My mom wanted a sweet little girl that loved pretty dresses and hair bows.  She wanted someone who would hold her hand and snuggle up in her lap to read a story.  Instead, she got me.  I was a mystery to her.  She didn't understand why I would rather play in the rain ditches catching crawdads and getting all muddy than play with "my dolls."  (I loved bugs, and snakes and worms and spiders.)

I say, "My dolls," when really they were her dolls.  Every year at Christmas, she would buy me a doll.  Sad.  She couldn't really afford to do that, and I didn't want them.  She asked me once what I wanted for Christmas.  "I want an erector set," I told her.  I got another doll.  My brother got the erector set.  My mom thought I would really want the doll she never got when she was growing up.

She never gave up.  I think she thought that if she was persistent that maybe I would turn into a feminine little girl and give up my tom-boy ways.  I never did.  And she never figured me out.  She had grown up in the middle of five children and her mother didn't pay much attention to her--Gran was too busy milking cows, canning beans and trying to hold life and limb together back in l920.

My mom tried to give me what she had missed.  What she had hoped for and wanted.  And I was just a kid that had no clue.  She was as big a mystery to me as I was to her.

Once, I caught a crawdad 'mama' that had a bunch of eggs hanging on to her tail, and put her under the refrigerator in the water drip pan. (You would have to be as old as me to know about a refrigerator drip pan.)  I just wanted to keep it, so I didn't tell mama.  The eggs hatched and the next morning there were hundreds of little crawdads crawling around on the kitchen floor.  My mom wasn't pleased.  I was ecstatic.   She handed me a broom, but I picked them up one by one.

I had a great mom.  She tried really hard.  I am who I am because of her.  I owe her a lot--even though we never understood each other.  But I wore the dresses she sewed for me.  Frilly ones.