by Sandra Lowen

Created on: April 03, 2010

TESTIMONY: MOTHER’S DAY WITHOUT YOUR MOTHER –

The world is full of mothers.

I lost my mother when I was eleven—‘Lost’ is a bad term to use, as if I could, if I looked in the right drawer or under the right bed, find her somewhere, hanging under a sweater or maybe stowed away in a garage, behind the garden hose. No, she breathed her last when I was eleven. I actually lost her years before, when my father decided he was done with her, and that he should lock her out of our lives; just move away one day, and not tell her where.

He elected to hand me over to the ‘mother’ he chose: a sister-in-law whom God in His wisdom had chosen to render childless. She had no idea of how to raise children, particularly a girl-child who rivaled and then outdistanced her in brains, youth and beauty. To her I was a servant she didn't have to pay, a house drudge who scoured and scrubbed and lathered while she yakked with her girlfriends on the phone and barked out new orders. She would pick choice moments, any time I was receiving recognition for something I’d done, to mutter not so sotto voce that I might be smart in school/church/the community, but I was an absolute dunce at home. She would recite my perceived shortcomings to whomever would appear to be listening, then dare me to deny her charges, which no well-bred child would ever do. She would then triumphantly hold forth about how she had rescued me from my alcoholic mother and brought me up as atrue

Christian, though I was a trial and a burden and destined to follow the genetic path to destruction. She wanted the title, but she was no mother.

Miss Ivy was my first other mom. She was our neighbor at the end of the block. Her husband had died years before, and her children had sadly disappointed her. The day we found out my mother was dead, she gathered me in her arms and told me she would always have a place for me in her home. I carried the memory of sweet tea, brewed and poured into chilled aluminum cups of electric hues and peanut butter cookies, moist and hot from the oven and a little too warm for the fingers well into adulthood. I noticed her hair had grayed a little each time I visited her in celebration or commemoration of my varied life events. She died at age 104. I miss her still.

Mrs. Nelson was my next mom. She was the Young Adult Sunday School teacher, but she let me come to her group when she heard that Mr. Worsley, the Junior High Sunday School teacher, had made

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