Well, she picked up my gift first, as soon as I saw the box as she was opening it, I wanted to run! Evidently, when I was buying her the Corning Ware dish, I had accidently picked up the wrong box, the one that I bought was the next to the smallest! She let me know about it too. I tried to explain my honest mistake, but it didn't help matters. Then she opened her box of candy, well, you can imagine, they weren't Millionaires. Then she got to the camera. Well, finally! This one's got to be right, she's been saying for months that she wanted a Kodak. Well, how were we to know that to her, Kodak was synonomous with Camera in her mind? "This isn't the one that I wanted, I wanted the one that James Garner has on his commercials, not Michael Landon!" Oh well, so much for good intentions. But, there was still the dishwasher! We could at least help clean up this year. We tried, we loaded it wrong.
My mother and I had the first and last real argument that year.

Early the next year, I managed to buy a trailer and move it onto part of our land where my grandparents house had once stood. By then my mother and I had cleared the air between us, and even though neither one of us would admit it, we were both excited that we were moving out of the house. We still had our little squabbles, but at least then, we both knew that we could just get up and go home if we got into an argument. But really there were very few disagreements after that. The stress that had been there from living in the same house had been taken away, and things were able to get back to what passed for normal in our family.

As the years went on, there were less and less arguments between my mother and I. When we did argue, it was usually about my daughter, especially when she would undermine my authority. I would tell her she couldn't do or have something, and my mother would go behind my back and get it for her, or help her do whatever it was she wanted to do. But for the most part, we even began to grow a lot closer. Her beliefs about religion even began to change. We finally got to the point where we could discuss it without fighting about it. She even started to listen to my thoughts and the reasoning behind my beliefs, where before, she would simply tell me that I was wrong, she was right, end of story. She even agreed with some of my thoughts. Actually what was really beginning to happen was that we had both gotten to the point where we could open our minds and discuss things instead of trying to prove ourselves right or the other wrong. We even discovered that a lot of our real deep beliefs were actually the same. I think that this came to a shock to both of us, and we got to where we really enjoyed our conversations on the matter.

My mother had always had health problems and over the years she got progressivly worse. She had terrible asthma and emphasima. She got to the point where it was even difficult to get ready to go to church without stopping and sitting down and resting two or three times during the process. As she was getting worse, it was easier to help her out. Things didn't have to be quite so perfect any more, and she appreciated any help that we gave her.

During this time I learned more about my mother than I had in all my years. I had always known that when my dad had asked my grandparents about marrying my mother, they had flatly refused, so my mother and father eloped. This left behind a lot of bad feelings on my mother's side of the family. I made the remark one time about the fact that she should go see her mother in California. because they were talking about moving her into a nursing home. She was over 90 years old and had lived on her own since 1962 when my grandfather had died. I could tell that she was hesitant about going out there and I asked her why. She sat down and told me that her mother still held it against her that she had run off and gotten married without their permission, and it really hurt her too bad to go out there to my grandmother's house and see all of my aunt's and uncle's and cousin's pictures hanging all over the house, while the ones of our family were stuck in a box somewhere. I didn't know about any of this since the last time that I had been out there, I was about twelve or thirteen years old, and I don't remember that much about it.

She also told me a lot of other things about her life that really came to a shock to me. Some things that were really very personal to her, that it was obvious that she'd never said to anyone else. She never actually said that what she told me wasn't to be repeated, and it wasn't anything that would really matter to anyone else, but for some strange reason, I've never said a word about them, and I know I never will. It's almost like having a small piece of my mother locked up inside of me that will always be only mine and hers. I guess that's one of the main reasons that we really became so close eventually.