The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Mothers? I had the greatest
It’s been nearly 13 years since my mother, Doris Lorraine Walker, passed away and I still feel a great loss.
It was Aug. 28, 2004, when she was taken from her seven children and left a void that we try to fill with pictures, memories and what we call our “mommy moments.”
Fortunately, she left us with so many good memories of herself, we have a treasure trove to fill it.
Since becoming a journalist, I write often about my mother. It is my way of keeping her close to me and also the only way I know how to pay tribute to her other than trying to be a good person.
I don’t write much about my father — I am confining my thoughts about him and the price his brutal ways exacted on our family to a manuscript I hope to have published one day.
But my mother brought the joy to an otherwise dreary atmosphere.
As I grow older and play witness to my surroundings, with each passing day, I realize what a good mother I had and how important mothers are in the longterm success of their kids.
I grew up with a mother who had old-school traditional values, loved the arts and all types of music, was a sucker for tearjerkers and romantic movies and had a voracious appetite for books.
She believed that women should dress and act like what she called “ladies” and men should treat them as such by holding doors and pulling out chairs when at a restaurant.
She was appalled at sex before marriage and had disdain for men who didn’t work and the “dumb women” who chased behind them. And she couldn’t stand men who whistled and wolfed at women who walked by.
She had no problem glaring at them and letting me know it was wrong. She never hesitated to remind me that she, my mother, was a woman first and I should remember that.
Of course, back then, it was ‘yeah, mom’ with an uninterested nod.
Just like it was ‘yeah, mom’ to opera and classical music, orchestra and big band music and jazz greats.
In fact, it was ‘yeah, mom’ to a whole lot more that she insisted her children needed to know and appreciate so we could be wellrounded — whatever that meant.
All of this was being taught against a backdrop of domestic violence, and later, against a bleak existence of survival that took years to improve.
When you grow up in a project and other low-income places with the heat of black power during the ‘60s, it was embarrassing to have big band and classical music coming from our apartment.
I mean, who cares about Tchaikovsky and Mozart when your empty stomach was playing its own notes?
Who cares about learning to waltz and do the swing when nobody I knew danced that way?
Who cares about theater when it was something that other people did and we couldn’t afford a movie?
So, there was a lot of ‘yeah, mom’ as she tried to convince me and my siblings that one day we would thank her.
If there is a problem with life it is that you have to live through it to understand it. And I guess that’s why the old adage “with age comes wisdom” is so true.
It took me a long time to realize my mother knew exactly what her children needed — and she pretty much built her own field of dreams in a wasteland of poverty to prepare us for the future.
And as her children grew and the layers of a troubled beginning began to unfold and drop away, what emerged was what she kept telling us we would be: well-rounded and able to find our way in the world.
Her seven children — Michelle, Allan, Jacqueline, Chimene, Paula, Natasha and myself — are the proof in the pudding.
We can waltz and do the swing and spin on a dime and get down with Motown.
We know Tosca and Carmen are operas and recognize more than Beethoven’s Fifth as the music of some of the great classical composers.
We are as comfortable singing Frank Sinatra and trying to scat like Ella Fitzgerald as we are rapping along with Jay Z.
And we are comfortable talking in any atmosphere or environment and among any group of people.
Because in the end, what stuck like glue were our mother’s lessons of tried-and-true traditionalism — not the hopelessness we sometimes felt. Somehow, she had spun magic out of despair.
I know my mother isn’t the only woman who overcame difficult odds to give her children a better life.
And I know I am not the only son who thinks his mom was the greatest and wants to sing her praises.
But this is my column. And today is Mother’s Day. And Doris Lorraine Walker was my mother.
She left before I could give her my version of the field of dreams I so much wanted her to have. She left before I could buy her the nice home, the fur coat and make her last days worry-free.
But she didn’t leave before I wrote my first column about her.
And I will never forget the pride on her face at seeing my name in print in a daily newspaper.
At that moment, I understood what being a mother — or a parent — really meant. It was her children’s success — not a big house — that was her reward.
I can only hope I still make her proud.
Once again, I get a chance to thank her ...
... and let her know, whether she is here or not, that I still love her madly.
And as her children grew and the layers of a troubled beginning began to unfold and drop away, what emerged was what she kept telling us we would be: well-rounded and able to find our way in the world.