Billie Thomas here, author of Chloe Carstairs’ soon-to-be-published mystery, Murder on the First Day of Christmas. As we approach the first anniversary of the day my mom passed away, I wanted to take a minute to minute to honor her in some small way. Hopefully, publishing the book we first worked on together will do that too, (more on that here) but this is more personal tribute. And by no means an exhaustive list. Miss you, Mom!
She gave me a life-long love of books.
My best Christmas present ever – even better than my go-cart or Commodore 64 – was a library card in my stocking. I was seven or eight at the time and when I gravely signed the back, I knew this was a Big Deal. It’d be years before I figured out how big. We went to the library every Saturday and I could pick out as many books as I wanted. By the time I was nine, Mom and I had an unofficial book club where Nancy Drews, Judy Blumes and Agatha Christies were enthusiastically traded and discussed. Reading and writing have been constant joys in my life and my Mom deserves all the credit.
She turned off the TV.
For several years, the TV remained mostly dark in my house. My parents watched the news and “60 Minutes”. My sister and I could only watch one hour a day during the school year and slightly more during the summer. That was it. No daytime TV at all except a few Saturday morning cartoons. Yeah, I hated having to fake-laugh when kids recounted SNL sketches, but that dark TV helped make me creative, healthy and able to entertain myself.
She cooked.
My mom wasn’t a fancy cook, but some of my favorite meals were hers. Spaghetti. Pot roast. Pork chops with a ring of crispy onions on top. Fried chicken for my birthday. She kept it all pretty healthy. Breakfast, always, sugar cereals, never. A side salad at every meal. Family dinners were the standard and we read Trivial Pursuit cards at the table. I don’t know why. She also understood that it was sometimes necessary to delay breakfast till ten when Taco Bell opened. Loved that.
She taught me to be a girl’s girl.
I don’t know how she managed this, since my dad was her whole world, but Mom always stressed the importance of cultivating friendships with girls and never letting guys come before them. (Husbands notwithstanding.) She said the only woman you couldn’t trust or respect was one that didn’t trust or respect other women. I completely agree.
She was willing to be the bad cop.
Any journals I kept before 1988 only had two or three entries in them, all detailing with Anne Frank-caliber anguish show stupid, cruel, unreasonable, lame, wrong or mean my mom was. Once I called her a “bourgeois bitch” – I forget why. And I’m sure I communicated those feelings in thousands of other ways over the years She didn’t care. Even if it hurt her feelings, she didn’t let it stop her from enforcing rules, teaching discipline and saying no when she needed to. You only have to meet or work alongside someone who thinks the world is their juice box to know why that’s important.
As I said, not an exhaustive list but a heartfelt one. I hope she’s somewhere where she knows these things and is proud of the job she did raising me. I miss her every day.