I Gave You a Happy Mother's Day

Though it is early morning hours, and I should be in bed, something keeps pushing me to write a blog about my mother. I have no idea what it is about, but I guess it will come to me as I go along, my fingers on the keys, new words forming before me.
My mother was the second child of a two child family. Her sister was many years older than her. I guess mom must have been a change of life baby, or something like that. Her mother died when she was just a teenager.
I remember mom always telling stories of her childhood. She would say how horrible her father was to her, and she would never have had anything if it were not for her older sister. She would wear her brassieres until they cut into her shoulders, and they bled, then her sister would make their father buy her new ones.
Mom married sometime in her young years. The story was that he was an abusive person, but she had to get away from her father, so she married. When she became pregnant, she left him and never told him she was with child. Her step mom put her into a psychiatric hospital to keep her safe from her husband. The divorce happened sometime during that time I am guessing at. Of course, pregnant women were not supposed to be in mental facilities, so the pregnancy was kept hush, hush. Mom would tell us that the other patients knew she was pregnant, so they would sneak her extra food, like boiled eggs or bananas, so that she would have better nourishment for the baby. I do not know how long she stayed in this mental facility, but I do not think that she could have stayed that long.
After the baby was born, he supposedly became very sick, requiring hospitalization. Mother had to work, so when the baby was released, her step-mother and father picked him up. My mother said, that she had to sign papers for the baby's release, but after she signed them, her parents put in a paragraph that she had agreed to them adopting her son. I always thought odd of this, because it seems to far fetched to be true, but it was probably 60 years ago, and single girls just didn't raise babies by themselves back then.
I still do not know why I feel like I am supposed to write this story.
My mother died the day after mother's day in 1992. Though I know these were not the last words she said to me, it seems in my mind that they were. She was in the hospital, and it was morning. Monday morning. I had stayed with her through the night, tending to her needs. When she saw it was morning, she smiled up at me and said, "I gave you a happy Mother's Day, didn't I".
She told me off and on through the morning that I should go home to be with my children. I had a six hour drive to make, but I was not worried about going home. Mom was too sick, and I did not want to leave her. She was restless and did not calm down until I agreed to go home at a certain time. We watched some dog show on television. "That one looks like (her dog)". Yes mom, he does. It was a competition show, where the dogs are judged by beauty and how they walk and such. When it was over, she said, "Now you can go." I told her good bye, and I loved her, tucked her in well, and left when my sister got there.
It was a long ride home. Of course I thought about her most of the way. It was before cell phones, so when I stopped at the last rest area, just over an hour from my home, I called to check on her. My older sister was at the hospital, along with my youngest sister. "She's doing fine, don't worry", was the message that was relayed to me. An hour later, the phone began to ring as soon as I walked into the kitchen door of my home. It was my oldest sister, Ramona. "Mom died about a half hour ago."
Mom knew that morning that she was going to pass over to the other world. She wanted me to go home to be with my children, so they would not be alone when they heard she had gone. She willed herself to live six more hours so I would be home when the call came that she was gone.
Those words, "I gave you a happy Mother's Day", actually meant, "I willed myself to live one more day, so I would not die on Mother's Day, so that you would always have a Happy Mother's Day because I did not leave you on that day."
That is not the story that was running through my head before I wrote this. Actually, many memories were rustling about the cobwebs of my old brain. I thought that was what I was going to write about.
Maybe another time.
huggggggssssssssssss