Of My Mother, and Mothers Like Her
A tribute for mom
In a couple of months, I will be hosting a retirement party of sorts for my mother, a woman who has raised 14 children (12 biological and 2 adopted, 9 boys and 5 girls), homeschooled each of them from their earliest days of learning how to hold scissors, through their high school graduation day when they walked an aisle in cap and gown. And now, after 35 years of homeschooling, her youngest child will graduate in May. Perhaps no one has ever deserved a retirement party more.
And yet, I find myself encountering an impossible dilemma: as one of her homeschooled children, and now as the homeschooling mother of my own five children, how does one honor someone who sacrificed so much, gave so much, of herself to make so much of her children?
How does a daughter express in words both eloquent and true how deeply she understands her mother now? Thirteen years into my own sleep-deprivation and midnight-nursing sessions, in the midst of my own endless days of repeated multiplication tables and discussions of where apostrophes and quotation marks belong, I see her so clearly now.
Though now her reach seems massive – with her 14 children now grown, an additional 9 sons-and-daughters-in-law added to the family by marriage, and 20 grandchildren so far – I know that once upon a time, decades ago, her life felt as hidden and small as mine sometimes does now. What can I say, what can I do, to honor a woman who got up every morning and put on selflessness?
I find that I am left with what Charlotte Mason and Wendi Capehart and Cindy Rollins have taught me: that poetry expresses feelings more deeply than any other words can. I have not much to offer, but such as I have, I give, both in gratitude to my own dear mother, and to the other homeschooling women who have also mothered me, whether in their embodied nearness or through the gift of their offered words on dog-eared pages.
From a second-generation homeschooling mother who is, first and always, a daughter: Thank you, thank you, thank you.
There once was a mother
Who gave me nine brothers
And I can still hear
Star Wars in my ear
Because they watched it
ALL THE TIME.
Then there are the sisters
And all of the whispers
Of the secrets told
In the dark of the night.
Let’s not forget the cows
The dogs and the kittens
But thank God, no chickens
I’m scared of them still.
And most of the days
Are a fuzzy, happy haze
Of Math-U-see
And Abeka.
She started each day
Watching toddlers play
And often they would climb up
To sit on the couch beside her.
Then came snow ice cream
And vocabulary and spelling
Then math and piano
And sometimes a nap.
That’s how she spent her days
For years, as she raised
Nine boys and five girls
And a really big garden.
It was roast on Sundays
Ordering paper and X-rays
To keep the office running
For her husband.
It was moments stolen
To play Freecell alone
Because all of those kids
Were so very loud.
It was late nights awake
As kids got home from a date
And sat on her bed
To tell her about it.
Now she calls her grandkids
To do spelling and verses
Though she’s raised her own kids
She hasn’t stopped teaching.
Her hobbies keep growing
With cheese-making and sewing
Her hands have always
Had something to hold.
Her days are still full
And her life is never dull
With so many people
Her world keeps on growing.
I’ve written this poem
You know, how you do,
To tell you that I
Hope I turn out just like you.
Beka Romm Gordon 2025
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