In honor of Mother's Day 2009 I decided that I would tell my mother's story. President Obama, upon the death of his beloved grandmother, spoke of "quiet heroes", people who go to work every day and contribute to their communities, people who receive little or no recognition and are remembered in the quietest of ways. My mother was one of those people and her presence is strongest not during times of great crisis or duress, but during the quiet times when I wish to tell her something funny one of her grandchildren said or when I want to pick up the phone and speak to someone who loves me warts and all. Even though it has been ten years since her death I still lean on her and long to hear her voice.
She was born December 17, 1933 in Kagoshima Japan. Her parentage remains clouded in mystery and is the subject of conflicting claims within her family. One version was that she was a "cousin" adopted out of poverty by well meaning and concerned relatives. Her story was that she was the child of an eighteen year old man and his thirty-six year old stepmother and that the woman she called grandmother was actually her mother. I have no reason to doubt her.
Passed along from relative to relative she lived for a time in a small village with a woman she knew as her "nanny". She remembered a thin well-dressed woman who came to visit and brought with her dresses and expensive European candies, she did not know it at the time but the visitor was her mother. One afternoon, when she was five, she awoke from her afternoon nap to find her nanny dead in the bed next to her. After that she was sent to live with cousins, then her father and his resentful wife and finally, at the age of twelve she was sent to her "mother".
As a young girl she was a rebellious tomboy with a fiery temper and was known for speaking her mind. She played with the boys and had little regard for the traditional role she was expected to adhere to as a Japanese female. On a dare from a schoolmate, she spent an entire night in a graveyard marking each grave with a small broken stick.
Age twelve, Girl's Day, Japan 1945
There was much familial discussion about her education and my uncle decided that the most practical course for her would be studying to be a teacher at a local college. She told the family to go to hell (her words not mine) and enrolled in a business school. All her life she remained bitter about her education and felt she had been denied a chance to attend a top tier university because of her gender and because of her brother's meddling.
In 1956 when she was 24 and working as a secretary for the U.S. Navy she met my father.
He was a young U.S. Marine with a gift for gab, or what my siblings and I later determined to be a highly evolved and imaginative brand of bullshitting. He said he was called "giraffe", to her 5'10" seemed very tall. She was taken with him immediately and they were married on October 31, 1956. He promised her life on a "ranch", something akin to the pristine setting of the Ponderosa, what she found when she arrived was a homely two bedroom farmhouse with blistering paint, miles from nowhere on the high plains of Colorado.
They had four children born in a span of four years and she went to work to support us while my father went to school on the G.I. bill. During those lean times, and because there was no money to spare, she wore my male cousin's castoff Y fronts, made potato doughnuts from scratch, invented recipes that used the large harvest of cucumbers from our garden, scrubbed our clothes, hung our laundry on the clothesline even on days the temperatures dropped below zero and sewed homemade mittens for us out of socks. On my sixth birthday, because she could not afford a present, she gave me her beloved transistor radio.
My father received his Master's degree in the spring of 1970 and six months later they divorced. She found herself with four children to provide for, living in a country she was not a citizen of and with no family to fall back upon. Hurt and sometimes lost, she picked herself up, enrolled in technical school, and began a life of fourteen hour days. Most nights, my brothers and sister and I waited by the front window looking for her headlights as they came down our street. Her day began at 6:00 AM and ended at 8:00 PM, she spent each waking hour working and attending classes and did so until I graduated from High School.
How she did it I do not know.
From her I learned compassion, from her I learned to sacrifice, from her I learned that no task is impossible, from her I learned that although life is not easy laughter must not be forgotten. She has remained the strongest influence in my life. I have been unbelievably fortunate to have been able to call her mother.
Although she was tough and practical, her greatest strength was her ability to dream and she never lost that. When she was a child she drew cursive "e's" in fogged up windows dreaming of a life outside of Japan, when I was a child she dreamed that I would be the first female President, when she grew old she dreamed of traveling the Amazon and walking under the canopy of the rainforests. As she was dying her life became a dream retold to me while we lay together on the bed she would die in.
Her favorite composer was Stephen Foster and I remember her high soft soprano singing "Beautiful Dreamer" as she washed dishes or hung out the laundry. In lieu of a hymn we used it at her funeral.
Happy Mother's Day Mom, you were, and will remain to us, the most beautiful dreamer. We love you and may we one day meet again.
Reiko Samejima Gifford
1933-1999
Mandy Barnett "Beautiful Dreamer"
(Hat tip to fellow Kossack "the national gadfly" and his heartfelt diary about his grandmother entitled "Wife" reading it encouraged me to write about my mother.)