Remembering Mother

 May 31st, 1914..somewhere in Tipton County, Tn......Maizie was born to a poor family who lived in the country and who already had too many children. While still just an infant Minnie and Charles Volz adopted her and one of her brothers, Joe.

 When she was a young teenager her father, whom she adored, left her and her mother to marry a younger woman who happened to be her mothers cousin.

In 1931 at the age of seventeen she met and married Edward Verious Stallings.

He was not a good husband or father...in 1945, shortly after their fifth child was born he hired someone to drive her and the children from Houston, where they were living, back to Covington, Tn...to her mothers. To my knowledge that was the last time she saw him....she and her children were left to live with her mother in a two room area in what had once been her home. The large, two-story house had been purchased by her mothers' brother-in-law and turned into four apartments which Minnie managed in return for a place to live.

She struggled through about eleven years there..for several years she sold tickets at the local movie house. She took a course in some kind of office procedures and later worked in a doctors office.

  In 1956 Bob and I brought her and my three younger siblings to live with us in Mena Ar. After about a year she wanted to go back to Houston to live so Bob took her and the two younger children to Houston where she worked for the same company for 26 years...


After retiring she stayed depressed and became ill ... The summer of 1983 Bob and I drove down to Houston from Chicago and brought her back to live with us....she lived for another 10 years. In 1993 at the age if 79 she died from emphasyma. She had been bed-ridden for nearly a year...near the end her oxygen-deprived mind became impaired..she was fearful and could not sleep.  I became so sleep-deprived that I was forced to put her in a nursing home.  She was less than a mile from our house and I was there with her every day but she felt as though she had been deserted again. She said to me "My mother did not want me, my husband did not want me and now my children do not want me."...In my head I knew that wasn't true..I had not deserted her...but it broke my heart for her to feel that way....and had I known that she would live only three weeks longer I could've held out.

She was a feisty woman...very small in stature...never weighed over 100 lbs. and,  in spite of everything,  had a sense of humor.   She never had a car; never  learned to drive... rode the bus to and from work every day, rain or shine; never had her own home; had very little security... Life was not good to her...but one thing I know...she was not alone her last 10 years;  she was loved and cared for;  she had security.

I love you mother.