Mom would get the big cardboard boxes from the grocery store, the really big ones, flatten them out, and attach them to the old walls of our house like drywall. Then paint or paper so the walls looked brand new. Kept out the drafts too. She loved to wall paper and paint.

The one thing I remember most? Many times when we sat down to supper, she gave up her serving of the meat so that Dad and we kids would have it. Makes me tear up now just thinking of it.

Mom left dad way back when my brother was 3 months old and I was 21 months old. It was practically unheard of, back then.

She tried it on her own, but her parents asked us to move in with them. They created 3 bedrooms out of a 2 bedroom bungalow and she got a job working afternoon shift. She was able to be home with us in the morning till afternoon when she had to go to work.

I can still see my Grandpa walking with my brother down the road to the corner gas-station restaurant, he was just a toddler.

We were always clean and had nice clothes, and I always liked the dresses I had in my school pictures. It wasn't until was an adult that I found out my clothes were handed down to me from my 2 cousins.. Thank heavens for that, it made things so much easier for Mom, obviously.

We had strict rules, we got disciplined (spanked), did chores, got good grades at school.

Mom and I were very close, and I still wish I could ask her things.

My mother could sew! She made me a pant and top outfit out of the striped pastel kitchen curtains. I was so proud! I thought that was the coolest outfit. She would get the latest Vogue magazine and make herself the outfit on the cover. I remember being 4 or 5, laying under a fabric bolt rack at a sewing store while she decided if she could spend the money on real mink trim or sheepskin that looked like mink ....she got the sheepskin. :0) She sewed a suit, used the "2" mink trim " on the 3/4 length sleeve edges.....it looked just like the mag cover. My father was a country club manager. We went to the club to eat/it was free & dressed up to fit in. The wealthy members would stare at my mom...and say things like, "I think we're paying your husband too much" because we were so "trendy".....and my mom would just "glow"....under the catty sarcasm. lol

My mom was able to set the center of the universe, literally. She was a tool and die maker and one of the only people on the planet who could manually calibrate gyroscopes that go into space. After she had to retire early due to illness, the company had to get a machine to replace her because no one else had enough precision to get the job done.

While she was working, she also somehow managed to help run the farm with it's cows, chickens, and food garden, do tons of canning and excellent cooking, raise us kids, gut and remodel the farmhouse...

She was able to teach me calculus when I was 12. She's a walking encyclopedia, still kicks butt all over Jeopardy every night. A bit slower than she used to, but still amazing just how much stuff she knows.

She was a talented seamstress, and now has settled more into being a yarn worker and knits and crochets up beautiful things. She was a rather good carpenter and home repairman, and an excellent auto mechanic. For a while she was a top-notch mud-truck racer.

My mother was an excellent cook. Fearless in the kitchen, she turned out the most amazing meals, although we didn’t realize until later in life how amazing they really were. She was a champion baker. Back when schools had bake sales all year, her cakes were always prized and the first to be gone. If she saw something in a magazine she wanted to try, she perfected it. Of course we didn’t eat like that all the time, but I can’t ever recall a bad meal unless it was one of those rare times when my Dad was left home with us and we ate a bowl of cereal or salmon from a can with crackers.

She also could sew and made many things for me. When I was in high school, I thought I had to have something by Mary Quant. Remember her? The British fashion designer who pretty much invented the mini skirt? Well, there were some patterns that came out and she agreed to make a dress for me. I’m tall and didn’t want ‘mini’ but sort of short, so she did it. I got to pick the fabric, which was a camel and cream houndstooth, pretty much like the photo on the cover of the pattern. I loved that dress. She also made me an emerald green velvet and ivory satin gown for a Christmas dance that was beautiful. Wish I still had it.

Alisande, your mother was a beautiful young woman.

My mother was a very hard worker and amazingly unselfish. We were a large family with very little money but she provided us with good food, making meals from scratch and using produce from her large garden. She would tend farm animals, milk cows and help with the harvest. The most notable thing was how she gave us children all that she could and took very little for herself.

What still amazes me is how my Mom was able to sit at the kitchen table with a comb, a glass of water, a bunch of bobby pins and no mirror, and completely pin-curl her hair. She also could feed us with very little food in the house in often very bad times. That's why I know the value of a can of bacon grease, a sack of self-rising flour and water.

I wrote about my mom butchering a rabbit that I claimed....even tho she asked me beforehand. I blamed myself. If I had said no, I am sure she wouldn't have done it. So I felt guilty about not speaking up, but as a result I learned to speak up, but my mother didn't do that as a learning experience for me. I never told her. I am sure she would have no idea.

I never really considered my mother to be an animal lover until years after I was grown. Yes, she raised chickens and could chop the head off of one and serve it for dinner....or supper as we called it. But I was always taught to be kind to animals. For example, the cat is sleeping....do not wake it up and annoy it.

When I came home from school and my dog came out to greet me...do not ignore him. Give him a pat and speak kindly to him because he was happy to see you.

I had all kinds of pets growing up. A calf, a sheep, a goat that pulled a cart, dogs, cats, hamsters, a Guinea pig, an aquarium of fish. However if I wanted to catch a lizard and put it in a jar, she would say,

"Don't do that. She might have babies at home."

My favorite pet was my horse that she bought for me. My dad was overly protective and no way he would have bought me a horse, afraid I would get hurt. The horse changed my life....my whole childhood and teenage years revolved around that horse. I was the youngest by 16 years in my family, so I didn't grow up with siblings....they were grown and gone by the time I was old enough to remember. My pets were like family to me.

My mother knew the name of all the native plants, trees and birds. I thought that was common, until I grew up and found out almost no one knew any of that stuff.

She was good to my friends. I lived about 4 blocks from school and I would often go home for lunch and bring a friend or two. They were always welcome.

She was a good, but not fancy cook. I still strive to make some of the dishes she served as good as she prepared them.

She wasn't a doting grandmother to most of her grandkids. Probably because she was raising me when they were growing up, but they did come spend the night and weekends. She was very good with my daughter though. Erin had over 1000 books...and my mother read to her constantly, to give me a chance to spend some time with my horses or the waterlilies that I raised.

My mother was very healthy and I believed she passed that on to me. She never got sick, and I don't think she believed anyone else did...so she wasn't overly doting if I felt bad. She would say, "Get up and move around...you will feel better." Her doctor told me when she was in her nineties that she was the healthiest person he had ever seen for her age. She worked hard and never sat around. I look just like her, and I strive to be just like her.

My mother overcame a rough childhood, being passed from grandparents to aunt to another aunt to mother to aunt, all in different towns and even different state. separated from her sisters much of the time, and having an absent father -- due to the depression - to do very well in school, be intellectually curious and continuing to educate herself. She was widowed with 3 young children, and supported them and herself under she remarried. She took part in, and led, some community organizations; by the early 1970s and the age of 50 she was done with being a housewife and set out to have a career in public relations and promotions, and was successful despite having had no formal education post high school. Even when she financially probably didn't need to, she still sewed clothing for us and herself often, and put up produce from our garden and farm stands - habits that she learned from her own mother and passed to me (although I gave up sewing pretty early on).

My paternal grandmother was also admirable - after being abandoned in the 1920s by my grandfather, with 2 small children, she worked as a free-lance stenographer in between employment by firms. However, again during the depression, with no one to care for the children after her own mother passed away, she was forced to give them up to an orphanage. Still, she took the streetcar every evening to visit them there. After they graduated, she relocated to take a government job and started taking night classes at the local university -- eventually graduating at the age of 52 with a teaching degree; she worked as a teacher, in what was now a poor area, into her 70s.

My erratic crazy nut job of a mother was amazingly good at things like watch repair. We always had watches and when they broke she fixed them and if they couldn't be she would hold on until one of the younger kids got old enough for a watch then take them apart and put one together from the bits. My dad would take the TV apart (he claimed to be trained in electronics in the military) get a 'headache' and go take a nap and my mother not only would put it back together she would fix it as well. It seems the long way around to fix the tv to me. My dad got the credit of curse. She could replace the timing dial on the washing machine and wire in a new element in the oven. She was good at sewing but loved ruffles and gathers and I absolutely hated pinafores and sashes. I could not get her to make plain clothes for me. My sisters loved the fluff though. She loved to read and passed that on to the whole lot of us and let us read what ever took our fancy. I had advanced tastes so that was a boon. So all things considered she had her strengths.

I am always amazed at what our mothers did out of love and necessity.

My mother could cook, sew, paint, upholster - if you told her she couldn't do it, she did it.

And she loved her kids, the most important part. And we loved her, not that she was perfect. ;-) I miss her everyday.

My mother probably had ADHD. She rarely sat down. When we finally were able to build our first house (apt living before that), the lot my parents bought didn't even have a blade of grass on it - all hard, baked clay with cracks one could lose a cow in, and rock. My father built a large screen and sifted all the topsoil in that 1/2 acre lot.

My mother wanted a large, L-shaped perennial border and she made one. She dug the begs (my father helped a bit but was not into "double-digging), found neighbors to give her plants, planted things my father dug up out in the country. Nurseries were for trees and shrubs in our small Kansas town and they didn't have money for anything other than a small row of "foundation plantings" in front. Everything else, was "road-side gardening".

When she was through with this, it needed weeding. Mulch was unheard of in the early 1950's and believe me, there were weeds. And of course watering - sprinklers were not very good so one stood with a hose and watered.

When this was done, she came in and did cleaning, laundry (she even ironed my father's boxer shorts), and cooked. Oh my, how this woman cooked! She was a superb baker and we had homemade hot bread (usually buttermilk biscuits) for breakfast and dinner every day. On Sun, there were yeast cloverleaf rolls. And a pie or a cake and always home baked cookies.

How the woman lived to be 85, I don't know. She had lupus the last 10 years of her life and hated how it limited her ability to "do things".

She was the Energizer Bunny... Makes me tired just thinking about it. No, I did NOT inherit my mother's energy level....

My mother was raised on a small farm in rural RI until, as my grandmother put it, "The bulls started getting over the fences," and they moved to the city. (You probably know what Grandma meant; it took me until I was an adult to figure out that my mother had 'blossomed'.) The HS principal in the city didn't know where to place her; she'd already finished his HS curriculum in her one-room schoolhouse. After a year, she graduated at 16 and lied to get a job.

My mother worked her entire life until she was dying of leukemia at 73. She was sole support of herself and her parents through the Depression, rising to be personal secretary to the personnel director of Sheppard's Dept. Store in Providence. She married my father near the time her beloved father died of the stroke that had incapacitated him in his forties. They started a small business in Chicago that flourished during WWII -- and which exempted my father from service, although two of his brothers served.

My father was unfaithful during my mother's difficult pregnancy with me. She refused to live with a mistress in her life and threw him out when I was two. She eventually agreed to sue him for divorce when I was six, hoping not to have to say in public that he was an adulterer. That was the law then, and yes, it was reported in the Chicago newspapers -- not because we were prominent, but because it was scandalous. My father would not pay the alimony or child support ordered by the court, so my mother brought her mother to live with us and care for me, and found a job.

The first job at hand was saleslady in a dress shop where she sold to the ladies with whom she'd formerly golfed at the country club -- when she was not working in the company or entertaining my father's clients. Then she found office work, where, as a divorcee, her bosses considered her 'fair game'. When I was in junior high school she became a realtor and then a broker. She excelled in what was then still a man's world. Soon she was the top grossing salesperson in residential real estate for a large realty company in Chicago and the suburbs. She cared about people, and they loved and trusted her.

My mother never remarried, although there were offers. An old beau continued to propose for decades. She once she came close to accepting. He was what passed for 'landed gentry' in RI, and 'close' with money. The plans foundered when she asked if she should ship her quite new washer and dryer out East, and he scoffed that his mother had used a washboard. Last straw.

After she became ill, Mom heard from the lovely man who had been her first beau. Her parents had said she was too young back then. He was now a widower. He came from the East to see her and to give her the sweet diamond ring he'd bought for her so long ago. He still had a studio portrait of her and all her letters! He said he had told his wife before they married that he loved her but would never stop loving my mother. (Who says men aren't sentimental?)

I had a loving mother who was also a phenomenal person who triumphed over desperate times.

My mom and I had a contentious relationship when she was alive. But we are talking about the amazing things they did. My mom, despite her flaws, loved us so very much. A thing I can see now - I was asthmatic as a child. And every single time that I would get sick it would flare up. And every single time, she would spend the night in a chair by my bed...moving the humidifier from one side of the bed to the other as I would roll away from the steam. And just like that...I'm crying. As a seasoned mother - I can totally feel the love now and wish I could tell her that.

My mom came here from a foreign country and learned how to drive and speak English, mostly while my dad was out to sea in the Navy. She sewed a lot of her and our clothes, curtains for the house. She even made at least one Barbie outfit...that I remember anyway. She also worked part time, selling Vanda Beauty products, working in our school cafeteria when I was young and later at many other jobs. Spoke to one of my cousins in Japan a couple years ago via skype with my Japanese exchange student and my son translating. The family in Japan considered her to be brave and very adventurous. I never really thought of her like that, but I guess she was.

These are beautiful stories. Here we are, the day before Father's Day, talking about our mothers! Long ago, when the KT was at GardenWeb, there was a lovely thread about our fathers, and one about our mothers too. I wonder if they're still accessible.

I want to add something about my second mother, who married my dad when I was 11. It was her first marriage, and she was 43. She went from living with her dad and her brother, and working for 20+ years at a bank, to becoming a wife and a stay-at-home mom--still in NYC but in a different borough. She still did her father's and brother's laundry. She had to adjust to a different lifestyle, make new friends, and deal with me. It wasn't easy--for either of us.

But we did it. She was my stepmother, my "Mama," for 40 years, and when she died I was at her bedside. I knew I'd miss her terribly, and I was right.

Alisande -- My mother was the brave, kind, loving person she was *because* of her father. Her mother was an embittered woman who trusted nothing and no one. (I only understood why long after she died...in her nineties.) I never knew my grandfather aside from my mother's stories about him, but his open heart and dedication to doing 'right' lived on in his daughter.