Theresa Lewis



When Mom was alive, we had a lot of fun with her, or perhaps I should say that we had fun at her expense. As children, we terrorized our mother. I think the mischief we pulled off would have been easily survivable except for the fact that there were ten of us. Poor mom didn’t know when, or what was coming her way.

When I was in my late teens, my mother went out to work. She had taken a course in Real Estate and she believed she was going to be the best there was. She told me that she wanted to work to ease the financial burden of raising ten children. In hindsight, I believe she just wanted a little time to herself away from her monstrous kids for a few hours a day.

As long as I could remember, mom was always home for us after school. When she decided to go to work, I had a hard time dealing with her not being there for us after school. I loved her and missed her usual warm welcome that meant the world to me.

Mom was a chubby lady who, for the most part, carried herself well…when she was upright. Back in those days, ladies of considerable girth like mom usually wore a corset, nylons and a dress when out in public. For some reason, mom did not wear high heels; she only wore ‘comfortable’ shoes called wedgies. Wedgies were unpredictable, or I should say that mom in wedgies was unpredictable. She was forever tripping over her shadow, or twisting her ankles. It seemed to me during those years that she spent as much time on her face as she spent on her feet.

One beautiful early April Saturday, mom wanted to go to her office to pick up some more Real Estate listings so she could prepare herself for her Monday morning presentation. She asked my oldest brother and me to walk to her office with her. Since it was such a glorious day, both of us accepted. The walk to the Real Estate office was long, but uneventful.

Because it was spring, the sidewalks were still piled with sand from the aftermath of winter. None of us complained about the long walk to mom’s office, but walking home was tiring for mom. She had complained that we were walking too fast for her to keep up the pace with my brother and me. I told her that the faster she got home, the sooner she could rest. She then whined about the fact that her new shoes were pinching her toes and making her bunions hurt.

It was one of those moments when something unknown possessed both my brother and me at the same time. He was on one side of her and I was on the other. We both locked our arms with our mother’s and ran as fast as we could. Mom shrieked, but we didn’t stop. We were only about two blocks from home and figured we could make her run like a cottontail the rest of the way.

Suddenly, amidst the pleas to stop, she tripped and went down like a ton of bricks. Unfortunately, because of the speed that we were running, we ended up dragging mom several feet along the sandy sidewalk. By the time her weight was ripped from our arms, mom was face down on the sidewalk. We scrambled to pick her up. We felt so bad that we had done that to her. She called us fools and hellions. Even though we both apologized, we laughed like maniacs and couldn’t stop laughing.

We got mom to her feet and noticed that her nylons were in tatters, her new shoes were badly scuffed and her dress looked like someone had thrown acid on it. Her knees were scraped from being dragged through the sand. If memory serves me well, I remember her threatening to have a heart attack. Nothing she said could make my brother and me stop laughing. Eventually mom laughed too.

She was a fine looking mess with her skinned knees when she went to her Monday morning presentation. We really didn’t intend to harm her in any way. I think her problem was that she had the tiniest feet for her size and it was a challenge for her to keep her balance at the best of times.

The End