I come from a long line of amazing mothers.
My father’s grandmother bequeathed me the name that I bear today but I never met her. She moved to St. Louis after her husband died in New Orleans and lived with her married daughter and son-in-law in Millwood, a small unincorporated area in West St. Louis County. In photographs, she stands tall and a bit grim, behind the groupings of her grandchildren. But on a shelf in my tiny house, I have a photo of the young married Corinne Hahn Hayes and her new spouse, looking sweet and hopeful.
Her daughter Beulah died during my sophomore year of college. I recall her as a grande dame, an elegant lady who took control of the family business after her husband’s early death in 1945. She kept her many children afloat and launched most of them to successful careers. She sent us matching pajamas and boxes of food at Christmas. She serenely graced the head of the table while her maid served us tiny individual boxes of cereal when we rode the bus to her apartment in the city. I have no photographs of Grandma Corley, but somewhere in my jewelry box, I have a cameo that must have been hers. I used to have a string of gold beads from her but they broke and I lost them years ago. She once mentioned, in my presence, that her sons who went to war had come home quite different than they left. The set of her face told me that the change had not been for the better.
We spent most of our childhood with my mother’s side of the family, nurtured by her Austrian mother Johanna Ulz Lyons, and grandmother, Bibiana Ulz, whom we called Mom. These resilient women twinkled and smiled when we visited but had backbones like steel girders. They, too, carried the weight of their broods, cooking, cleaning, holding the hands of crying children, and seeing to the family finances.
Nana had a successful run as an area representative for Montgomery Wards before starting a hearing aid business with my grandfather. She taught me to sing in a low voice, to boldly relax on the porch in a nightgown after sunset, and to make my bed “as tight as a drum and as neat as a pin, so one could bounce a quarter off of it”. I’ve lost that last art, to be honest, but I often sit outside late at night wrapped in a robe. I drink tea and think of Nana in her nylon slip on their back porch in Chatham, Illinois, quietly rocking in the dark as the summer breeze carried the scent of newly mowed grass across the yard
The legacy of these women simultaneously haunts and comforts me. From the first moment that I laid tearful eyes on my baby boy, I dreaded failure. No matter how I strained, I could never quite get everything as right as I remember experiencing motherhood during my own childhood. I made schmarrn as my mother and grandmother had done. I cooked casseroles and read his favorite books and taught him to ride a bike. We took trips and played soccer and did volunteer work together. I filled his glass piggy bank with pennies, a piggy bank just like the one that I had as a child. I took him to Disney World and the zoo and to Chicago to meet his aunt and cousins.
I do not know if any of it made a difference. Did I create enough sweet memories of childhood for him to cherish? I do not know. I might never know. I admire the man that my son has become, but most of that came from his own effort. I know him well enough to know that he would thank me for what I got right and forgive me for the mistakes. Forgiving myself comes less easily.
We live far apart these days, him in Chicago and me in California. He calls often, and we speak of small things. Anything larger has already been said and needs no further elaboration. Being the mother of Patrick Charles Corley has been the best and most cherished gift that the universe could ever have given me. I only hope that I did him justice and did not disappointment him too much. I know that the women who taught me themselves had flaws. I feel certain that they regretted choices along the way. In the end, all of us just put our best feet forward, one step at a time, walking each other home, with love, in gratitude, and always in the hope that we contributed something beneficial to the legacy of which we are an everlasting part.
Happy Mother’s Day.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
The Missouri Mugwump®
