My mother, Yvonne, struggled nearly all of her days to find peace and joy and love in her life, as was given by family and friends during her latter years.
Mom was born on August 29, 1928—the second of six children. Her siblings include her brother, Donald, two years her senior; Juanita, five years younger; and Deborah, nearly 10 years younger. One other sister named Carol June lived only a month; another of the six was stillborn. Mom was affectionately known as “Sis” to each of her siblings and all of the rest of the family, too. Even her own parents called her “Sis.”
The family grew up in Oklahoma, primarily in Guthrie, but often traveled between Oklahoma and the Houston, Texas area, where Mom was born. Seeing her first light of day on the cusp of the Great Depression, Mom would not be left unscathed by its dark effects, which took a tremendous toll on the family as a whole.
Mom remembers her parents, or the retelling of stories about her parents, as fun-loving people who enjoyed life and one another. However, with money troubles constantly at the threshold of their lives, her father, Earl Roy Plaskett, a carpenter by trade like his father before him, became a kind of man that even his own mother did not recognize.
It is a great understatement to say that Earl was less than kind to the family; and concerning money, he remained very tight-fisted with it throughout life, presumably because of the effects of the Great Depression.
The family tells of a rather humorous story when little Deborah had one of the biggest toothaches of her life. “Sis”—now a young adult herself—had “come through” Guthrie (that's what they called all of her meandering travels) and found Deborah in such a state of great pain and discomfort that she took her little sister to the dentist immediately. With bravado, Mom asked that the dentist please charge her father’s account for the work done. Shortly afterward, Sis left town, Earl got the bill, and Deborah heard his wild rantings for weeks. All of the family thought Mom's financial retaliation to be great fun and laughed together over the story several times in later years.
Her mother—Lois Laura Hollon—was the
third sister in the Hollon family to marry Earl Plaskett! (Why these sisters never talked to one another following their divorces and all is beyond me! Oh, the stories I could continue to tell you!) Lois was one of nine children herself. She was very pretty, and, with spit curls hugging her cheeks, could easily be called a flapper in her day. Following the Great Depression, however, things changed. By all accounts told of her by family and others who knew her, Lois eventually became a religious fanatic. Most of her attachments were made within various forms of the Pentecostal religion. Two of her sisters, Maydell and Helen, influenced her to a great degree in this.
Mom recalls the day that her mother, Lois, came home from some type of revival meeting where it was taught that it was a sin to imitate any of God’s creations. So, to conform with what she felt was God’s will, Lois ripped up all of the family photos and tore out all of her very own hand-embroidered stitchings of butterflies and flowers and such from blankets and handkerchiefs and doilies, a talent that many of her family appreciated very much up to that point.
Mom once wrote:
I just can’t separate my fears and anger from the woman called Lois . . . my mother. She should have never painted into the eyes of my soul such vivid pictures of a pit of fire stoked by a devil somewhere in the bowels of the earth that was surely going to consume me for all of eternity. I just knew that was to be my fate. It had to be because that is what she told me.
When Mom was but nine years old, baby sister Deborah was born. Following the birth, Lois became so disabled by back pain that she was laid up in bed for a year. The condition was known as
"milk legs." During this time, Mom took on all of the responsibility of becoming a mother herself, which wearied her greatly.
Then, when Mom was around 13, Lois left the family. Though six year-old Deborah refused to budge from off the top of her mother's closed suitcase, her shrill cries filling the air and begging her mother not to leave, Lois left anyway. Not only did she leave the children, she left them in the care of their father. Difficulties for the family now multiplied, perhaps beyond our ability to comprehend.
Mom's brother, Donald, got on his own early in life. By age 14, Mom moved out on her own as well. With the compassionate and protective help of the long-time family doctor, Dr. LeHew, the teen-aged Yvonne was taken out of her father’s home and was given her first real job: washing dishes and setting up trays for patients at the local hospital for $30 a month and room and board. She also ironed bushels of baskets of starched, long-sleeved nurse’s uniforms for $1 a load.
Mom told me often that it was Dr. LeHew who stated that, had it not been for Grandmother Plaskett, she would have committed so-called “infant suicide” for that love found lacking in the home. Mom spoke to me often and fondly of Grandma Plaskett, and once wrote, “My happiest times during childhood were the days I spent with my grandparents.”
One of the highlights of Mom's life as a youth was her playing of the French horn in the school band. She earned first chair, in fact, after enduring much practice in the wooded creek bank area behind Grandma Plaskett’s home. (How emotionally intriguing it is to me that, as a teenager myself, and even before learning of Mom's skill in and love for her chosen instrument, the French horn had became one of my most favorite musical instruments.)
Due to her difficult circumstances, Mom never graduated from high school. Instead, she hit the road on her own somewhere around age 15 and began her life as a self-proclaimed vagabond. The following writing symbolizes very well, I think, the difficulties of Mom’s life on the road and outside the influence of loving ties with family and friends:
I was in Oakland, California on VJ day—the day the Japanese surrendered—and in New York City when the end of the war in Europe was celebrated. One birthday was celebrated somewhere in Wisconsin. Another in Santa Fe. I became hardened. People believed me when I passed as twenty-one. Then, after I finally tired of truck drivers and traveling on buses, I learned how to be a waitress in diners all over the country. Sometimes I would work a week or two, but always restless, I would move on. I felt lonely and desolate going from place to place. I reached in vain for some place to plant roots, for someone to love me; but love eluded me, and I would go on. Liquor became my friend. Drinking dulled the negative feelings. Sitting on a bar stool eased the feeling of isolation.
For most of her life, alcohol supposedly became my mother’s most cherished friend, though it betrayed and consumed her again and again and again. There are not enough words for the pain caused by this bitterest of enemies—in her own life—and in the lives of those who loved her, including me. Alcohol was a difficult adversary for her to overcome; but, in the last 10 years of her life she did overcome it, though the scars of years past remained in great measure. In spite of the grave difficulties of her life, and perhaps because of them as well, Mom did find meaning and purpose, and felt enough love and joy to know that God was with her and that he loved her.
During the summer of 1968, at the age of 40, Mom did an amazing thing: she earned her General Education Diploma! She then entered a junior college in September of that same year and began studying Psychology. Eventually, she earned her Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and had original plans to earn her Master’s as well, though that never did come to fruition.
Mom was a social worker for several years and loved all those she cared for very much. In fact, as a youngster of but nine years of age, I remember sometimes feeling jealous of the people she worked with—usually teens. However, even at my young age, I also figured out that working with all of these people who were but strangers to me was the one thing that held my mother together and that helped to keep her from drinking, so I just silently observed and never complained.
One of Mom's most cherished jobs was when she worked at a place called Pisano in Miami, Florida, where she was a live-in housemother for 47 troubled teenage boys, all between the ages of 11 and 18. She stayed there for close to two years when I was about 11 and 12 years old. They all called her “Mother” and loved her dearly. She needed that.
Mom walked tall. She was six feet most of her life. As a seven year-old, I remember jumping on the concrete wall of the Royal Castle hamburger joint in Key West, Florida, exclaiming, “I’m almost as tall as you!” She would laugh a little and I’d jump down. Upon serious reflection and all things considered, I’ve never really been sure if I’ve reached some of the heights she reached in life.
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Before I was born, Mom married three times. After I was born, she married twice. She remained heartbroken all of her life over the loss of her second marriage with Morton Rosenzweig.
Prior to her first marriage in 1950, Mom did some very wild things that landed her in the Federal Reformatory for Women in Alderson, West Virginia, where a few notable bad-girl celebrities lived, to serve a sentence of one year and one day.
It was here that she knew Billie Holiday, the great black jazz singer, who lived in a segregated cottage on the far Eastside. It was here that she taunted Tokyo Rose, the WW II propaganda queen, who lived in the same cottage that Mom did. It was here that she was also befriended by Machine Gun Kelly’s wife, Katherine, who liked Mom and treated her like a kid sister—who gave her lipstick and sweets and food sneaked in from the kitchen, and who taught her little tricks in alteration.
It was also here that she experienced solitary confinement a few times, one of which followed a work assignment when the cottage matron ordered Mom to take steel wool and sandpaper to remove the finish from the front door, which was made of rich mahogany wood. Mom refused to do so. Said she:
“That door was so beautiful that I didn’t want it marred, and the matron had failed to tell me that, after I sanded, the finish would be restored to its natural beauty.”
So it is with the beauty of a soul.
Perhaps the beauty of my mother's soul has never been more fully developed than in her love for me, her only child. I have always felt her unconditional love. Always. Even during the last year of her life between 2001 and 2002, when all else seemed so unsteady about me, I knew her love was constant, and this knowledge strengthened me.
One of my favorite stories told by Mom is that of the day I was born. She said that Dr. Massey, her obstetrician, stated that there was a moment during childbirth when he almost lost her. Mom always chose to believe that he was speaking of the moment during delivery when, in her words, she
“experienced a most peaceful, serene feeling of walking through a field of brilliant, blue [cornflowers].” How reluctant she was to leave that field, but after hearing my infant cries, she was soon fully back again in the delivery room.
Mom loved God’s creations, especially flowers and plants. Her apartment was filled with plants, some of which she attended to for coming on eight years. She also loved to cook and feed people, being innately generous with her food. Cooking and entertaining were among the greatest joys of her life—in latter years especially—for there was little else that she felt capable of doing for others. She never had much to her name—Never! But, what she had, she shared. I know God loves her much for this most natural of divine qualities.
Mom tackled crossword puzzles every day until the day of her stroke in April 2002, which helped to retain her high degree of intelligence to the very end. She appreciated the fine art of playing Scrabble, too, and cheated at it every sly chance she got. She was generally witty, which naturally attracted people to her throughout her life. And, how she enjoyed a good belly laugh! Amazingly, she had no problem retelling the same amusing anecdote several times over, so as to laugh just as hard at the last telling as she had at the first!
She was one of the biggest flirts you ever did see. In fact, during the last couple of weeks of her life in June 2002, she had to make another trip to the hospital. Even in her weakened condition, and after six days without food, she kept eying one young fireman about 28 years in age who worked with several others to transfer her from the nursing home to the hospital. She finally exclaimed to all present:
“He’s cute!” This made everyone laugh and brought a soft blush to the fireman’s face.
Tenderhearted to an amazing degree, Mom cried sweet tears of love and compassion many, many times, as when reading messages of love in cards and letters, either those written to her or by her! She also cried when she was in a state of worry about sick friends, or even when a touching commercial was on. She was, in essence, one big blubbering boob. I think I inherited a little bit of the same from her.
Affectionately known as “Putt-Putt” by her friends at the Martin Luther King Apartments in Tucson, Arizona (for the scooter she rode everywhere she went), Mom became one of the landmark residents there during the last 10 years of her life. This place was one of the most stable and loving homes my mother ever knew. Faithful friendships were made and kept there. And, too, the spillover of love and affection from some of my own beloved friends poured through Mom's life and heart in such a way as to finally help her to find her emotional home. Constancy of love and affection for Mom finally, mercifully, rested with her in abundance as a senior adult.
I know that our Father in Heaven knows perfectly what it is that my mother faced in life. True, she made a series of poor choices to contribute to her difficulties over the course of her nearly 74 years, which also served to create a chasm in her own heart between her and God for much of that time. With empathy, though, I hope that we can all appreciate at least a little of how that kind of thing happens. I especially hope that we will all strive to ensure that a similar fate does not happen to us.
I remain most confident in the teaching that our Father—our most tender parent—will measure out the greatest amount of grace and mercy possible to give my mother (and each of us), as well as the least amount of justice necessary to address any wrongs committed in the flesh.
My mother, Yvonne, was refined symbolically by steel wool and sandpaper all of her days. She is as the choicest and richest of mahogany woods. The natural beauty of her soul is real and deep and eternal. It
will be restored by the touch of the Master’s hand.
Rest in the knowledge of love abounding, dear Mother of mine. May it—“the Wind Beneath Your Wings”—carry you to eternal fields of brilliant, blue cornflowers—where I should like to embrace you again one day.
Happy Mother's Day.
