Meet a Pearl - My Original Pearl

My mom, Sarah, believed she lived a charmed life.

That might not seem remarkable until you know a little about the life she was describing.

She grew up in a large family in rural Oklahoma in the 1940s. She married at 16 and became a mother at 17 when my sister, Delores, was born. Three years after that, I came along. By the time my parents' marriage ended, Mom was working the night shift at a local glass-making plant. The schedule was difficult. We were at school while she slept, and sleeping while she worked. Years later, she told me why she finally quit that job: she hadn't had children for someone else to raise.

That decision threw us into extreme poverty.

There was no fluff in our house. We had the necessities, sometimes with help from our local church, and we had lots of love.

When I was 11, Mom met Phil, a kind and gentle man whom I grew to love dearly. They married, and the following year our family grew again when my little sister, Phyllis, was born.

I was thrilled. At 12 years old, having a baby in the house felt like the greatest thing imaginable. When Mom and Phil were working, I helped care for Phyllis and she and I became inseparable.

There was only one day I wasn't entirely thrilled with my new baby sister: the day she was born. Phyllis arrived the day before Thanksgiving, which meant Mom would be spending Thanksgiving in the hospital and Delores and I would be spending the day in the kitchen without our head chef.

Mom eventually went to work for the State of Oklahoma. She hadn't graduated from high school, but later earned her GED and built a career that lasted forty years. She worked hard. Really hard. Calling in sick simply wasn't something she did.

After years of working for the State, an unexpected opportunity came along. A change in the retirement system resulted in Mom receiving a lump sum of money - more than $10,000.

There were plenty of practical things she could have done with that money, and Mom labored over the decision. But she also knew an opportunity like this might not come again.

She bought a house.

Oh how she loved that house.

There was nothing fancy about it. Mom wasn't much for fancy anyway. She was a minimalist long before minimalism had a name, and one whole wall was decorated simply with framed photographs of the people she loved.

But after years of apartment living, that house must have felt enormous. She had a washer and dryer of her own. A two-car garage. A walk-in closet. Two bathrooms. And instead of an apartment complex outside her door, she had an acre of land.

And Mom didn't want a fence around her acre. The front and back yards remained open.

Everything in it was nice and clean and cared for, but nothing needed to be expensive or impressive. Mom simply had a wonderful ability to believe that whatever she had was the very best. She never seemed to feel deprived or as though something better was waiting somewhere beyond what she already had.

What she had was enough.

To Mom, it was more than enough.

And that little house had a back porch.

It also had a habit of filling up with people.

At one time or another, nearly every branch of our family tree seemed to find its way under Mom's roof. My sisters and their families lived there for a time. So did other members of our extended family. Some needed a place to land. Some stayed longer than anyone expected.

No one really needed an invitation. Everybody simply knew the door was always open.

People came for holidays and dinners, games and ordinary afternoons. Nieces, nephews, cousins and friends wandered in and made themselves at home. If the gathering went late and Mom got tired, she'd simply go to bed. Everyone else was welcome to carry on without her.

When I first moved to California, visits home meant Mom and I spent days, as she called it, "running up and down the highway" trying to see everyone. Eventually we got smarter. Mom would simply put out the word: "Brenda will be here from this day to this day. We'll be at the house. Come see us."

It was perfect. I got to spend my visits home with Mom, we still got to see everybody, and neither of us ended up exhausted from trying to fit everyone in.

At the beginning of each visit, Mom and I would go shopping to stock the house with all kinds of yummy things to eat.

Then we stayed put.

And the people came.

Thanksgiving was Mom's favorite holiday. I think she loved that it was about gathering around a table rather than gathering around gifts. And if someone didn't have somewhere else to go, it didn't much matter whether they were technically family.

There was room.

And still, through a life that gave her plenty of reasons to believe otherwise, Mom said she lived a charmed life.

I loved that about her.

I loved a thousand other things too.

When I came home to Oklahoma, we could stay up until the wee hours drinking iced tea, eating popcorn—her favorite food—and solving the world's problems. We played games around the table. We watched the same movies again and again because Mom was particular about what she was willing to put into her brain. She was strong and tenderhearted at the same time.

We understood each other.

We used to say that we loved one another "warts and all." It was our shorthand for something bigger: I know who you are. All of you. And I love you still.

Mom knew my warts, I knew hers.

And boy, did we love each other.

When I was a young woman, she encouraged me to venture farther from home than I thought I could.

I had decided to move to California to be with Scott, the man I would eventually marry, but the move was still months away and I was miserable without him. One day Mom looked at me sitting sadly at the dining room table and announced that when I went to work on Monday, I needed to give my two weeks' notice.

She was taking me to California.

I look back on that moment differently now.

This was the woman who had once willingly given up financial security because she wanted to be present to raise her children. And when one of those children grew up and needed to leave her, Mom helped her go.

She gave me roots.

And then she gave me wings.

There were many years between that move to California and the day I lost my mom. Years of visits home, long conversations, laughter, disagreements, celebrations and ordinary days together. Ordinary years. Wonderful years.

Through all of them, she remained one of my favorite people.

Mom died at 67, seven years after her breast cancer diagnosis. I miss her. I am certain I always will.

But when I think of Mom, I don't first think about her cancer or the day we lost her.

I think about tea and popcorn. Her tidy little house. That back porch. Her fierce work ethic. Her generosity. Her stubborn streak. Her tender heart. The way she could see mine.

And I think about a woman who could look back over a life that had never given her much in the way of ease or material wealth and somehow know that she was rich.

She lived a charmed life.

And I lived a charmed life too.

I got to be her daughter.

Meet Sarah—my mom and my Original Pearl.

Mom and Me in Hawaii, 2007