When Every Day Was Labor Day

Remembering the nurse's aide who made me

For more than twenty years, my mother’s last work badge has hung above my first one in a dangling bouquet over my desk.

She was a nurse’s aide, later called a nursing assistant, at the hospital in my hometown. I was “a journalist who gets paid to write .” I’m quoting my parents. They never tired of describing my job in this way to friends, co-workers, and neighbors in our working-class town.

“Our girl, in the newspapers,” Mom loved to say. “Imagine that.” Every time one of my stories or essays ran, she’d buy at least three copies from the newsstand on Main Street. Five if my name was on the cover of The Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine. My father would point to the growing stacks and say, “If there’s ever a fire….”

My story was my mother’s to tell. I often talk about my father’s vow to send all four of us kids to college, but it was my mother, Janey Schultz, who changed her life to launch mine.

When I was a junior in high school, my parents decided that, even with Dad’s union wages as a utility worker, the only way I would become the first in our family to go to college was for Mom to get a job. For 16 years, she had been a stay-at-home mom raising four kids. For me—for my big dreams--she returned to the hospital job she’d held before she became pregnant with me and married my father.

(In 2012, I had the chance to thank Bruce Springsteen in person for his song, The River. When I told him it was the story of my parents’ lives, he took my hand, thanked me, and said, “Did they get to see how you turned out?” Nobody had ever asked me that before.)

I mentioned two essays ago that my mother was petite—just four feet, eleven inches tall. For many years she worked on the mental health floor, as she called it, and took care of men who were violent and could easily overpower her. On the hottest days of summer, she would sometimes come home from work wearing a cardigan to hide the new bruises on her arms.

This enraged my father, and he would demand that she quit. She was done taking orders from him. This was the only job she was qualified to do, she said, and she liked it. She especially loved her patients, even the ones who occasionally hurt her. If they knew better, she said, they’d do better.

I had seen bruises on my mother’s arms before, when I was a little girl and our family was in a constant state of crisis. Now I was a teenager, and my mother’s wounds were inflicted by strangers. These were people she was trying to help. I had started reading The New Yorker and Ms. Magazine. I couldn’t understand why she put up with it.

One exchange with her haunts me. I was days away from starting college, full of nervous energy and layer upon layer of guilt over leaving Mom behind. She was a woman of deep faith, with three more children to raise. She had no time for my misgivings. So, I picked a fight.

“How much suffering can God expect you to endure?” I said, pointing to a fresh bruise on her arm. “If you don’t stick up for yourself, who will?” I knew I was crossing a line, but she didn’t lecture me about God. Instead, she reprimanded me for diminishing the value of her work.

“Every day, I am helping people,” she said. “I am making a difference, no matter what you think of me.”

I was mortified and ashamed. She had no time for that, either, and waved off my stammered apology. “You get this one chance,” she said. “Go to college and be somebody.”

In the last five years of her life, Mom became a hospice home care worker. She loved spending eight hours a day with a single patient. She cooked their favorite recipes and listened to them for hours as they reminisced with photo albums and their favorite music. Mom’s colleagues often joked that when Janey showed up, people lived longer.

When she was 61, she was diagnosed with a lung disease and eventually had to stop working. We were devastated. Mom rallied. She told me she knew this disease would kill her and she wanted to do some things before she met Jesus. This unleashed a sense of adventure in her that I’d never seen before. We planned a trip to Ireland—she had flown only twice in her life—and paid in advance for the wheelchair and oxygen tanks she’d need while we were there.

She also enrolled in a class for dried flower arranging, which was a bigger deal than it sounds. Mom had always claimed she was not a creative person, but with time running out she took a chance and discovered otherwise. Working with dried flowers brought her so much joy.

This was the note she tucked behind her first creation:

July 25, 1999.

My daughter, Connie,

I knew when I was making my very first dried flowers (framed), that I was giving it to you! So there is alot of love, fun, enthusiasm, and most of all a Mother’s Love in this gift! I hope you like it.

I love you,

Mom

Mom, always with the smiley face next to her name.

Two months later, she was gone. She died on the day we were supposed to leave for Ireland.

More than 800 people showed up for her calling hours. Many of them were her former patients; others were family members of those who had died. A very tall man told me that every time Mom saw him, she stood on a chair so that she could hug him.

My father spent the rest of his life haunted by the belief that his decades-long exposure to asbestos had killed her. Mom had anticipated my father’s unraveling. “If Dad ever blames himself for this,” she said, pointing to her chest, “you tell him nobody knows what caused it, and that includes him.” I must have told Dad this a hundred times.

“She really said that?” he’d say, often with tears in his eyes.

“She really did.”

We agreed it was so like her to think she should have the last word.

“That job,” he often said. “It changed your mother.”

Last week, I came across this photo of 6-year-old me with my younger sisters, Leslie and Toni. We were playing in the inflatable pool that Dad bought at Hill’s Department Store. I smiled at the memory of him blowing it up, and the sight of our flip flops piled in the grass. What caught my eye, though, was the line of laundry hanging just behind us.

Photo by Charles C. Schultz

Like generations of women before her, my mother was a working mom long before she got paid for it. So many of my childhood memories are wrapped up in images of her pegging clothes to the line, a wicker basket of wet laundry at her feet.

Six decades later, that image of my mother became a pivotal scene in my first novel, The Daughters of Erietown. Twelve-year-old Sam is looking for her mom, Ellie. She walks toward the rows of clothesline and spots Ellie’s worn-out Keds sneakers under a bedsheet that is billowing in the wind. Her mother picks up the basket full of clean clothes, but as soon as she hears Sam’s news, she drops it. Everything is about to come crashing down.

Another memory, and a hard one, but this time I rewrote the ending.

Mom would have loved that.

“My girl,” she would say, still alive. “Look what she gets paid to do.”