I’m Sorry Ma

Anyone who knows me well is familiar with my devotion to the ‘Little House’ books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I’ve written about it before, back when I had my other blog, but true fans of Little House know that you can never exhaust the subject. They were, by far, the most influential books of my childhood and there is rarely a day that goes by when Laura and family don’t cross my mind. My daughter was similarly obsessed when she was young and we still talk about Mary and Pa, Almanzo, baby Carrie and even Nellie Olsen as if they are people we actually know.

Then there’s Ma. I’ve never really been able to relate to Ma. She was the least vivid of the characters in the books, and such a drag. All about manners and being quiet and cleaning. Sure, she gave up her semi comfortable life in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, with her extended family nearby, to homestead “out west”, but Ma was definitely the party pooper of the family. (She was also terribly racist which makes her a bit hard to swallow, even if that was the norm for women of her time.)

But guess what? Ma was at home all day, every day, with her kids. She taught them herself when they couldn’t go to school in person. She lived through “unprecedented times”, with plagues of locusts, deadly illnesses, financial hardship, and social unrest as the undercurrents of her life. She was isolated for years on end, unable to lean on the support of other adults. Anything sound familiar?

We had a big storm here on Tuesday night. It was raining fishhooks and hammer handles, as Pa would say, and the power was out at our house for 24 hours. As I was cooking dinner by candlelight, boiling water to wash dishes and thinking about what to do with the rapidly deteriorating food in the freezer*, I had an epiphany. Ma was a fucking rock star. She couldn’t bribe her kids with screen time. She couldn’t go for a walk with a friend occasionally. She only had TWO BOOKS in her house for Christ’s sake and one of them was the bible! She was never alone with her own thoughts (I’m guessing that someone was always following her to the outhouse to complain because some experiences are universal). No wonder she got snappy when her kids were running wild inside their tiny house. No wonder she insisted children be seen and not heard at the table. No wonder she finally put her foot down and said they were moving to town where the kids could go to an actual school.

Pa is pretty much the hero of all the stories. Everyone loves Pa, with his fiddle playing, good work ethic and fun loving attitude. But when he came in from a day of farming or house building, tracking mud on the floor and getting everyone all loud and riled up, I’m guessing Ma probably didn’t appreciate being told that she seemed kind of irritable. Not that I’d know anything about that. Why don’t you try spending all day cleaning up after these feral children and trying to make them do school work, Pa, and see how you like it. Pa’s life was far from easy, but he got to shoot the shit with Mr. Edwards while whittling his own nails every once in a while.

My life here in the 21st century is so darn cushy. My house never gets so cold that a bottle of ink would freeze. I don’t have to boil clothes on a wood stove to get them clean. I don’t have an entire day of the week devoted to churning butter. Still, there is a common thread between the times we are living in now life on the prairie in pioneer days. Ma may have been a killjoy, but she was keeping things together for everyone. People were fed, clothed, educated and loved. She practiced gratitude for the little things, even in the face of extreme hardship (“There’s no great loss without some small gain!”) She got up every morning, put on a brave face, and cooked another meal. And she did it all without swearing, alcohol or antidepressants which is pretty damn impressive, imho.

I want to apologize to you Ma. I’m sorry for dismissing you for all these years. I’m sorry for thinking you were un-fun. Maybe if you’d gotten a break once in a while you could have loosened up a bit. I realize now that you probably started out young, hot, chipper and vivacious, and that by the time your daughter was old enough to write about you, you were completely worn down and unable to find your zest for life. You probably also had PTSD. I’m sorry you have not been celebrated in the way you deserve.

For all of you out there being the “Ma” for your family right now (minus the racism!), I want to recognize the load you are carrying. You might be kinda crabby and fed up with the mess of life, you might not remember what makes you feel alive, and you might crack if you hear someone sing the Minecraft theme song one more time. But you are the glue holding it all together, and even if you aren’t the main character, you are unsung hero of the story, whether anyone notices or not.

*I wouldn’t really mind the power being out, except that my freezer game is especially strong right now and I can’t bear the thought of losing all that work. What if my various pans of enchiladas melt? What if my 4 kinds of stock go bad? What about the 50 pounds of fruit from the summer that I painstakingly tucked away? Soups, sauces, cookies, ravioli filling, all ready to go – this stuff is precious like nothing else!