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Show 215 Mama was walking the floor, wringing her hands and moaning, her hat still on. "Harold is dead, " she corrected. * * * * "Mama had nine, " I kept repeating from the delivery table when our first child was born. "Mama had nine. " Half-anaesthetized, I was trying to explain that my mother had gone through this torment nine times, in primitive conditions, without the gleaming modernity afforded me. "Laurie, your childern ain't raised yet, " Sister Jackman often said to Mama, primarily to forestall any criticism Mama might give the Jack-man children. Mama sometimes sat by the kitchen table and wept, wiping her eyes with her ever-dependable apron, at the bleak prospect that we would turn out all right. First a mother is satisfied if her children are born healthy and complete, but she immediately resets her goals: they must be moral. If they reach maturity without becoming liars, murderers, thieves, adulterers (now combined in one term: hippies), she is still not satisfied. In addition to the above, she resets her goal: they must "make something of themselves. "All my married children have been through the temple, " she said with satisfaction before she died at seventy-nine. "And they have all made something of themselves. " Mama gave us too much credit for this self-creation. We bounced back many times to her and to Joseph to be recharged, as the god Antaeus was wrestled and thrown again and again to gain new strength from earth. |