Mother's Day Tribute Part 3: My MawMaw

My students find it hilarious that I have a MawMaw and I am willing to call her that in public.  It doesn't bother me in the least.  My MawMaw is one cool chick, which is why she is making an appearance on my blog.  My MawMaw has always been like a second mom to me.  She helped raise me and my siblings from day 1.  Not in the "my parents are too busy for me so the grandparents must take over" kind of way.  She literally lives next door.  So, my childhood was about evenly split between my house and hers.  Like all good grandparents, she is a mixture of leniency and discipline.  She has never hesitated to put us in our place.  I remember her popping me on the back of the leg with a fly swatter.  WATCH OUT CPS! At the same time, her house was THE place to be on the weekends.  We each had a night - mine was Saturday.  Saturday night at sunset, I would walk over and we would go rent a movie and then pig out on junk food.  We would watch all kinds of stuff.  When it got too bad, she would hurry to run in front of the TV so I couldn't see whatever was happening.  The next morning, it was whatever I wanted for breakfast before I had to be back home in time for church.

There are so many good stories about my Mawmaw that I don't even know where to start.  Before our neighborhood got busy, we would stand out on her porch and look at the stars.  She would point out the abnormal ones and tell me they were UFOs.  Once I got old enough - I tried to convince her they were Russian spies.  ((We also can't talk about that on the phone - it may flag us with the government - for realz) During the Y2K scare, she had an entire sunroom/secret storehouse built on to store food for when the technology crashed.

My favorite stories are of her and my PawPaw.  In some of them, they were trying to wring each other necks and in others, two teenagers in the 50's falling in love.  I love looking at old pictures of them together.  They were both so beautiful. Inside and out - honest, stubborn, hard working and dedicated.  Both of them had their flaws and there were plenty of times they could've called it off, but they stuck it out and were married for almost 50 years.  And there has never been one doubt in my mind (despite all the stories of their fights and near-breakups) that my Mawmaw loved PawPaw as much as the day they got married.  She is the matriarch of our family.  We can all be mad at each other and every single one will go to her first.  She is our rock when things get tough and she is the one that keeps us connected to the family and to our roots.  It's because of her that we have rice at 90% of our meals (as all good rice families should) and the reason we always end up laying aside our differences to make peace.  I think I speak for the entire family when I saw we have the best Mawmaw there is and we can't imagine a world without her.