I met my mother-in-law Margie when I was only eighteen years old, when she and my at-the-time boyfriend’s dad Ed came to campus to visit and took us out to dinner. I didn’t know then that she would be my mother-in-law and grandmother to my children, but she already had three daughters-in-law and ten grandchildren at the time. She was the quintessential grandma type – white hair, bright clothing, always had earrings and shoes to match each outfit, and it was easy to get her talking about anything. Seventeen years older than my mom, she was old enough to be my grandma, too – and in fact, my husband still recounts all the years his friends and classmates would say “Jimmy, your grandma’s here!” when it was really his mom. A few months later when we were moving out of the dorm to head to our separate parents’ homes for the summer, Ed, Margie, my mom, Jim and I went out to lunch (Angelo’s, another icon of my life that has passed from this earth) before heading out of town. Margie asked my mom “Do you work out?” and the chasm between their ages was apparent, as my mom struggled to decide which question she was meant to respond to – was it weightlifting at the gym or employment outside the home? Of course, Margie meant did my mom have a job outside the home, which she did, and Mom picked the right answer based on how she would answer her own parents, and they were off getting to know each other.
When our daughter was born, we were living in Kentucky, and so when we held her baptism ceremony it was at a church there, and we were lucky enough to have lots of our family travel and stay there to be with us for the event. We were on the schedule for that Sunday’s service, and so Jim and I sat in the front row with our (mercifully sleeping) baby, and the family filed in behind us. As I sat with Esme’s face over my shoulder, trying to keep her bonelessly sleeping body upright in a dress three times longer than she was, I heard Margie say to my dad, “Hello, Mark, how are you?” and Dad respond “Well, I hate wearing a tie.” Margie said “I feel exactly the same about pantyhose.” She always said exactly what she thought, and anybody who didn’t like it could just deal with it. No matter where she was or who was around, if she ever mentioned menopause, it was always “the change” in a carrying stage whisper, with her hand standing to attention on the exact wrong side of her mouth if she was intending to be secretive.
No matter what we were up to she was always up to help, and she wanted to be there for everything. When we decided to stop the renting merry-go-round and buy a house, she “sold” us two acres of her property for a dollar. Then, when we were out of town or busy, she would take care of our cats while we were gone. When I was pregnant with our first child, she helped with yard work and housework, and after he was born, she was always willing to babysit, even if I wasn’t often willing to leave the child. When we moved six hours away, she hated that drive with a burning passion, but she did it multiple times a year during the six years we lived there, so she could see her grandchildren and they could really know her. She drove down at least three times as we waited for our daughter to be born so she could stay with our son while we were at the hospital. She was there when each of the children learned to walk. When we moved back to Michigan, she was always happy to see us and would look after the children on the rare occasions we did something without them. When Grandma came to stay with the children, they were allowed to stay up late watching TV, she would play ball with them in the yard, and she would make them feel grown up and needed – to show her where things were and how they worked and more. She always attended concerts and events, beaming with pride in her grandkids. I wish she could have been there to see our children graduate from high school, college, graduate school. I wish she could have seen them perform in even one marching band competition. I wish she was here to see the successes they have achieved on their way to becoming the actually quite wonderful people and self-supporting adults they are today.
Margie was born in 1935 in Michigan, the eleventh of twelve children. Her father died when she was only eleven years old, and her mother then began working nights in a factory. Margie was first married at the age of nineteen, had her first three children at the ages of nineteen, twenty-one and twenty-three. Her first husband died when she was only twenty-five, leaving her a widow with three young children. She was married a second time at the age of twenty-seven, to my husband’s father, and then had three more children, two when she was twenty-nine (not twins!) and my husband when she was thirty-seven. She was fifty-seven when Ed passed away a few months before her mother, and we lost Margie to lung cancer when she was seventy-nine. She had quit smoking more than twenty years before her diagnosis. She passed away on the day of our son’s first marching band parade. She had heard him play the tuba and the guitar in a few middle school concerts before she died, and she had heard our daughter play the piano in a few recitals, but she never got the chance to see so much of their growing up years. We remember her all the time – the things she would say, the expressions on her face, how she always had a stick of gum, how gambling wasn’t even taking a chance for her because she always won, how loving she was, how much she enjoyed especially our children, but really, anyone’s children!
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