November 27, 2020· 

Obviously, I’ve been thinking about my mom a lot lately. I’m going to share some thoughts here. Please feel free to share your memories of her with me.

If I had to describe my mom with a single word, it would be “formidable.” Sure, she was smart, and talented, and driven, and personable. But these traits seemed to loom larger in her than in most other people, transforming her into someone you couldn’t help but take notice of. When she was in her element, she was an absolute powerhouse. And she was such a hard worker that most anything she tried became her element.

She loved us fiercely, and made more personal sacrifices for us than I’ll ever know. Family struggling financially when I was a baby? No sweat, she’d just join the National Guard. Better opportunities as an officer? Okay, she’d spend the entire summer of my 1st grade year away at officer training school (and she retired from the Guard 25 years later as a full bird). Wanting to provide more opportunities for her kids? She’d simply go back to school to earn her PhD, while married, and working full time, with a household to run, and a 10 and 6 year old at home. She set up a card table with the family computer on it next to her bed so she could stay up all hours writing her dissertation. Oh, and before that, she taught herself MS-DOS on our first home computer, with no background in technology, because she knew she’d need it to get ahead. The woman was the living embodiment of the word “hustle.”

Education and kids were my mom’s reason for living. She majored in music education at Ball State and she was my music teacher in elementary school. She also taught color guard and poms. We didn’t live in a town with lots of money or wealthy families, so she sewed a couple dozen girls’ costumes herself for several seasons. She always made me a miniature version, and I felt like big stuff dressed up like the high school girls. When I was in 3rd grade, she moved up to the band director position at the high school. The kids nicknamed her Dragon Lady, and it fit. She got to meet with several of those former Delphi students this summer, and she cherished that.

She became an assistant principal at Anderson Highland, then principal of Zionsville HS, then assistant superintendent in Zionsville, then superintendent of schools in Seymour. She never stopped caring about the kids. Her favorite thing to do was volunteer in the special needs classrooms. Her second favorite thing to do was prank her teacher friends. She used to take me to Spencer’s Gifts to help her pick out cards with scantily clad, heavily obese women in them, which she would then place “anonymously” in fellow teachers’ mailboxes at Christmas and birthdays. One night at a Highland basketball game, she caught students with a dead cat in the parking lot, trying to find an unlocked car to toss it in. The next morning, she took my brother’s Boy Scout hatchet to the school parking lot, chopped off the dead cat’s tail, placed it in a florist box, and had it delivered to one of her friends at school the following week. The friend retaliated by drawing a poster of a cat, putting it up on my mom’s office door, and nailing that tail to the poster, Pin the Tail on the Donkey - style. And I couldn’t even count how many inappropriate cakes she made for teachers over the years. She definitely had a sense of humor all her own.

She pushed me, hard, my whole life. Every 95% on a test was greeted with, “Okay, now why wasn’t it 100%?” Traditionally, each first grade classroom at my elementary school had three levels of reading groups. She pushed for a fourth, higher level and found a teacher willing to take it on (thank you, Mrs. Hoffman). Then she went a step further and started and taught the gifted program at my school so there would be one for me. It inspired her to pursue her PhD in gifted and talented ed. She continued pushing me to achieve academically throughout my school years. She often hand-selected my teachers, so if you taught me, it’s a good bet she thought highly of you. She insisted I take the SAT until I achieved a satisfactory score, and she bought me a study program to improve my verbal score (770 in the end, thanks to her). She taught me to persevere. When I first applied to pharmacy school, I wasn’t even granted an interview. Because of her influence, I made an appointment with the dean of admissions, found out what I had to do better, and got it done. The next year, I was in with one of the highest application scores in my class (divulged to me by a member of the admissions committee after the fact). I couldn’t have done that without her. In the words of my brother, she taught me to, “put my head down and get to f******* work, to meet a standard, and to at least try to do it without making everyone around me miserable.” It’s absolutely who she was and her biggest legacy in my life.

Her second-biggest legacy? My children. There was dark stuff in my mom’s distant past, the kind of thing it takes a lifetime to work through. She fought for a better life for me and my brother, and she fought so hard and overcame so much that she catapulted us into a future that often takes families generations to achieve. She did it despite sexual harassment and discrimination (she was a huge admirer of RBG) and her example was so strong that I never once questioned whether I could or should achieve anything. It literally never occurred to me that I couldn’t do something because I’m a girl. That was her doing. And now my children are her living legacy, never having to work through the things she did. Like I said, formidable.

Like most mother-daughter pairs, we had growing pains. She had to learn to let go and not be in charge of my life, and I had to learn who I was without her strong influence. When my kids were born, she fell absolutely in love. The most painful part of this is knowing what my kids have lost. She adored every one of them, took them on overnights at her house, provided respite care for Owen. In recent years, she became an RBT, which may have been her favorite job of her whole life. She talked constantly about how much she loved working with the kids. But then, it was education and kids, so it shouldn’t have been any surprise.

My mom had her first symptom December 23, 2019. She had surgery in January, was informed it was cancer, and in the first week of February, a scan showed it was stage IV. She went through chemo, hoping for a couple of years. In August, she moved in with my family. I told her I thought it could be one of the most beautiful chapters of her life, spending time with my family and just being together. But it wasn’t to be. She developed complications which came with a great deal of pain. In October, she started hospice care. Her hospice nurses were wonderful and visited a couple of times a week to guide us. We cared for her the best we could, especially my husband, whose heart of gold has never been more apparent. She decided she wanted to be at home with us at the end. I am forever grateful we were able to make this happen for her.

It feels unbearably cruel that our mothers are both gone long before we were ready. We’ll love them and miss them both for the rest of our lives. Thank you all for your love, prayers, and support.