EY #8 Tell about your Mom

HAPPY MAY DAY!!!

Look out world!  Here comes May!!!  You'll get to know about a lot of people and events in my life this month as this is the month that fate has chosen to be my month to go broke; second only to Christmas!  Holy cow!  Just a summary to prepare you all, May is the month of birthdays for both of my parents, 2 children, 2 children-in-law, 2 grandchildren, 1 sister and 2 anniversaries!  I'll probably be too pooped to write any other blogs through the month, so just get ready to learn about people I love!

So what better way to begin such an eventful month than with the birth of my mother on May 1?  May Day has always held a special significance for me because of it.  I remember I was in Kindergarten when I learned what May Day was and that it was also my mom's birthday.  That was the first time she received a homemade May basket filled with a bouquet of lovely dandelions! She received the same gift for many years, although a few years later, after we moved to Wisconsin, I was able to go a little classier and cut some fresh lilacs for the basket!

My mother was born in 1922.  I can't tell you much about her birth, 'cause neither could she!  She was born Estelle Vorhees in Chicago, supposedly the daughter of a Methodist minister.  She had a twin brother and several siblings that she never knew. How's that you ask?  Well, here's the story as I remember it...

When my mother and her twin were still infants, her father was killed trying to catch a train.  He was a traveling minister, as most were in those days. He had finished delivering a sermon in one congregation and was late for his train to move on to the next.  As he ran to catch the train, he slipped and was run over by the train.  His wife, left with several children (two of them infants), needed to find a way to support her family and put the twins into the care of an orphanage until she could care for them. While in the orphanage, the little boy died of scarlet fever.  I was told that the orphanage had an opportunity to adopt out my mother and told her birth mother that she had died as well.  I'm not certain I believe that part of the story.  I rather believe that when they had the opportunity to adopt her out, they asked permission.... Here's why.....

Probably first photo of Mary Ellen Hill
circa 1924

From the time she was very young, my mother remembered taking annual train trips into Chicago with her adopted mother.  In Chicago, they would go see a very nice woman who would visit with them until it was time to go back home.  This happened every year until the day they were on their way back home and my mother asked who that woman was.  She never got an answer and was never taken to see the lady again.  My mother always wondered if the woman was her real mother.

Mom was adopted when she was two, although the orphanage had told my grandparents that she was three.  She never found out she was actually a year younger until she was marrying my father.  My grandmother took her back to the orphanage to get her birth certificate to be able to apply for her marriage license!  She said that she had some flashbacks when she walked into the orphanage; remembered glimpses of her past, but no real memories.  When I was a child, hearing the story, I had visions of the movie "Annie," since it was set at about the same time my mother would have been in the orphanage.

Anyway, she was adopted by Pearl & Edward Hill of Aurora, Illinois when they believed they would never have children of their own.  Her name was changed to Mary Ellen: Mary after a great aunt and Ellen after her grandmother Ellenora. She hated being called Mary. She'd never correct a stranger, but if someone she knew fairly well called her Mary, she would remind them that her name was Mary Ellen; not Mary.

Mary Ellen with father, Edward Hill
& baby sister, Dorothy 1925

Mom was a tomboy and apparently had a great pitching arm.  I also imagine her when I watch the movie "A League of Their Own," about women baseball players during the war.  Had she not married my father, I'm sure she would have easily followed that path!  She also played tennis and was on the East Aurora High School girls' tennis team.  As an adult, she supported my brothers in their sports and she played on a bowling team every Monday night. My brothers took after her with the sports; both of them played baseball all through high school.  I was the klutzy disappointment; ducking if a ball was thrown toward me, unable to hit anything other than a foul ball and on the RARE occasion I DID hit the ball, unable to beat the ball to first base!

In addition to being athletic, my mother was musically inclined.  She sang in the choir, played violin and could play piano by ear.  Yeah.  I'm missing those genes too.  I took three weeks of accordion lessons and dropped out.

She was smart.  She knew bookkeeping and shorthand and probably could have easily been a secretary or bookkeeper/ accountant if she had had the desire to do so.

Married September 11, 1942
(Notice the locket!)

She met my dad when she was eighteen and they were married when they were twenty.  She helped Dad on the farm.  She was pretty and she had some dominant physical traits.  When I look at Brookie, I see my mother's chin.  When I look at Bart, I see my mother's smile. Sami has her hair and Brandon does her trick with his eyebrows.  When I look at Meg, Gail (my niece), or Mary (my niece) I see a resemblance that claims them all as cousins and I just realized as I was looking through old family photos to scan, that this picture of my mother explains where the resemblance comes from!

Mary Ellen with mother, Pearl, grandfather William Haag
and little sister, Dorothy

Mom was blind in one eye.  She wasn't always blind in that eye.  She wasn't injured and she didn't realize it was coming.  Just one day she was talking on the phone and looked up at the clock out of the corner of her eye and realized the clock had no face. She looked at it straight on; did the winky thing with one eye, then the other and realized that the center of everything was gone when she used just her right eye. Macular degeneration I've been told it was now.  To her, she was just blind in one eye and had a restriction on her driver's license to have a side-view mirror.

Oh yeah... that's something else.  She drove a car before a lot of women of her generation.  And she drove a lot of other women around; including DeeDee, Miem & Grandma Hill.  She loved cream horns and it was always a special afternoon treat if mom picked me up from school and we made a stop at Buchner's Bakery on 5th Ave in Aurora to pick some up and go visit Miem for a good German pastry and a cup of coffee.  (Milk for me!)

Chillin' with my mom &
my Tiny Tears doll

She valued education and made it an unstated expectation that I would get an education and have a career. She was very active in our schools serving as a room mother, working on band boosters and president of the PTA.  She also volunteered for things like eye testing and polio vaccination clinic at the school when they came out with the vaccine.

Now, if I'm making my mother sound perfect and saint-like... well, I'm not that unrealistic.  She hated housework.  She hated to cook and bake and she HATED dresses!  Now, our home wasn't dirty.  But it wasn't spic-and-span like Miem's house either.  We were... cluttered.  And she was a really good cook.  She just didn't like it and we frequently ate leftovers, 'cause when she cooked, she cooked enough at once so she could just heat the leftovers and we'd have dinner again.  Boxed dinners were a God-send to her!  And, speaking of boxes!  I never knew a cake had flour, sugar and everything else until I was nearly a teenager!  I never saw anything but Betty Crocker mixes! She claimed it wasn't worth all the extra time it took to make it from scratch 'cause cake mixes were moister anyway!  Unfortunately for her, she lived in a time when slacks still weren't widely accepted for women.  They were becoming acceptable so she could wear pants at home or just running to the store, but for all the school activities, etc. she donned the requisite dress, but the June Cleaver look was NOT for her!  Come to think of it, my women's lib streak in the 70's probably had its origin in attitudes I developed from her actions.  My mom.  The original libber!

My mom loved the song "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and got choked up whenever she sang it. The first time I ever realized it was affecting her, we were listening to it being sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.  That was looooonnnggg before I ever even would have considered the fact that I would one day be a Mormon, yet somehow, it's mostly because of her that I joined the church.  It was she who told me the Indian legends of the "white man" who would return to them one day that rang true as a listened to the missionary discussions. Anyway, consequently, I've never been able to sing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" since the day she died without thinking of her and getting choked up myself.  And Brookie knows this story and tells me that now it chokes her up too.  And Barton sent me a text a couple weeks ago,  telling me that he sang it in church on Sunday with the choir and he thought of me. He probably didn't get choked up; he's too trained to sing through his emotion, but I bet he was picturing his old mom with tears in her eyes!

Mom: Probably 1945 after Billy was born.

She would have been a great grandma!  She adored Dan & Gail and Todd & Kirsten; the only grandchildren she ever knew.  Unfortunately, I'm sure none of them remember her; Dan was only three when she died and he was the oldest.  I was always so sad that she never got to know my kids or Jeff & Mary and that they never got to know her.  But I know they know her heart, because the kind of love she had doesn't die.  It's amazing that someone who was in my life for such a short time could have such an impact on my life, but my mom taught me how to love and because of her, my kids know how to love too.  My kids always tell me what a great mom I am.  If I am, it's because I learned how to be a mom from her.

Happy Birthday, Mom!  I love you....