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| Mother Betty Jean |
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Today is Mothers Day, and as my own mother passed away into her heavenly reward fifteen years ago, my celebration of the day has been absent any merit or significance since that time. I did live around my sister the Mothers Days of 2002 through 2005 (she passed away December 2005), but I recall no attempts at recognition of her status as a mother, no honoring her for the mother she also was. Such stands as a blot on my record not only as "brother", but also, most likely, as that of "son", as who can say whether my absence in the celebration of my sister's motherhood did not also translate into my presumed acknowledgments of my own mother?
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| Sister Elaine Suzanne |
Today I hope to remedy these personal slights - to some small, though hopefully not insignificant, degree.
A few days ago I found myself reading my Barnes & Noble NOOK, the e-reader I leapt out onto a limb and purchased two-plus years earlier - not technically needed, just fascinated with the new technology that finally seemed to be taking hold. In that time, I have read few books in number - as quick reading is something I never mastered either as a child, or even now as an adult - yet the ability of this e-reader (as well as all e-readers, I presume) is the capacity of books exceeding any reachable library or bookstore in one's locale. Practically any obscure book, referenced in another book one might be engaged in, can be discovered through this resource.
I was not searching for this particular book I am about to reference; but being a native Kansan, a book entitled:
"A
Kansas Souvenir: a book of information relative to the moral,
educational, agricultural, commercial, civil, manufacturing and mining
interests of them state"
caught my attention as something which might possibly benefit my limited knowledge of my home state. It is not a single-author treatise on the state. It is a compendium of many different individuals, covering a variety of topics, with a Kansas perspective of 1896. Essentially, whatever a soul wished to know of the state back in that year, this book offers to explain.
One of these sections of the book is entitled KANSAS HOMES AND KANSAS HOMEMAKERS, and it is written by a woman of that era named Isabel Wobrellball. She begins by writing of Kansas homes that were built as people moved into the frontier of the west and began to populate the state. Then she begins to speak of the women who were in charge of those homes, the mothers who made them a success...
"Into these houses went the women with the children who were to make Kansas " first in freedom, first in wheat." Had those women been of the common mould they would have folded their arms in supine despair, and the waves of civil strife would have engulfed them and theirs. But they were not of the common type. Since before their sires crossed the winter seas to the inhospitable shores of the New World, their character had been forming to steel them to meet just such vicissitudes. The heirs of all the ages of thought, of these "just men made perfect," these noble women transmitted their intensified hereditary dower of mind and will to their children. And so it was that they did not know the meaning of the word fear, nor of fail.
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| "Madonna of the Plains" |
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What those noble pioneer women suffered, only God and the recording angel can disclose. By the light of the border-ruffian fires they read their Bibles, and between the war-whoops of the Indians taught their little ones their prayers. In the dead of night they and their frightened children were called from their beds to see the husband and father shot like a dog, because he loved the flag and abhorred slavery. They returned from the little union cabin church to find their homes in smoking ruins. They went on infrequent visits to distant neighbors, and came back to a blush of roses, where roses never grew! Great drops on the branches, bat not of the dew. From the hearths of their cabins, the fields of their corn. Unwarned and unweaponed their dear ones were torn."
And all that was left the distracted mother was to take up the burden and the heartache, and be mother and father both for the half-grown boys and girls. Then came the drought and the grasshoppers. Again and yet again they came, but through even that trial her courage never wavered. Her face took on a tenser looker, perhaps, and the lines of suffering about her mouth grew a little deeper. Her children were almost grown now, and she could lean upon them in some happy day to come.
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| memorial tribute to pioneering women |
The cloud of Civil War descended, but out of the gloom shone the face of the Kansas mother, irradiated, transfigured. God had taken everything else - husband, home, inheritance; but all had gone in the cause of human freedom, and she had not murmured. The last great calamity came, as she had forseen that it must, and she had but one thing left to give. She laid on the altar of her country her sons, and set herself to do all that a woman's hands could do for the preservation of the Union. Grown used to affliction, she schooled herself to think that her manly sons might never return; but that drop of Marali's waters was spared her.
Civil strife at an end, where the smoking hell of battle rolled a newer and grander home was erected. In it the Kansas mother sits like Zenobia, with her children and her children's children about her. She looks abroad, and she sees that the sod house and the dug-out have given place to granite and brick mansions, and Cities grow where stunted birches hugged the shallow water-line and the deepening river twine pat the factory and mine."
Her sun of life is shining in at the western windows, and the shadows lengthen; but as she folds her no longer busy hands, and looks off to where the "sunflowers wave their thoughtless frondage" in the soft south-wind which stirs them as lazily as a lover would touch his sweet-heart's cheek, her face is like a benediction in its calm expression of high resolve and resignation. You see in it the history of the past, the intensity of the present, the yearning hope for the future. Her granddaughter pauses beside her, and you catch in the younger, fresher face the key to that future. And you know that the maiden's nobility of character, purity of purpose, prudence, justice and liberality are the home-making and home-keeping finalities that the matron has transmitted to her posterity, and that the future of Kansas is safe in the keeping of such women."
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| Grandmother Anna Jane |
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Neither my mother, nor my sister, nor even my grandmother were women of the era addressed here. My mother was born in 1931, on a Kansas farm, within a family of ten kids - a typical family household to that day and age. My sister, it was just myself and she, growing up in small Kansas towns all our lives, learning what we could of life through those daily experiences. My grandmother, my father's mother, she raised her family in the 20's and 30's, having been born in Missouri - also within a family of ten kids - traveling across the breadth of Kansas to settle in Colorado, before settling in Kansas as a young woman to raise the five children who would be her own. She, likewise, was not of this pioneering era of the 1800s, though the traits that made her my grandmother, I clearly could see in the words Isabel Wobrellball used to describe the mothers and grandmothers of her time. And as I consider it, though my mother and my sister never faced the "war-whooping of Indians", nor sent their sons and husbands off to civil war, nor felt the threat of drought or pestilence to wipe out any livelihood to sustain their lives and their families, the resilience that made those pioneering women the standard bearers for motherhood and women of all, I can recognize it as dwelling within them as well. Perhaps it lies dormant within all women, rising to the crisis of the moment, the difficulty of our time, a special characteristic only mothers possess to ensure the successful advance of one generation into the next...
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| Grandmother Anna Jane |
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| Mother Betty Jean |
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| Sister Elaine Suzanne |
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| Sister Elaine Suzanne, Grandmother Anna Jane, Mother Betty Jean |
