But while I love to pay tribute to "mothers of blogdom" I also want to pay tribute to Edith Jane Eileen Catton - my amazing mother. That's her in the picture and my two brothers and one of my sisters. I'm the wee one with the pout. I have a few pictures of myself at that age and I often pulled a pout - even then I wanted to always have my own way! Stubborn little puss I was!
Somehow my mother had the patience of Job. By the time I rolled around she had already parented 4 other children and probably didn't have much patience left! Happily for her my two sisters were (and still are haha) 9 and 11 years older than me so they pitched in to help raise me. Even so I had enormous admiration for my mother - she was someone I aspired to be like when I grew up even though she was very much unlike my "cookies and milk" friends' mothers. When I came home after school it wasn't to cookies and milk, oh no, it was to the sound of the typewriter keys being tapped away in another room, a room with the door closed.
And while I might have wished for "cookies and milk" I was also filled with pride because my mother was so very different from other mothers. She was so so intelligent - she wrote stories whenever she could carve out some time from caring for 5 children and a husband. She was a stay-at-home mother except for one day a week when she worked at the local "Sales Barn" where farmers brought their critters to market. She helped with the accounting. And she also sold her stories so you can imagine my heart swelling with pride when she'd purchase a Jack and Jill magazine for me and there was her name in print beside the title of the story she'd written!
So while I had to forage in the kitchen by myself it was worth it. No doubt it helped me become a more resourceful child - I don't remember ever resenting her for being behind a closed door when I came home from school. I knew she was special! While other mothers slopped around downtown in slippers and curlers she was creating! When she did go downtown she was very well turned out. We weren't very well off but boy did she have STYLE!!
I grew up in a different generation from my older sisters. I grew up not thinking about marriage or having kids when I was finished highschool- I grew up thinking I could become a writer or anything else I wanted. I knew that I would work and have a career. There were many bumps along my road and I didn't do things in the usually accepted way but then neither did my mother. I admired her for being so different from the average mom so is it any wonder that I have lived such an unorthodox life?
Edith Jane Eileen Harrison - I wouldn't have it any other way!!
