MOMMA

 

I should have been more caring. I should have been more understanding. I should have been more appreciative. I should have been more affectionate. My mother deserved more. 

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Momma was a talented seamstress who made all my clothes while I was growing up. She even made my pajamas. When I needed a costume for a school play, she made me a beautiful green gown and a peach ruffled party dress. She was always available to help any of the neighbors in our apartment building with mending and fixing on her treadle Singer sewing machine. 

She couldn’t read or write in English, so she attended evening classes in Taft High School. She reached a small academic success which gave her great pleasure.

When I married, she loved to visit. Because prices in the East Bronx tended to be lower than in Queens, Momma would visit laden with bags and bags of stuff. She would also arrive with her own baked apple cake, strudel, rugelach and honey cake. Her other specialty was potato knishes which she would often make in my kitchen. It would amaze me to watch her stretch the dough across my long kitchen table, making the dough stretch bigger and bigger and thinner and thinner. Then she filled it with a potato and onion mixture, shaped it, cut it and baked it and the result was a culinary treasure.

My father had an ongoing relationship with a neighbor in my parents” building. My father cast a magic spell that made people honor him. He was always the dapper dressed, and entertaining man on the block. I never realized how hard my mother’s life must have been. Now I see the domestic scene in a new light. She was the victim who never got her “me too moment.”

Ethyl Haber

May 2022