Grandparent stories: Legacies of the Grandma We Never Met

My mom's mother is the grandma I never met. Mom barely met her, herself: she was six months old when her mom was hospitalized for pneumonia in 1938. She never came home. Mom was handed off to various aunts.

Upper left: Mom's mom, with three of her sisters, c. 1920s

Here is my mom with her high school senior portrait, her first childhood portrait, and one of my doll birthday cakes. Mom believes her mother "watches from heaven" and all. It's too hard to imagine the missed milestones, growing up without the mother who'd have loved you more than anyone else on the planet ever could or would.

Did I mention #resourceful? Other kids had birthday parties, but she'd had none. Rather than feel sorry for herself, this child planned and hosted her own Tenth Birthday Party. She bought party supplies, mailed invitations, and hosted her own party because she didn’t have a mother to do it for her. She baked and decorated a cake and rode her bicycle to the grocery store for ice cream. She covered all the bases! No photo of the cake or the party favors, candy wrapped in cellophane with a ribbon, and the birthday girl is hidden in the one and only photo of her party. (Why wasn't she in the front row?? Too much humility, Mom....)

Back to my own grandma, the mother my mom lost in infancy:

Mom's father, a bricklayer who worked out of town all week, hired housekeepers--local women--who STOLE a lot of the hand-sewn linens and quilts that were all my mom would have had left of her mother. WHO DOES THAT. Silverware, glassware, too, but I vowed not to go into the lurid details of this terrible, tragic tale of a woman who would have survived pneumonia if the hired nurse had stayed awake and kept her patient from falling out of bed and bleeding out on the floor due to a broken glass tube in her spine....no lawsuits then, no justice, not that money would bring back a lost wife and mother.

Not Gonna Go There!!!!

So many haunting, horrible details accompany this story, I'm not going to mention them: suffice to say, Mom grew up to be humble, resourceful, competent (she could bake a pie from scratch at age nine and bake it in a wood-burning oven), optimistic, hopeful, and never bitter. She married a farmer at age 18. Thirteen months later, the first of five daughters was born.

The grandma we never met was real to us, because Mom never forgot her mother, and never failed to keep her alive in our hearts. Grandma Cassie was a school teacher, an immaculate housekeeper, a splendid seamstress who sewed clothes for the poor in her neighborhood, and a great cook. Mom still has the antique school bell her mom used to ring. She found an unfinished quilt the thieving housekeepers were too lazy or incompetent to finish themselves, or it, too, would have been gone.

The grandma we did meet never liked children, not even her own, who were sixteen years apart. Back then, a farm family with only two kids was unusual. Note: I've no doubt this grandma loved us all; but to "like' and enjoy our family members is a different thing than LOVING them.

Grandma "Standoffish" stands apart from Dad, Grandpa, and the five granddaughters

My dad says he has no memory of sitting in his mother's lap. Warm and affectionate, loving and devoted: that was the grandma who died, not the grandma who lived. This struck me (from a very early age!) as a grave injustice. Had it been the other grandma who died, no housekeepers would have been needed; a sixteen-year-old daughter was already in place. This daughter was not allowed to attend high school despite her intelligence because girls didn't need an education. (My dad held that same belief and tried to keep all five daughters from attending college.) Note: this is not to say I would play God and wish my other grandma dead. When she died at age 97, I cried for a week. I miss her still.

For many years this spinster aunt worked at a meatpacking plant, buying a house in town sometime after she turned thirty. By then my dad had married and taken over the farm. His parents moved in with their spinster daughter. We saw them almost every Sunday of our childhood. Grandma never held us in her lap, either, even though she no longer had a gazillion chores to occupy her.

When my mom became a grandma, she sewed quilts for the kids, held them, played with them loved them, and now does the same with great-grandchildren. Despite losing her own mother, she knew instinctively how to be a loving mother herself. Her aunts were good role models, no doubt, and they raised her as one of their own, for which they deserve endless accolades. Even so, nothing is the same as your own mother being there for you every step of the way. Mom's character and personality set her apart from those who nurture grudges or treasure their victimhood. She is warm and generous and good. No one could see cold, heartless, or cruel in this motherless child. Instead of wallowing in pity or darkness, she loves all things bright and beautiful.

Here is a king-size quilt she made from African wax prints, scraps from our daughter's senior project as a fashion design major:

Yes, KING size. Truly, an act of love.

She sewed a little pink princess dress for this same daughter, age three at time.

How greatly loved this dress, how many hours it was worn and played in! And yet it has survived. Twenty-some years later, a great-daughter wears this dress.

The color-pencil portrait (partly shown below) is by Claire. Her middle child is the great-grandddaughter.

Very few photos of mom's mother exist. I made a copy of one and turned it into a collage. No image of my mom as a child worked so this ghostly portrait includes only my children with the great-grandma they never met.

Yes, that's the same little pink princess dress, worn at many a Halloween, on the right; and yes, the background is a copy of the classic Lone Wolf print that everybody bought, back in the day.

To my Grandma Cassie,

may you really be "watching" over us from heaven, along with Julie, the firstborn, taken from my mother at age 18. Maybe when these photos were taken, you were watching. Maybe at this very moment you know that I am thinking of you and all the ways you live on in my own dear, devoted, loving mother.

Thank you Silver Bloggers for all these contests!

Thanks to @galenkp and our judge @dandays (having hosted and judged contests, I know how time-consuming and difficult judging can be!), and thanks to those providing the 145 hive prize money: @meesterboom, @tarazkp, @maonx, @dreemsteem and @galenkp.

Thank you for my second-place prize in a previous contest, and please know I'm not entering for a prize - just commemorating my mom and the grandma I never met but who lives on in my mind and heart.