Sheila

When I was growing up, I had more than one mom.

One mother, when giving birth to me, told the nurse, Sister Monica, not to wake up the doctor for my arrival because “I have been through this before.” Indeed, she had.  I was her tenth child.  Photos of my growing up years are few and far between.  My baby book has the entries Mom made when she was in the hospital with me.  The rest of the pages are blank.  Make no mistake. I am grateful for the constant presence my stay-at-home mother gave me growing up.  My biological mother was a very talented, intelligent woman.

My other mother, my sister, Sheila, came and went a lot in my life.  She was 16 years older than me so by the time I started to be able to say her name,  “goodbye” was also a word I had to use.  I have a photo of my very young toddler self clinging to Sheila as she told me goodbye so she could go back to college in another state. Even all these years later, that photo makes me weep.

Sheila was no ordinary sister.  One of my brothers contrasted two of our sisters once.  One, when baking a cake, would let him lick out the bowl after she had scraped it clean.  If Sheila were the baker, though, she would let him lick off the beaters from the electric mixer and then dip them back in the cake batter so he could have more.

I remember one time when I had learned to play a little song on the piano, Sheila celebrated the event by making me a little marshmallow snowman.  The marshmallows formed the body, stacked three high , snowman style, and chocolate chips made the eyes, nose and buttons down the white shirt front.

One time when we went to town and Sheila spotted a smudge on my face, Sheila convinced me a spit bath wasn’t such a terrible thing from her because, she told me, her saliva tasted like orange juice.

I was so impressed by the Catholic  picture Bible that Sheila sent me in the mail in 1976 that I asked her if she would send me enough copies so I could give one to everybody in my school.  The entire learning institution had only 8 students total, in grades 1-8 in my remote one-room country school, but still, I’m sure those Bibles weren’t cheap, but Sheila said yes and the Lutheran students in my school  were soon paging through their own Catholic picture Bibles.

I learned to write letters and address envelopes by writing to Sheila.  Writing was our chief means of communication;  long-distance phone calls were expensive and these were the days before the World Wide Web.   When I turned 13, Sheila wrote me a letter about how life gets better after 13 which gave me a lot of hope.  Sheila was often a lone voice crying out to me saying I was smart, I was beautiful, I was worth something when my mirror and other people in my life were saying something far different.

When I started college, Sheila mailed me a teapot and the makings for red raspberry tea .  When I finished college, got married and had a son, Sheila mailed my son a large conch shell she had found near the ocean.

Sheila came home to die from cervical cancer in 1999.  I had the privilege of cooking for her and helping her with tasks she could no longer do like brushing her hair and bathing .

My biological mom died in 2002.

I am so grateful I had two moms in a world where self sacrificing servanthood is in short supply.  Those two women helped me survive my isolation and I shall never forget them.