My Lovely Mom...

Anita Louise LaGrave Gillis

1919-1968

Only One Mother

by George Cooper

Hundreds of stars in the pretty sky,
Hundreds of shells on the shore together,
Hundreds of birds that go singing by,
Hundreds of lambs in the sunny weather.

Hundreds of dewdrops to greet the dawn,
Hundreds of bees in the purple clover,
Hundreds of butterflies on the lawn,
But only one mother the wide world over.

I was determined not to include a "sappy poem" with my mother's picture but all of a sudden, I remembered a poem that my mother used to read to me when I was a child.  I found it...and I knew this was the poem I had to include. 

My mom died when I was eighteen. I loved her more than anyone (Jud and Katie, of course, are right up there with her). She was always physically weak, as the result of a rheumatic heart at aged twelve, and died at the age of forty-nine. She was one of the funniest people I have ever known, though she married a difficult man and things weren't always very "funny." 

She was a lousy housekeeper. Instead each morning, she went for "coffee" with a varied group of women. In reality, she was practicing her college degree of Social Work, counseling and supporting each one of them. From her I learned the deep importance of my women friends.

It didn't matter how much money you made or where you came from, my mother loved people for who they were. My father let her buy one nice dress a year which she invariably wore to church with a button hanging by a string or part of the hem falling down. She didn't care. Clothes didn't matter. People (and her relationship with God) did. 

She was a weeper. She cried at parades and when her favorite hymns were sung at church. She had her own rating system for how "wonderfully emotional" things were, as in, 

"That was a four kleenex wedding." 

People in my town always said that she had a different and individual relationship with each of her children, which was true. We were very different, yet she loved each of us as if we were the "only one."

When she died, I heard two friends of my parents discussing her. "Annie was a great gal," said one man. "No, she wasn't" said the other, "Anita was a wonderful woman."

She was a very wonderful woman. She lives on in all of us but I see her most in my daughter who "stole" this picture from me and put it by her bedside when she was about nine. "I need it." she said. "She's my guardian angel."

I love you, Mom. You are my angel, too. I am so grateful to have been born your daughter.