Story for the Week
I didn’t write a new blog post last weekend. It was a weekend for self-care—time with friends, time with my private thoughts. The next five weeks will be hard: my mom’s Celebration of Life and memorial service were today, our first Father’s Day without my husband Dennis, my birthday, our wedding anniversary, and Dennis’s Celebration of Life and memorial service on his birthday. I needed last weekend, and we should never feel guilty about taking care of ourselves instead of doing the things we feel we should be doing instead.
So what I’ve been reading these past two weeks, over and over and over, were the words of remembrance that I read for my mom this morning. We all miss her, and I think publishing those words here shares her with everyone.
In loving memory of Judi Lisak, May 24, 1941-March 24, 2021.
We will love you always. 💖
They say it takes a village to raise a child. In my mom’s case, I think she raised the village. A lot of my friends call me the neighborhood mom, but my mom was the ultimate neighborhood mom with far fewer resources than I have today. I could literally tell stories all day about Mom, so to celebrate her today, I’ll try to hit some of the best highlights.
I’m sure all of you know how active Mom was…in everything. She became a Girl Scout Leader when my Brownie leader quit, and she stayed a leader long after I finished Girl Scouts. For countless years, we had cases upon cases of cookies in our living room because she was also the Cookie Mom. I went to church camp a year before I was allowed to because they asked her to be the craft person, and she said she would do it if she could bring me along. And she stayed the craft person and a counselor for many years after.
She was the Taffy Apple Lady at my grade school. She was a room mom. She was a Sunday School teacher and a preschool teacher at church. She was on the bowling league, Tri-M’s, Sociables, Crafters, Ladies Guild, she helped with the Messenger. I’m sure I’m forgetting plenty. All of this while raising three kids…and she didn’t drive. I don’t know how I would do all of the things she did without being able to take myself places, and I only have one kid. A busy kid…but only one.
Mom would do anything that she could for us. She walked us to the library every week in the summer, and I grew to love reading as much as she did. She spent plenty of Saturday nights putting Cindi’s and my hair up in those painful pink foam curlers so we’d look nice for church on Sunday. She sprayed me full blast with a hose once to finally teach me not to eat ice straight out of the freezer.
She popped popcorn for Halloween, and everyone knew that it was safe because it was from the Lisaks. She let us put pup tents in the yard when we wanted to try them out before the overnight we had with the Girl Scout troop. She welcomed every single friend we brought home, and no one called her Mrs. Lisak. That was too formal for her. She wanted to be Mrs. L instead. And several of them even called her Mom.
She raised us and all our friends well. And she didn’t stop raising us just because we became adults. When I went away to college, my parents would come to visit with care packages—Mountain Dew, gummy bears, Oreo cookies—enough to sustain me AND all my friends (who were always available to help lug everything to my dorm room). When I moved out of the house, she told me that I would always be welcomed home, but if I moved out and paid rent somewhere else, I would pay rent if I came home. Fair is fair after all.
When I had to have my tonsils removed, I couldn’t be left alone for the first 24 hours because I was 29, and it’s a lot riskier for an adult. Mom spent several nights with me, cooking soft foods, making sure I ate, making sure I had milk when I started coughing, making sure I had my medication on time, playing Backgammon and Scrabble. When she left for a day to go to church and pick up some things at the store, she cried because she felt guilty leaving me alone. And the whole time she stayed with me, she slept on the floor, letting my cats use her as their own personal jungle gym. When I asked her why she didn’t just sleep in the bedroom since I was on the sleeper sofa in the living room, she said, “Because if you need something, you can’t call for me.”
That was my mom…always thinking about what other people needed.
She was with me through the best of times: dances, graduations, my marriage, and especially after I had my own daughter (and immediately became less of a priority). And she was with me through the worst: breakups, a miscarriage, Dennis’s cancer diagnosis, and when we lost him in September. She was there for it all, and she felt it all right along with me because she said no matter how old I got, I would always be her baby girl.
I always said Mom had more faith in her little finger than I have in my whole body. She was able to just give everything to God no matter what. When I was 10, she had bypass surgery. She had been a smoker, and someone stepped on her foot at the church picnic. When it didn’t heal, they found the blockages. She spent a lot of time in the hospital, and she was on a lot of medication when she came home. She quit smoking, but at one point, she told my dad that she couldn’t teach her kids not to take drugs if she was taking so many pills every day, and that if the Lord wanted her to live, she would do it without the pills. And she dumped them. I remember vividly that I was so terrified, and I prayed, asking God not to let my mom die.
Apparently, He had plans for her in those 45 years. She got three more kids when Cindi and Rich and I got married, and she loved our spouses as much as she loved us. She got a lot of what she called her grand-fur babies—too many to count. And she got four awesome grandkids. She loved being a grandma, probably more than she loved being a mom. She even embraced Dennis’s daughter and her family because our extended families were automatically her family, and that was true of all of our in-laws.
I think Mom taught all of us so many things that you can’t learn in school: how to laugh and enjoy the life that God has blessed us with, how to be there for others, and mostly how to love because she really loved all of us with her whole heart, and the love she and my dad had….well, theirs really is what you find in fairy tales.
When we were going through Mom’s closet, we found a poem that I wrote about 25 years ago when Dad asked me to write something for their anniversary. Their 58th anniversary was April 20, and I know the sentiment has never changed, so Dad asked if I would read the poem today.
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