My mother died on 21 August 1985, at just before seven in the morning, two weeks before my thirtieth birthday and just under three weeks from her fifty-ninth. She never got to heal from decades of trauma or help her children do the same. I have spent the last four decades trying to recover for both of us.

My long, slow slide into our shared recovery often finds me walking paths that she might traverse, in another time, another place, but so similar as to meld into a shadowy memory. When I pull into the parking lot of a thrift store — the junkier, the better — I hear her voice exclaim that this will be a goldmine. She steps in the dusty aisles with me, lifting a dish now and then to glance at the marking. Ah, Haviland, she would say, with a knowing smile. I used to have a collection of Limoges soup bowls that she and I had found together. I don’t know what happened to them when I moved; perhaps they made their way to Saver’s in one of the manydonation boxes.

In my mother-in-law’s hutch, I keep the yellow clay pitcher from my mother’s bedside. During her last illness, we kept it filled with ice and water. It’s nothing special, not from a monetary sense, but it means a lot to me. Right now it’s filled with coins and dollar bills. I used to throw change in a blue tea pot that my sister’s daughter game me. When I downsized, I gave the whole teapot, coins and all, to my son. I started over with my mother’s pitcher when I moved to California. I don’t have any plans for the accumulated money except that now, I suppose, the pennies will become collector’s items. Mother might find that funny.

I get my once-auburn hair from mom. In grade school, they called me “the red-headed crippled girl”. The little boys pulled my pigtails and I would struggle to get away from them. I remember my mother combing out the braids and telling me not to worry, that some day it would not matter if I walked funny. I’m still waiting but I don’t wear my hair down much anymore.

After all the kids moved out of the house, my mother took up gardening. She filled in the space where the driveway used to go down into a garage under the house and planted flowers there. She dug up the backyard for vegetables and planted tomatoes on the long strip facing south at the side. Somewhere in a box under the bed in my sleeping loft, I have a photograph of my mother on a bench at the far back of the yard where we used to have a swing set. She has a scarf tied around her hairless head. My nephew Rick stands beside her. The chemotherapy had taken its toll in ways far more impactful than her hair loss, but that seemed to bother her more than anything. It must have been my sister Joyce who found the pretty scarves for Mom, since Joyce lived nearby and took such good care of her. I didn’t inherit my mother’s green thumb, but succulents grow themselves in California . I surround myself with them, perhaps in something of an homage to the beautiful garden in which my mother might have enjoyed a peaceful old age, had she lived.

When I sit on my porch among those hardy plants, my mother’s memory comes to me in something far too pleasant to describe as a haunting. She had a way of lifting one eyebrow that sent me into hysterical giggles. I went to the symphony with her a lot during high school, and she never failed to get into conversation with those in the seats around us. But she insistent on silence when the music started. Once, when my parents went together and I stayed home, two women kept talking through the first piece. My mother finally leaned down and said, in a loud stage whisper, “Must you talk?” One of them turned around and snapped, “Yes, we must.” They turned out to be reviewers.

In the decade during which my mother’s life calmed enough for jaunts, she and my father took to driving out into the country. I never got to go along on one of those jaunts. By that time, I must have been living in South Saint Louis, consuming too much single malt and pursuing a mediocre college career. But I heard about them. I vividly recall her describing a day in St. Genevieve, Missouri. Her eyes shone as she talked about their lunch, some antique store that she liked, and the beauty of the countryside. I’ve never been there; I suspect it’s not the same as my mother saw it, all those years ago and through eyes which longed to behold a little quiet goodness.

My parents instituted a kind of uneasy truce between them in what they did not anticipate would be the last years of my mother’s life, between the late 1970s and 1985. Dad had quit drinking or taken it underground. In 1977, he suffered a major heart attack which ultimately necessitated cardiac bypass surgery. Reportedly he asked the recovering room nurse how many bypasses they had given him. “Seven,” she said. He claimed to have contemplated and then asked the record number for a single operation. When told “eight”, he gleefully demanded, “Wheel me back in, I want two more!” My mother told the story with a girlish laugh while my father rolled his eyes. They acted like that, in the last years of their married life — more like the post-war newly weds that I imagine them having been. The chaos and turmoil that besieged our family seemed to fade into the background. My mother continued working, my father helped our neighbor in his upholstery shop, and they went on daytrips to small towns in the Missouri countryside.

In the fifteen or so years that I served as an attorney for children in high conflict households and the foster system, I learned a lot which applied to my own childhood. From that perspective, I gazed backwards at the choices our mother made, the most pivotal being to stay. We learn in studying family violence that survivors remain in the home for many reasons, mostly associated with the belief that they have no where to go and no way to take care of themselves or their children on their own. In 2025, I hope this reality has evolved and that more and more survivors get out and get help. As for myself, and speaking only for myself, I will be satisfied if I can heal in ways that my mother never lived to experience; and if the generational curse does not corrupt my son any more than it might already have done. He deserves the chance for happiness that my mother so longed to find, on those Sunday drives, forty years ago, in the Missouri of another era.

Mugwumpishly tendered.

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®