Character Building

March 30, 2010
Monday, 7:00 P.M.
Home

If I appear to emphasize my mom's homemaking and mothering in the next couple of posts, the reasons will become clearer as this tale progresses. I remember her on her hands and knees, with her big pregnant tummy inches from the floor, holding a rag in her hand applying Butcher's Wax to all the oak floors in the house, upstairs and downstairs. She would get up, grab her waxing machine with the brushes attached, brush the wax in, then change the brushes for buffers and buff those floors to a slippery shine. Many were the hours that we kids spent in our sock feet sliding across the hall floors from one bedroom to another. Mommy would call us in for baths and clean clothes before Daddy came home from work, so we would all be nice and fresh when he got there and we sat down to dinner. Dinners were pretty simple fare, nothing fancy except on Sundays and we were never allowed to have soda with our meals. As a matter of fact, for some reason, we didn't even get our milk until after we finished eating. Nobody dared ask to leave the table before Mommy and Daddy were finished eating. Then you were able to ask, "May I please leave the table?". We could never just say, "I'm finished" and get up and go. As I have mentioned before, manners were very important in our home.

As I look back today, I can see a couple of harbingers of things to come from back in the "good days" of our family. At that time, I just thought of them as the way we were expected to behave. For instance, my brother, Jimmy, (pre Jim days) hated peas, I mean really hated peas. My whole family knew how much Jimmy hated peas and yet, my mother would insist on serving those damn peas. Every time I saw we were having them for dinner, my heart would go out to my little brother. He tried everything; mixing them with the gravy or mashed potatoes, swallowing them whole, holding his nose, you name it, he tried it because we were not allowed to leave the table with anything left on our plates and we were not allowed to refuse anything that was served on them. Jimmy would be forced to sit there, sometimes for what felt like hours, until every last pea was gone from that plate. His little body would spasm with the gagging and the tears would slide down his cheeks as he tried to force them down. He suffered this fate silently, but I knew how very much it was hurting him. Our character was being built...