is in a few days and I really miss her. She passed away on New Year’s Day of 2023. This is the post I wrote about her and how it hurt to lose her:

My New Year started off with a phone call from my brother that our mom was found in her bed unresponsive. She lived in assisted living and I wasn’t able to visit her during COVID shutdowns. Thankfully, I visited her at the end of 2022.

Within two hours she passed away after being taken by ambulance to the hospital. This was totally unexpected. She tested positive for COVID five days earlier but was asymptomatic.

I’m going through shock, denial, disbelief and grief all at once.

I wrote this children’s story about her years ago. I sent it to children’s book publishers and actually got an offer from a small publisher. I turned down the offer because I didn’t think it was big enough! I’ve never had another offer in my life to have a book published.

Here’s the story:

A DIFFERENT KIND OF MOTHER

I have a different kind of mother. She’s not like other mothers on our street. She looks like other mothers. But it’s what she does that’s different.

She sings all the time. She sings songs by men named Wagner and Wolf. But she calls them “VAHgner” and “VOUlf.”

When my friends come over they ask “What is that?”
We listen. “La la la la la la la la laaaa.”

I shrug my shoulders and say, “That’s my mom.”

My friends laugh. Their mothers never sing unless it’s to the radio.

My mom sings all the time. She sings operas while she drives, cooks, shops, gardens, reads and cleans. I think she sings in her dreams.

My mother never buys a loaf of bread. She bakes it every week and slices it with a big knife. Sometimes she lets me punch down the dough after it rises.

When I take my lunch to school, my sandwich sits crooked and looks like it’s ready to fall. My mother packs me carrot sticks, a hard boiled egg, an orange and an apple. There’s too much food and not one chip or pretzel like the other kids get. I like to order hot lunch.

My mother thinks hunting through the woods for mushrooms is fun. She took classes to learn about mushrooms so she knows which are good to eat and which ones are poisonous. I hate it when she asks my friends to go picking with her. But they love to go tramping through the dense green forest, climbing over fallen logs covered with moss. She points out the faerie rings where the mushrooms grow.

My mother grows vegetables in her garden, she won’t buy them at the store. But does she grow peas and carrots like the other mothers on our street? No. She’s proud of her eggplant, asparagus, spaghetti squash and rhubarb.

When my friends come over to play, my mother asks them to weed the garden.

“Nobody wants to weed. We want to play,” I tell her.

Then I turn around and the kids are lined up on both sides of her, pulling weeds as she tells them about the vitamins in vegetables.

My mother doesn’t read ordinary books by popular authors. She likes to read e.e. cummings with letters scattered over the page. I don’t know what the poems say. But my mother gathers up the letters and makes sense out of them.

Digging for clams up to her elbows in mud is how my mother catches dinner. She knows about razor clams that we dig in the surf and butter clams, littlenecks and cockles we find in the gritty gravel. She calls the ones we break with our shovels “clums.”

She picks oysters off the beach, shucks the top shell off and eats them raw right then and there. She eats the roe out of sea urchins and says, “It tastes like caviar!”

She’s the friendliest person on the street. She bakes wild blackberry pies for elderly neighbors and talks tomatoes with anyone who will listen. 

She invites the neighborhood kids in, even if I don’t want her to. She doesn’t care when kids build a fort in our backyard or makes tents in the living room with old sheets. She lets us draw chalk pictures on the driveway and dig for China in the backyard.

At night when she tucks me in, I listen to her sing a lullaby with her beautiful voice.

When she kisses me good night, I love that my mother is a different kind of mother.

mom fishing in the river
Mom fishing at our cabin in Washington.

73 thoughts on “A different kind of mother”

  1. Your mother sounds like a perfectly beautiful mother! I would love to go mushroom hunting with her, Elizabeth! You are so blessed. ❤️🙏🏻✝️😍

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    • She had so many interests, most of it out in nature. Photography was one of them. She had a dark room and developed her own photos and framed them throughout the house.

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    • Thank you, Wynne. I get sad each year on her birthday to not have her with us. The year she died, my aunt and I went to our river property on the Stillaguamish and spread her ashes. I think her birthday brings back those memories.

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  5. What a lovely tribute to your mom, Elizabeth. I love the light she shined on your life, but I laughed at your sandwiches for lunch. My mom passed in 2012 and my dad in 2017, so it’s surreal without having that foundation.

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  6. I enjoyed reading this and imagined your mom singing opera and collecting mushrooms, inviting the kids in the neighborhood to dig to China! My mom passed away in 2002 and she was my best friend. My favorite story of her is when they moved from the City to a small town in the mountains. Her mom thought we were crazy. Mostly, my dad was crazy as there was not life outside of NYC. She mailed her some lovely leopard underwear from Bloomingdales. Unfortunately, my mom, my beautiful mom, thought it was a bathing suit and wore it swimming in the Lake near our home. She never cared what anyone thought. Loved that about her.

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  7. I think this story is worth at least a dollar a word.

    Your mother sounds like a wonderful person. You’re lucky to have had a parent as smart and nice as her.

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    • Thanks! Some magazines only pay 25 cents a word, so I’ll take that as a compliment. The publisher offered me a run of 500 books. Then if it sold well, he’d run another 500. I was thinking big numbers like “Good Night Moon” or Dr. Suess so I passed.

      Mom was truly wonderful. She gave me a love of nature, the great outdoors, cooking and music.

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  8. So beautiful, Elizabeth. I don’t know why, but the phrase about your mom “talking tomatoes” with anyone who’d listen put such a big smile on my face. Mothers who were different…I hear you! Xo! 😘

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    • I’m so glad you enjoyed my story. My mom was different, but mostly in a good way! She loved being outside in nature, gardening, gathering wild things to eat like clams, fish and mushrooms. We had a backyard in the early days with a neighbor’s yard on each side and one directly behind. That’s where she’d talk tomatoes with the neighbors over the fence.

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      • Love it…my mom talked to her flowers and tomato plants…and I added that quirky behavior as one of the character’s quirks in my new book…I just realized it’s why I adored that part of your story! ❤️😉❤️

      • That’s such a good detail for a character. Wasn’t talking to plants supposed to help them grow? At least I remember that trend in the 1970s. My mom was a character in many ways. She was bipolar which they called manic depressive back then. But she was very kind and loving, not a speck of meanness in her. Her mental illness meant I had 30 or 40 dresses she had sewn lined up in my closet and she’d vacuum at 2 a.m. I have written a mid grade manuscript based on her, but I think it would be more appropriate as YA.

  9. I love the story of your mother, EA. She sounds so delightful! And I grow what she did, except eggplant.😁 My mother’s birthday is coming up soon, and she also died in 2023, but was deep in dementia then. Sending you hugs!

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    • I’m sorry you lost your mom, too. My mom also had dementia. But when I visited her in Washington state she’d be alert around me. People around her said she was different when I was there with her.

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  10. Ooh Elizabeth, this made my heart smile. So touching and beautiful. Your love for her shines through and I could picture her in your words. I would definitely try again with a publisher or really encourage you to self-publish it. I think its a lovely tribute to your mom and that your family would love having a copy. There are so many self publishing routes to look into now. Definitely some to stay away from but legit ones out there. Something to think about. I can see it selling.

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  12. I loved reading this and I know I’d have loved your mother. I’m sending you love this week. When exactly was her birthday? My daughter’s birthday is tomorrow, and I was wondering if they might share a birth date.

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  15. What an amazing mom you had, and how much you loved each other. Just an absolutely beautiful mother daughter story. No wonder you got an offer from a publisher! I am sorry for your loss. It’s one of life’s hardest.

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  18. My friend. I HAVE TEARS. Your mom sound so very special; what a blessing to have had her in your life. I’m sure you miss her everyday. XO

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    • Thank you so much! The publisher who offered me a contract said the story made him cry! I so wish I would have accepted it. My mom would have been thrilled with the book. I do miss her everyday. Today I stopped by the grocery store and bought chanterelle mushrooms, because we used to pick them together. They were ridiculously expensive, but I figure in honor of her birthday a few days ago, I’d splurge and think of her.

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