Chapter 12 - Augusta

Now I know that so far my portrait of my mother has been less than flattering, but that’s just because I have different goals from my mom. Her goal in life was to marry and have a family. She accomplished exactly what she wanted to accomplish. I can’t help it if it looked to me like the third ring of Dante’s Inferno,
She met my dad when she was nineteen through a group of mutual friends. From the beginning he was the only one for her. It was the middle of the Depression. Neither of Dad’s parents had jobs, Dad supported them. He didn’t know how to stop. My mother waited six years to marry my dad. As soon as they married, Dad’s parents got divorced and went to work. He probably should have cut them loose sooner.
Augusta was working in an office as a secretary. When Hobart married her she was twenty-five years old. Hobart was thirty. She worked days; he worked nights. For the first two years of marriage Augusta, on her way to work, waved from the bus window to Hobart as he drove home from work in the early morning. After two years of hardly seeing each other, as soon as they were in the same place at the same time, they started their family. They had one, two, three, four babies right in a row, two not even a whole year apart. Two years later the fifth baby appeared and they made the move to Smithvale.
Our city apartment seemed to be always neat and well organized. In our pictures we wore starched and ironed dresses and hair dos with ribbons. Mom told us that she did not know how to cook at all when she married, that she burned the pan the first time she tried to boil water. I remember when the pressure cooker blew up and spat potatoes all over the ceiling. I don’t know how cooking could have eluded her because she came from a very poor family, but apparently her mom did all the cooking. Although she lost track of what was cooking on the stove and burned things, by the time the oldest of us were in our teens, when she could pay attention, she was a pretty good cook.
In Smithvale, for some reason, Augusta’s housework often got the better of her. Having three more babies certainly could have done it. She just could not keep up with it all. Her floors were mopped or swept, her sinks, toilets, etc. were clean, but she just did not seem able to throw anything away. Things piled up.
Having a spotless house, however, is not necessarily a hallmark of great mothering. Augusta was a great mother.
When they tarred our road one hot summer day, after we all walked in the tar with our bare feet, Mom lined us all up on the back stairs and patiently cleaned our feet with Lestoil and then filled a tub with water for us to rinse our feet in. She didn’t rant and rave about her floors, none of us even made it inside. She didn’t spoil our fun. Our moods were just as good with clean feet as they had been when we were glorying in hot tar. We liked our clean feet and didn’t go back out to the tar either.
When anyone was sick, they got to lie in state on the living room couch all day and Mom made sure there was ice cream and/or ginger ale if they were up to it. If everyone was sick she was a tireless nurse. Her hand on your forehead felt like healing. We had measles, chicken pox, whooping cough, and some of us had mumps. It would take a long time from the time the first child got sick until the last child got well. In those days they felt it was good to expose everyone while they were young and let them get over it, not they we had any space to isolate someone anyway. We all made it through all of those childhood diseases.
Sometimes all the other neighborhood mothers came over and sat around in the back yard or the dining room. We couldn’t help hanging around to listen to them. The discussion always got around to childbirth, each mom trying to outdo the other with length of time in labor and other grueling details of blessed nativity. Augusta had a hard time competing. Once she was in labor for twenty minutes. She tended to have very small babies, 3 lbs 10 oz, 4 lbs 3 oz. When she had a six pounder it was considered huge. Even the small babies were completely formed and healthy although two of her babies had to stay in the hospital for at least a month after they were born. She wasn’t just a great mother; she was a lucky mother.
Hobart was a practical man. He handled all the money. If we needed something and he knew we didn’t have enough money, he believed we would just have to do without. Augusta, who had gone without more often than not, didn’t agree. Shoes were always a big issue and Augusta saw to it that we always got them. Hobart was forced to perform lots of budgetary magic over the years but he generally came through, or Gustie would nag him to death.
Augusta found time to join the PTA, to make cookies and cupcakes and cakes to send to school, to assist in a Brownie troop, and to take in extra kids to baby-sit for when money was tight, which was always. Even when we were grown we called Mom several times a week and everyone came back home every Sunday with husbands, kids, dogs, and relatives.
The girl across the street, Carrie, who was Robert’s age and had only one older brother, hated to go home. She had a spotless, beautifully decorated house to go home to. She also had a mom who never stopped yelling. And her mom and dad never stopped fighting. They drank and, of course, they smoked and screamed, a lot. We had to practically throw her out of our house. And Augusta hated to do that, but was more afraid of a tongue-lashing from Carrie’s “straight-talking” (“b” word) mom.
I guess I would have to say that Gustie had a gift. It was a gift for making a family and for making anyone who visited us feel like a temporary member of the family. When we went on a picnic, we always made a huge group with softball games and lots of food and laughter. Even when we went somewhere as simple as the Little League baseball field (which took the place of the old barracks the fire fighters used to burn) everyone we knew came along, like a long neighborhood parade, the biggest “family” at the ballpark.
They say about daughters that we all become our mothers. Even though I swore that what Augusta wanted was not what I wanted, even though I still did not want to be a housewife and a mother, I spent the next twenty years of my life trying to mold all the disparate groups of people who populated my life into one family after another. And because of Augusta’s excellent example, I was often able to succeed in creating or joining close nurturing groups of strangers, in spite of the fact that I had no idea that this was my goal.