Late Bloomer

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My mother, a late bloomer?

I've never thought of her that way until last week, when I heard Melissa Barker's presentation about finding records for our female ancestors. Suddenly I could hear Mom's voice saying that her last job was most important of her life, even more than raising my sister and me. While thanking Melissa for her lecture I tried to say what Mom told me, and choked up with emotion. I was overwhelmed with grief, but also with joy that Mom found a way to heal her own heart while working in a prison!

My mother was on her own from about age thirteen when she worked and boarded with a couple with young children before and after school. She wanted to pass the high-stakes test in Canada at the end of grade nine, so she could go to high school. During her time with that family, lots happened, including a burst appendix and time in hospital recovering from the infection and surgery. This all happened miles away from her mother and siblings in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Then she got a message from home: Sidney, her youngest brother, had died. Come home for the funeral. 

This was the first tragedy of Mom's young life, and she felt the sorrow deeply for the rest of her life. Sidney had fallen ill in an orphanage, where he spent his days while his mother worked and older sisters were in school. Mom's father had deserted the family a year or two earlier to marry another woman. 

The story about Mom coming back to the US after all this happened is in an earlier post: Barb and Bob, Ted and Lola.

After I was born, Mom did not work full-time until my sister and I moved away from home and married. The first job that engaged her was as an assistant helping special needs children in the Issaquah schools. Eventually she accompanied some to and from school on the bus along with helping them in class. When that job ended, a friend who was working in the office at the youth prison Echo Glen told Mom about another job. Issaquah School District ran the school in the prison, and her friend thought that Mom would be a good fit for the teacher's assistant position being offered.

Once she was hired, Mom made the job her own, focusing not on helping the teachers, but on helping and loving those kids. A few were really special to her, and I think she recognized and empathized what they had lived through. She remembered that when her oldest sister offered a helping hand, her life was transformed. I think she hoped she could do the same for "her kids." She said it was the most important thing she ever did.

I can see in the photo my husband took at the top of this post the joy that filled her, in spite of the dementia which was slowly destroying her memory and peace of mind. Not too long after that Christmas, Mom had to quit, because it became too hard for her to drive. She sometimes lost her way to work or home. It broke her heart to leave the kids behind, but my Dad reassured her that they would remember her and she might have changed their lives forever. I hope he was right. 

The mother who raised me was not a happy woman, but her photo above is full of joy, and I think it was because of all the love she was then sharing with her kids. 

Lola McBee Cowan died three years later; her ashes are in the National Cemetery in Maple Valley along with those of my father. 


Valorie Zimmerman

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Send your stories to m.strickland@skcgs.org





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