My mom moved into a Care Center yesterday. As I was writing her a note last night, so many memories flashed through my mind. I thought I’d share a few as I marvel at just how many moves and transitions she has made in her life in hopes that it will inspire any of us going through a transition of our own.
So just how many times has my mom moved? Well…
1) She grew up on a farm 12 miles west of Leola, SD. Her first big transition wasn’t a move to a different house, but to a different school. In her 9th grade year, mom transitioned from a country school, filled with her neighbors and family (she had 11 siblings), to the high school in town where no one knew her (she was the first of her family to go to high school) and where, in the winter, she lived and worked for the Lutheran pastor’s family while going to school. Mom, by the way, would probably have gone straight to work after 8th grade if not for her country schoolteacher who not only approached Grandma Ida about it (grandma wanted Mom to help with the chores) but also made countless arrangements to make it happen. Without her interest Mom might never have left the farm.
2) After High School that same teacher helped her to go to college at USD in Vermillion, SD. One of Mom’s favorite stories is how one year the washing machines at the college broke down, so Mom put her dirty clothes on the train to Leola where her mom picked them up, hand washed them, and sent them back clean on the next train! Mom felt like she was royalty that year! There in Vermillion, Mom met a young man from Harrisburg, SD who was living in the basement of the United Methodist Church in Vermillion. They met by the water cooler at the church. Dad invited her for a walk on skip day. Mom said no and insisted that she needed to get to class because she was struggling with Biology. Dad called her that night and convinced her to come with him by saying something about there being a bunch of plants they could study down by the Vermillion River! Not exactly the greatest pick-up line, but it worked. Soon they were dating and in Mom’s Jr. year, on Christmas Eve, they got married.
3) After graduating, Mom joined Dad in Chamberlain, SD where Dad was teaching English and doing everything possible to earn a bit of cash. He helped with Boy Scouts and several youth groups. He was coach of the Drama and Debate teams. I think he even helped coach Basketball that year. Mom spent her time fighting morning sickness and volunteering with Dad! She had to put her teaching career on hold because married women were not hired as teachers in those days.
4) After a year of teaching and a moral argument with the Superintendent involving the way the Superintendent disciplined the boys in the school (Dad thought the Superintendent was abusive), Dad was given two choices: resign his position and join the military or be drafted. The Superintendent was in charge of the draft board, so Dad resigned and joined the army. Dad was stationed near New York City in New Jersey (I think), so Mom stayed in New York City and worked near Central Park in the accounts department for a local dentist. (One of the stories Mom tells is of having only one bathroom on the whole floor of the apartment. The walls were so thin, she said, that you could hear each of us going to the bathroom, so the rule was that if someone was in the bathroom, everyone else had to sing!) Mom loved New York and especially enjoyed going to shows with Dad on weekends.
5) After New York it was off to Atlanta, and it was there that dad decided to opt out of the Korean War and go into the ministry. A big shout out to Representative George McGovern for helping Dad make that transition after reading Dad’s heart felt letter about his call to ministry. Dad entered Seminary at Candler School of Theology in Atlanta and served a “black” church in rural Atlanta while he went to seminary. They paid him in yams and fried chicken! Mom, again, had to put her teaching career on hold due to societal expectations.
6) In the summers, Mom and Dad came home to Dad’s hometown: Harrisburg, SD, where Dad made extra money working on the slaughtering floor at Morrell’s Packing Plant. Mom stayed home taking care of children (5 by now?) and trying to get along with her mother-in-law. That wasn’t a problem. Mom knew how to get along with almost everyone. One of her great gifts!
7) After seminary Mom and Dad moved to Hurley, SD where Dad served 2 churches: Hurley and Viborg. A story Mom tells is of her wearing shorts and going down with all the kids to watch a summer parade. One of the church members, an elderly woman, took one look at Mom in shorts and said, “Mrs. McBride those shorts just will not do around here! Go home and put on a dress!” Mom said the shorts came down to her knees! But she went home and changed anyway. In Viborg Mom brought the rest of her children into the world. My sister Hope was the last at number eight! Indeed, at one time she had 3 in diapers at the same time!
8) Then it was off to White Lake, SD. And when Hope, the last, reached the age of Kindergarten, Mom started teaching again. She started off teaching 2nd grade. She even taught me! (After that year she said it took her a month of rocking in the rocking chair on the back porch to get back to balance! “Your class had so much energy!”)
9) Move number 9 was from White Lake to Wagner. Just a 2-hour jaunt down the road, but what a move. I remember it for two reasons. First because in order to save money, Mom and Dad had agreed to put all of our stuff in one of the area farmer’s grain trucks! I felt like we were the Beverly Hillbillies going down the road. The 2nd memory is a memory of us just arriving. We were all traveling in a VW bug…all ten of us…and when we arrived at the new parsonage, we were so excited to be there that we all piled out of the car and ran around the house amazed at its size and “modernity”. We were yelling and screaming in joy! And just then we looked across the road and noticed about 50 United Methodists staring over at us, mouths dropped to the floor! Mrs. Stedronsky, a prominent member of the church, had put together a “little picnic tea” for the new pastor and family! By the looks of things, they didn’t know what hit them! It was in Wagner that our family of ten was tragically reduced to 9. The grief we all encountered in losing my sister, Rachel, in a car accident still brings a hush to our hearts. And as I think of Mom and Dad holding it all in and trying to hold all of us together as only parents can, my heart swells with both pride and pain for them!
10) The next year, not surprisingly, we moved to Rapid Valley, just East of Rapid City. This move was, I think, the toughest of all. Moving from a rural setting to “the city” was tough on us for so many reasons. Mom had to travel 50 miles one way to teach in a one room schoolhouse in Scenic, SD (near the Badlands). Mom hated to drive and to watch her head off to Scenic in an old VW (a second one) was hard on us all. In the winters she wrapped her legs in two blankets because of the cold. And when she got home, she immediately went to the couch and fell asleep under an electric blanket! We had kids in middle school, high school, college, and out teaching! All this while helping us all try to piece together a “new normal” after Rachel. And all this while being stone-cold broke! Those years were slim. I remember several trips to the grocery store with mom and getting to the checkout line only to have to put several items back. We kept close watch on the tally…not fun!
11) It was in Rapid that Dad decided to try “not being a pastor” for the first time. We moved to a small house in Rapid City. Dad didn’t have a plan for employment. He just thought he’d land on his feet! At one point he went to work as a night clerk at a casino in Deadwood, SD! All the while, Mom kept on teaching…kept on pinching…kept on keeping us together. She had to! She was the lone, sole provider! It’s almost as if she willed us through these years.
12) That lasted two years, and then Dad, brought to his knees by unemployment, took a pastoral position in Howard, SD. Again, Mom scrambled to find a job. She ended up teaching in Pierre, SD…3 hours from Howard! She stayed with a pastor’s family in Pierre during the week and came home on the weekends. What I remember of those years was Mom and Dad struggling to keep their marriage together. Under all that struggle, I think, was the fact that they grieved so differently. Dad wanted to talk. Mom just cried in her room and carried on in public. Dad, trying to piece his ministry back together and Mom, a little ticked that he had put them all back 2 years by taking a leave of absence. Eventually mom landed a teaching job in Carthage…just 12 miles away. They seemed to have made it through their rough patch.
13) It was then that Dad died of cancer…and mom gutted it out to retirement. Those years were miserable, but Mom did finally find what she called “a new normal”. She shared the threshold moment with me once. Dad had been gone 7 years. It was January. It had snowed the night before and Mom was hoping the Carthage schools would be closed. They weren’t. She dragged herself through the foot of snow to the garage (not detached). Got in the car and tried to barrel through the snow to the road. She got stuck. A neighbor, Mrs. Moe, dug her out. She got out to the main highway and noticed her fuel tank was empty. She hated filling up her car, but she turned back and, standing out in the cold and wind (10 below wind chill), she burst into tears. Dad was the one who always did this stuff for her. She missed him so. All the way to Carthage she drove over “finger drifts” two or three feet long. Trying to reach Carthage. Finally, about halfway there, she just couldn’t do it anymore. She pulled over to the side of the road and much like “Hagar” in the biblical story (her words not mine): “I just pulled over and gave up. I just couldn’t go another step.” But as she collapsed in tears, she heard a voice. At first, she thought it was Dad. (She said he often spoke to her those first few years). But this voice was deeper. “It’s like it came from the basement of time.” she said. “I know it’s crazy, but I can only speak from experience. I really think it was God. And God told me ‘Elsie, you can do this. Just pull back in the lane and go forward one drift at a time. Hang in there. I’m with you. ‘” Mom took the words to heart. And it was then that she started moving forward again in life. Finding what she called “her new normal”.
14) She then moved to Sioux Falls where I do think for one of the first times in her life was able to have some agency, some control to make her life hers!
15) And then in 2019 the Pandemic hit, and we decided to move her to be with my sister, Liz, in Ft. Pierre. One day she pulled me aside and asked me. Why did you make me move? I explained and she hugged me. “It was the right decision, Brook. Liz has been the best. I don’t know how I would have made it through without her.”
16) And now to Wessington Springs to be in a care center.
I know that’s a long journey, but I wanted to share it with you because I wanted you to know of all the sacrifices my mom made. All the positions and jobs she gave up because of being the spouse of a pastor. She never got to move “up” in her career. She always had to take “what was available”. She never got a choice on the “where” of it all. She never really had a chance to have full agency in many of the matters that mattered most to her. She just took the baton that was given to her and ran it on to the next stop. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. My mom made friends not because they were people she chose, she made friends because those were the people next to her. And she was genuine in the effort! She never once was “asked” to help with Sunday School or VBS…she just found herself in charge. And she did it all with remarkable and tenacious enthusiasm!
One of my favorite images of my mother is an image I have of my mom playing with my then 1-year-old grand-daughter, Emerson. We had just received a package from Amazon and one of the leavings was a great big cardboard box. Emerson was on our lap at the time, a little fussy. What am I saying? She was wailing! So, mom, then 88, got down on her hands and knees and started crawling in the box, all the time making wild animal noises and playing “peek” with Em. Instantly, Emerson was off our lap and in the box with great grandma, tears still in her eyes, but heart now filled and overflowing with laughter. Mom played down on that floor for over an hour!
Yes, Mom is moving to a care center. Yes, Mom is struggling with memory and health. But I truly don’t worry about her much. She’s done this before. She will have 5 friends by tomorrow. And if a little 1-year-old is crying, she will figure out a way to take a box and her heart and make some joy!
What a gift she is…what a joy brings to the world…what a witness she is for us all!
Your son, Brook, number 7, wishing you a wonderful transition. And praying not only for you, Mom, but for every clergy family that is (or has) making/made that same transition this month. You are not alone! And you most certainly can make it happen!
Brook