Mom wanted mashed potatoes and thin spaghetti with plain tomato sauce last night for supper. She loves that combination, and I could never imagine why. As I was picking up her dishes after she ate, she told me why.
“When you guys were kids, I would scrape off the little bits that were left on your plates and put them in a container. I didn’t want to waste anything. I’d eat them for lunch. I had these two things in a container one time and I liked them together.”
Whoa.
My mother ate our table scraps.
Here’s some backstory on us. We didn’t have much when we were a young family. It’s safe to say we were the working poor. My parents raised the three of us on my dad’s hard-earned income, which was low.
My mother was a child of World War II and remembers vividly what it was like to live with rationing of aluminum, nylons, and yes, food among many other things. It’s also safe to say that one of the big reasons we survived financially as a family is because my mother stretched dad’s paycheck as far as it could possibly be stretched. She made our clothes, clipped coupons and mailed refund slips to Kankakee, IL every week, washed and re-used plastic bags, canned 80 percent of what came from Dad’s garden and froze the rest. No matter how worried or tired she was on any given day.
And she sacrificed for us. A lot.
Was it absolutely necessary for her to eat our table scraps? Did she have to do without the many other things I was too oblivious and self-absorbed to notice? Probably not. Or maybe. I’ll never know. All I know is that sacrifice is in my mother’s DNA.
How many times in the last two years have I been frustrated with my extremely strong-willed mother as her heart weakens and her body fails her? How many times have I longed to be her daughter—just her daughter—and not her caregiver?
The truth is, as her daughter, sacrifice is in my DNA too. I just don’t do it as willingly, stoically or gracefully as she did.
You see, I have a mother who put my needs above her own for six decades. Sacrifice and love go hand in hand for her. The story she told me last night is a profound lesson about that. One that came when I needed to hear it.