I remember the day I said it, “I don’t want her life! She’s a slave to her husband. A slave to everyone. I’ll never live like my grandma!” I was sixteen years old, jetting around in my little, ice-blue Toyota Celica with a sunroof that blew my red hair around. Listening to Journey and Bon Jovi and Livin’ On A Prayer.

And living for me.

Only me.

Just me.

I read historical romance novels until 2 a.m., “torch books” my dad called them. Got mostly A’s in school without much studying, cruised with my girlfriends on Friday and Saturday nights in Marysville. Back when Marysville still had a “cruise” basically you drove the main strip again and again, yelling out your window at other young people driving slowly back and forth yelling out their windows, showing off their cars, and their mullets, and their hair a mile high. It was the 80’s and my grandma still groomed poodles in her garage for people.

Sometimes I bathed the poodles for Grandma. Smelly, old dogs with nasty old teeth and long toenails that had to be clipped. Little old ladies would bring these poodles to my grandparents’ peach farm after breakfast. After Grandma cooked a full square meal before sunrise for my grandpa “Pops” we always called him. The poodles were done by lunch when Grandma made another hot, sit down meal for Pops, then she served dinner promptly at 5 p.m. in winter time, and 6 in summer for her farmer husband. Everything from scratch. Even her salad dressing, which we’ve all tried to duplicate for years using Grandma’s recipe and none of us can get it quite right. Everything Grandma made tasted so good. Everything a little bit German, since Grandma’s parents came over on a boat from Germany before the first world war.

She never had a dishwasher, except sometimes me, or her twin daughters, and their girls, my cousins. No man ever touched her kitchen sink. Or mopped her kitchen floor, which Grandma did every day after the noon meal. Her beds she made each morning after airing them out for an hour. One time while staying with her, I made my bed right after crawling out of it. “You can’t do that,” she patiently explained to me. “The bed has to breathe.” I wanted to tell her I didn’t stink up my bed farting like Pops, but “fart” was a bad word. The only time I ever heard Grandma cuss was in German. Just one time. One word I didn’t understand, but she was mad, and I knew it was a curse.

We used to say she combed her lawn. That’s how meticulously she did her own yard work. She raised chickens and rabbits for the dinner table. Killed her own chickens, but couldn’t stomach butchering her rabbits, which squealed before Pops snapped their necks. I couldn’t handle the squealing rabbits either, not after sitting under the big sycamore tree in Gram’s and Pop’s backyard with bunnies in my lap all spring.

You could eat off her floors, and lick her bathroom sink, that’s how clean she kept her house. She hung her wash on the line near the sycamore tree, and darned her husband’s socks, sewing up the holes in heels and toes.

“I will never stay home and sew my husband’s socks or pluck chickens before frying them up for some man,” I told my girlfriends. “I will have a career!”

Less than ten years later, signing papers with my husband to buy our first house, I’ll never forget what the woman doing the loan said to me. “So what do you do for a living?” “I’m a housewife,” I sheepishly told her, sitting there eight months pregnant with our toddler on my nonexistent lap. Her eyes filled with pity. “Let’s say homemaker. Doesn’t that sound a little better than housewife?”

“Okay,” I mumbled, kissing the top of my little girl’s wispy, blond head, feeling like a loser because I didn’t have a career. At least I didn’t have to kill my own chickens for the dinner table. Later, I drove to my grandparent’s peach farm and ate a wonderful supper in Grandma’s warm kitchen. But I didn’t appreciate it. Not the way I do now twenty years after Grams and Pops are gone.

After all Grandma’s chores at night–every night– she sat down in her favorite chair near the TV, but not watching TV. Instead she held a rosary in her gnarled hands when I visited her with my babies after buying that house– in a few short years she’d be dead from arthritis– but in life, she prayed for her family.

On Sunday, she’d be in church. A perfect lady during mass, not making a peep as the priest droned on in Latin, and later– after Vatican II– in English, droning on for a lifetime of Sundays, Grandma a nearly perfect lady at home as well, except when she called Pops, “You old fool!” for returning customers too much change at the fruit stand in their front yard on Highway 99 where I worked as a kid.

Yesterday, at the doctor’s office, the receptionist asked me, “What do you do for a living?” “My husband’s a school teacher,” I answered, watching her tap the information into a computer. “No,” her voice changed. “What do you do for a living?” “I’m a housewife… a homemaker,” I corrected myself, waiting for that old loser feeling to hit me. “Oh,” she said. It almost sounded like an “Oh, no.” Or “Oh, you poor thing,” but the receptionist didn’t say anything else after that. Her silence perhaps meant to shame me. Perhaps she wasn’t trying to shame me. Perhaps, I’ve been shaming myself all these years.

When I reported for a newspaper for a season of my life it felt so good to tell people I wrote for a living. As if words on a page were better than babies in my arms. Yet, most of my years have passed at home with babies.

“Your youngest is three?” The doctor’s eyes widened when I spoke with him after sitting in that waiting room for way too long yesterday. “And you’re oldest is twenty-three?” He looked a little taken aback by this information.

“We wanted a large family. We had three, stopped for five years, then God gave us the faith for four more.” “You must be Mormon or Catholic,” said the doctor, turning his back on me to wash his hands. “I’m a born again Catholic,” I said. When he turned around, I could tell I’d stumped him.

Seven kids stumps everyone unless you’re Mormon or a serious Catholic. Born again sometimes insults people. Unless they say they’re born again, too. The doctor then got down to business, looking at my mammogram and ultrasound slides before assuring me I don’t have breast cancer.

Grandma had benign lumps too, but she never talked about that. Or wrote about that, though her handwriting was beautiful, and being a high school graduate meant a lot to her. I’m a little hesitant to write about breasts too– knowing men read this blog– thanks, guys! But so many women have shared they’ve been through this, and it’s frightening with cancer so common nowadays. It’s important we encourage each other by sharing our stories. And sharing God’s faithfulness to see us through these things.

Grandma became a born again Catholic. I believe this because I saw the light on her face as she lay dying and I talked to her about Jesus. It was Jesus who said, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” John 3:3.

It took me becoming born again at 33 to see the truth about Jesus. And the truth about Grandma’s life. And my own life: the truth about words and babies.

This Mother’s Day, I learned something about Grandma hidden for years. Talking to my aunt–one of the twins in the photo of my grandma, the other twin my mom at the top of the page– my aunt said, “I think she wanted more children, but I was born breech. She never got pregnant again after us.”

Why hadn’t these words ever been spoken in our family? Why never written down in some letter or journal for my generation to read? Not once had I heard Grandma wanted more kids. I’d always assumed Grandma thought two babies, twin girls, was enough. More than enough for her.

They called her “Speed” in her strong years. Speed because she worked so hard and fast. The only time I saw her sit still was in church. And in her chair at night before bed with her rosary. It was then she stilled.

Before God, Grandma stilled.

This green-eyed German girl who grew up on a dairy beside a river and milked cows until she married. Then spent the rest of her life serving her husband and family without complaint. With two babies and not many words. Grandma wasn’t much of a talker. Had she lived past 80, she’d be a hundred years old this year.

I sometimes think of her when I’m taking care of my boys. Laying down my life for my husband and five sons, being a housewife like Grandma who adored her two grandsons. Boys held a special place in Grandma’s heart. She was good to us girls, my cousins and me, but those boys made her world go round.

How could I not have known Grandma wanted more babies? Of course she wanted a son. “That generation didn’t talk about those kind of things,” my aunt said on Mother’s Day. Today a woman will tell you all kinds of things about her body. About her pregnancies. She’ll even show you her belly on facebook and get a hundred likes.

But will she be a fruitful vine in the heart of her husband’s home? Psalm 128:3.

This is the truth about words and babies. Words are important, but without babies who grow into people, there’d be no words. Without babies raised in homes by loving mothers the words would become hard. And we see this happening today. Harder words. Harder kids. Harder people. The heart of many homes without a mother’s heart there.

I miss my grandma.