Lessons From Mama
The last few months have been hard. In so many ways, they’ve been hard. For my family, as for so many others, having our mother in a nursing home room for months without benefit of her family’s touch or any meaningful conversations was absolutely crushing. At times it was hard to breathe for the weight of it. I know I am far from alone.
So when God chose to take our mama to heaven on May 7, the blessing was not difficult to see. Our beloved mother, Mary Runnels, was three months shy of her hundredth birthday and now she is whole and healthy again. I wish I could have had one last conversation with her as she was when her mind was unabridged by dementia, but we did get to spend a couple of days with her just prior to her passing, thanks to the kindness of her caregivers, and in that time, she told me she loved me. She knew me. Even in her altered mental state, she always immediately knew each of her sons and daughters. What more could a child ask?
In the quiet of my mother’s absence from this world, I have had much time to reflect. She taught us all so much, but relative to this column and to the work I do every day, I find new gratitude in her lessons on finance, spending, saving and preparing for an uncertain future.
“Save for a rainy day,” was something my mother often said. Even when she and my dad were rearing a large family on a meager Army salary, Mama saved something every single month, and she had a Christmas Club account until the banks stopped offering them. (And the balance of that Christmas Club account was all that was spent on Christmas.) The phrase “pay yourself first” wasn’t really in vogue then, but moving money to savings was the first thing she did. When I was a child, I was never allowed to spend all my birthday money or what I had earned through dog sitting or babysitting. I had to put half into savings, then could spend the rest.
“Always have a stash for emergencies,” said my mama. As kids, when we needed movie money or a small amount for some various activity, Mama would reach into the antique salt cellar that sat on a kitchen shelf and pull out just what we needed. If the expense were a little larger, she would disappear into the back of the house and come out with bills. Once I opened a photo album and out fell several hundred dollars. I don’t know if this habit of my mom’s came from her childhood in the Great Depression, but it’s a practice I adopted myself. There’s comfort to me in knowing I have a few extra dollars here and there, just