Each day that passes reminds me that time is fleeting and fragile. My dear mom, Doris Kennington is 89 years old and the family is planning on a big celebration for her 90th birthday in August of 2008. Mother is an incredible woman who has lived through some very unique experiences in her life, one of which always astonishes me when I think about it. "When mother was a little girl, her mother, Mom, was married to a guy who owned a ranch in Colorado. She had five children with her on the ranch and her husband was very cruel especially to the two older boys. The boys had already left and returned to Kansas City, where Mom had relatives living when Mom finally had enough and decided to leave. They actually hitch-hiked all the way from the mountains in Colorado to Kansas City. Can you imagine hitch-hiking with three small children clear across the country in the 1920's? Mother said they rode in bread trucks and all other kinds of vehicles on the way. Mom was clearly a remarkable woman in her own right but this post is going to be about my mother, Doris Kennington.
Thoughts about how to best tell mother's story is still floating about in my head so I am not sure how best to do it. Mother was born in Kansas City in 1918 and had one older sister Dorothy and three brothers, Carlile, Durb, and Bob. Their father was an engineer with the rail-road and was gone from home quite a bit. When their dad was home, things were good financially but when he was gone, things got really tough. Finally one day he just disappeared and they never saw him or heard from again until they were all grown. They grew up thinking he was dead.
Eventually the family moved to Grand Junction, Colorado, where my grandmother, Mom operated a pastry shop. Mother remembers delivering bread, pies and cakes in a little basket to homes when she was just a girl. Later she remembers coming home from school to mountains of pots and pans waiting to be washed. When she was just 17 she married our dad, Coll Eugene Catt and moved from a comfortable life to one of hardship.
What followed were years of all kinds of trials, times where she went hungry so her five children could eat, the washing machine being sold for a load of animal feed, driving on country roads to church in a Model A Ford with tires so thin they would have gone flat if she had run over a burning cigarette. The time she had to sell all our furniture to buy bus tickets to take us from McCamey, Texas back to Grand Junction, Colorado because her husband, our dad had gone to find work and failed to send money or communicate where he was. Or the time she asked him to send her money so she could buy all five of us kids winter coats but he sent expensive photos of himself instead. Or the time when he called her on the phone and told her he was married to another woman while still married to mother, asking for understanding how he could love them both and to help him figure out a way he could have both.
Why I said all that is to say, she survived all that and never talked about those hardships with her children. She taught us to love the Lord Jesus Christ as our Saviour and to love each other and our philandering dad. She kept us fed, warm, clean, and educated in times of great stress and enormous money challenges, and we never knew what she was going through until it was over. She had a heart so big, she never had favorites that we ever knew of. With each child her heart just expanded to love another one, whether it be a child, grandchild, great grandchild or great great grandchild. She taught us to work hard, so we could always be more than she had been, so we could achieve more if we gave more than others. She taught us integrity, hard work, honesty, courage, and self discipline. She sang to us and taught us to sing just for the love of music. She read to us when we were tiny and taught us to love the written word and books. She taught us cleanliness was next to godliness and although we were poor in those early days, we never knew we were.
As I was growing up we did not have television. We had a radio and at special times we would gather around and listen the shows like “The Shadow Knows”. But media was never on just for noise or music. It was always a special time to sit down and really listen.
Mother did love to read and she passed this passion on to her children. We would visit the public library every few weeks and we would all check out as many books as we could to hopefully last until the next time we came. Sometimes I read some of my older sister’s books after I had read all of mine. I used to imagine that someday I would write a novel. I never did but trying to express myself a bit in this blog is reminiscent of that childish dream.
Mother has been an optimist and expected the best of people for most of her life. Now that she is nearly 90 years of age, occasionly we have to remind to look for the best in others. It seems that as you age and have to live with the challenges of dementia sometimes she remember the bad and forgets the good. However, If colors could describe us, my mother-in-law is black and mother is rainbow.
I hope when I am old, really old because I guess I am already old, my children can think of more good things to say about me and about what I taught them than the areas I failed in.
They are both walking although Ryan is still very cautious. Jayden has been walking since she was 8 months old so she runs. Jayden is the daughter of Candice and Ryan is the son of Tiffany Decker, both my grandaughters. The babies were getting the hang of opening presents so they should be up to speed when Christmas gets here. 
Posts
