A Mother's Day Tribute

Mother's Day is fast approaching and I'm finding the holiday to be just as bittersweet as last year. It's been one year since we buried my mother and I can't help but miss her amidst the constant barrage of ads with ideas of what to buy your Mom Mother's Day. All the other holidays have been much easier to bear by comparison this past year and even my stoic brother has said he can't wait for Mother's Day to come and go. She may be gone, but she is not forgotten, so I hope you'll bear with me as I share the memorial that I gave at her funeral. I didn't think I'd be able to get up and speak, but I'm glad I did as there was laughter amongst the tears as we all reflected on our memories of a fantastic lady.   

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While we do share many memories, my brothers and sisters also have their own memories that differ from my own. I can only speak today about the Mom that I knew. I’m the youngest of six surviving children. Our brother Michael was the second youngest and died when he was only a few days old. But Mom never forgot Michael and always considered herself to be the mother of seven. My other five brothers and sisters, known when they were a lot younger as Ricky, Stevie, Gary, Nancy, and Laurie, were born within eight years of each other, so they kept Mom very busy and she often had two children in diapers at the same time. Six years later, once all the kids were in school, I came along. Mom hated it when I referred to myself as an ‘Oops’. Even though I wasn’t planned, we had a special relationship. With the older children in school and more self-sufficient she had more time to spend with me, a luxury she just didn’t have with the other five being so close in age. When I was four, Rick was the first to leave home and one by one they moved out until I was virtually an only child by the time I was a teenager.  

Mom had a lot of interests and passed many of them on to me. We went to the library regularly when I was young and checked out hundreds of books over the years. She loved to cook and would check out five or six cookbooks at a time and lay them open on the kitchen table just to compare the same dish in each book. She was always looking for ways to perfect her recipes and would note the various measurements, substitutions, and directions on her recipe cards. This habit made it hard for me to figure out what part of her recipes to follow and which notes I should ignore, so I would often call her up so she could walk me through making some of her dishes. It will be really hard the next time I make one of her recipes and reach for the phone out of habit to get some help. She enjoyed cake decorating and was an original partner in Joy’s Kitchen Magic for a short time. We were perhaps the only children who actually got tired of eating cake because she would make a cake a week just to try out new decorating techniques. I remember one birthday party where she made small cakes for each of my friends and then helped each of us decorate them with a wide variety of colored frostings. Needless to say, the results didn’t look very appetizing, but we had a lot of fun. 

Our mother was a very smart woman and kept her mind sharp to the end. She loved doing logic problems and crossword puzzles and had several puzzle magazine subscriptions to satisfy her habit. I was always amazed at her ability to solve the New York Times crossword puzzle when I could maybe get a word or two and her latest passion was solving Sudoku puzzles. Gary supplemented those puzzle books by printing additional puzzles off the internet for her on a regular basis. She often told me that our Pippi, the French term for grandfather, also loved to do crossword puzzles, so she picked up that habit from him.  

Mom was very proud of her French heritage and never let people forget that she was a LeBlanc, even after being married to our father for 56 years. Her ancestors arrived in Quebec in the mid-1600s, migrated to Mackinac, came to Detroit when it was founded in 1701, and were among the first settlers in Ecorse, Allen Park, and Lincoln Park. We have a long family history in this area and our great-great granparents’ home was recently renovated and is now the Allen Park Historical Museum. She got the genealogy bug thirty years ago and made a lot of progress on the family tree. We took genealogy classes together and would often pore over microfilmed census records or go traipsing through cemeteries looking for missing clues to help us with our research. She often wondered what people thought when they developed my film only to find entire rolls just of pictures of tombstones.  

Mom was also quite a seamstress and loved to sew. She made a lot of our clothes when we were young and taught each of us girls how to sew beginning when we were quite young. She tried to teach me how to do embroider and do other needlework techniques but I didn’t have the knack for it. When cross stitch became the rage she was finally successful in getting me to do needlework and she and I would go to needlework shops just to browse for hours on end. We took a quilting class together, which I preferred over needlework, and we gradually developed a regular circuit of quilt shows that we would go to each year just to admire the creativity and get inspired.  

My Mom actually started coming to this church about twenty years before I did. She was an active member of the Embroiderer’s Guild, which meets here, and I regularly attended their special programs with her. I remember her showing me the artwork in the North Parlor and walking me down to the sanctuary to look at the Chrismon Tree at Christmas. She even met Pastor Doug before I did and I remember her coming home and telling me that the new guy had chosen a quilted piece for the new paraments. This was much to my mother’s chagrin because quilting wasn’t her forte and she did a lot of muttering while working on her squares. Those of you who attend here are familiar with the green paraments that we use during ordinary time. These paraments have always been special to me and are even more so now because while she is gone, her handiwork is still here in the sanctuary.  

Speaking of being in the sanctuary, I should probably come clean about helping her deceive my father fifteen or so years ago. A regional conference for the embroiderer’s guild was being held at the Holiday Inn a few miles up the road and she really wanted to go because she had never done anything like that before. But, she knew my Dad would expect her to come home and make his dinner every night instead of staying at the hotel and getting the full experience. I somewhat jokingly told her to tell him the conference was in Louisville, and that’s what she did. Mom called home every night to check in and Dad didn’t ask any questions and never realized that she was just up the road. She had the time of her life staying up late stitching and laughing with her friends. By the end of the week, word had gotten around the entire conference about Mom being in Louisville and all the ladies got a big kick out of that. While I know I should repent for my part in the deception, I haven’t quite gotten there yet because she enjoyed herself so much.  

She and I went on several trips together over the years to visit my brothers and sisters or just to go exploring. Our last adventure was in the fall of 2002. Steve, Gary and I had gone out to Denver to see my grandmother for her 104^th birthday and while we were there my cousin Lynne mentioned that it was sad that our two moms wouldn’t likely see each other again because they both had some health issues and lived so far apart. Within a few hours a plan was hatched for each of us to drive our respective mother half way so they could visit with each other. My Aunt Gert was all for the idea and before I had even called my Mom, she had figured out that the half way point was Des Moines, Iowa, of all places, and had already set a date. The four of us had a great time in Des Moines. We had nightly cribbage tournaments, talked for hours, went out to eat, and toured the Bridges of Madison County. It was a trip that I’ll never forget and I know she treasured that time with her sister.  

Through all these shared interests and adventures with my Mom I met a lot of her friends over the years and got to know her as someone other than just my mother. Likewise, she had met virtually every one of my friends, and knew all about any friends that she hadn’t met yet. When my father passed away two years ago my church friends reached out to her and invited her to Longaberger Basket parties unlike any she had ever been to and they went out of their way to talk to her when I brought her to social events at the church. I’d like to thank each of you for being so warm and welcoming to her and making her feel a part of my church family. Likewise my brothers, sisters, and I want all of you to know how much we appreciate you being here with us today.