B00AEDDPVE EBOK (20 page)

I know I’m not the lone mother who has to ignore this phase of adolescence as best as I can. We moms need an AA group: Adolescent Aggravation. I won’t chase the storm my kids brew no matter how much they “flap” about what I ask them to do, because there is a part of me that completely remembers feeling the exact same way, way back when.

I have my own vivid recollections of feeling the same when
I was a young teen. There were many times when my mother’s demands on my personal time made me exclaim silently in my head, “Are you kidding me?”

My mom knew that the best way to remind me that show business doesn’t make a person exempt from everyday life was to have me join her in the regular household chores when I got home from the recording studio or the TV studio.

I would walk through the front door, exhausted from a ten-hour day in the studio, to have her greet me at the door with a basket of fresh cherries or a set of measuring cups in hand and a grin on her face. I knew that the next two hours would be time with my mother learning to bottle fresh fruit or baking homemade bread. There was no escaping it. As a teenager, I thought it was the pits, figuratively. My mother knew that coring out the cherry pits (literally) or filling my hands with sticky dough was a great way to take my mind off the materialistic “dough” and put it back on what matters most: family. I’m certain I rolled my eyes and sighed about her requests, too. She didn’t seem to mind, as long as we rolled out the bread together and talked. It was in those hours that I discussed my problems and fears with her, and she listened deeply. My mom was crafty that way.

I was a very strong-willed girl, though, and if I thought I had a justifiable point of view, I would rarely back down until I was heard.

One afternoon, my mother and I were in the kitchen making dinner, discussing what dress I would be allowed to wear to a big event. Both of my parents had a firm standard of modesty,
which is a principle of my faith, as well. However, it often seemed that my mother’s idea of what was appropriate for a girl my age was nothing short of a pilgrim-style dress from the 1600s. That’s an exaggeration, of course—she was fine with anything that came up to my chin and down to my calves! My idea for the dress for the event fell more in the 1970s current-trend category. Come on! Halter tops ruled.

My mother was listening to me, but she didn’t seem to be changing her mind about my wardrobe choice. She kept shaking her head no even when I brought up what I thought were convincing points that seemed logical to me. She just continued peeling the carrots and tried to change the subject to something else.

I could tell I was losing ground. Losing to a mother who was wearing a purple muumuu.

For a brief number of years, muumuus were my mother’s way to dress when she was home. She loved bright colors and big flowers and lots of room to move around in. The muumuu fit all of those requirements. To keep her hair out of the way when she was busy, she would sweep it up into a tall pile on top of her head. The big lenses of her glasses always seemed to have something smudged on them from cooking or gardening or putting makeup on in a hurry.

My teenage self realized, “Of course, she’ll never see my point of view. She doesn’t care about fashion.” But I tried one more time.

“Mother, I’m grown up now, in case you hadn’t noticed. I can’t wear a dress that makes me look like a baby.”

She said nothing back. I’m sure at this point I sighed and rolled my eyes.

I couldn’t believe she was being so stubborn.

I stood staring at my mother and thought, “I could take you down.”

Instantaneously, I realized that my mouth was moving with my thought and I had actually said it out loud. What was I thinking???? A bit of panic set in, but I had no choice but to hold my stance.

My mother set down her vegetable peeler and swiveled her head to look me in the eyes. “You think so?”

The next thing I knew, I was looking up at the ceiling. My mother had dropped me gently to the linoleum in a swift martial-arts-type move that I never saw coming.

More astounding was that she had pinned all 103 pounds of me by laying her body across the top of mine. I wasn’t at all hurt, but I was in shock.

My mother then burst into laughter.

It wasn’t a cruel laugh, just a silly one, brought on by the look of surprise on my face.

I had to laugh, too. Who knew that my mother was hiding some muscle under that muumuu? She had superpowers that I had never suspected. I was stunned and speechless. The Purple Muumuu Master had taken me down!

Needless to say, I wore the dress that my mother wanted me to wear, and despite all my earlier protests, I didn’t look “like a baby,” but I didn’t look like a sexy woman, either. I looked like a young teenager, which is what I was. I only had to wear
that dress for one night, but the awe and admiration I felt for my mother’s ability to lovingly answer my challenge lasted from that day forward. A mother can’t convey to her child the wisdom the years have given her, but she can stand firm in her no, because the no comes from knowing what is best for her child.

There are around twenty-eight hundred different species of butterflies around the world. Each group probably has millions of members, all flapping their wings. If “the Butterfly Effect” is real, there must be new storms starting up every second. I’m sure, for the sake of education, at least one butterfly of every known species has been pinned to a board. It only takes one example: One storm-inciting butterfly must fall for us to be able to see the bigger picture.

The wind was gusting through my open car window as my little Abi’s face popped up next to the door handle.

“Mommy, can I go to the show with you tonight?” she pleaded. “Please! It’s Friday. No school tomorrow.”

She loves to be at the show with me, to have me all to herself for one whole hour to tell me the many adventure stories from her life as I put on makeup and curl my hair.

I didn’t stand firm. “Okay,” I said. “You need your boots and a jacket and bring a coloring book and some markers.”

Abi’s face beamed.

“Hurry. Run like the wind. Mommy is late.”

I love having her go to the show with me, too, even though thirty minutes before the end of the show she’s usually sound asleep on the couch in my dressing room. I wanted to enjoy every moment of this time in Abigail’s life when no one’s opinion
or attention matters more to her than mine. Let it last, I prayed silently. Let it last.

One positive aspect of working evenings is being able to attend my kids’ daytime school events. With Abigail and Matthew, 2009.

My working performer family, waiting for yet another bus ride to another show:
(from left)
Donny, Wayne, Father, Jay, Alan, Mother, me, and Jimmy. Donny, Jimmy, and I were already singing songs in Swedish and Japanese.

M
y father’s bassinet was a wooden fruit box stored under a tree at the edge of the wheat field. Tethered to the same tree with a long piece of soft clothesline rope tied around their waists were my dad’s older brothers, who at ages two and five might have wandered away. The oldest brother was in charge of watching the two younger ones. The big shady tree was their babysitter from dawn until the noon hour. The only lullaby that was heard was the swishing noise the machetes made cutting the stalks close to the ground to harvest the crop. One of the workers in the field, and the only female, was Grandmother Osmond as a young woman, age twenty-three. This was the way she provided for her three young sons.

My grandmother didn’t have the choice to be a stay-at-home mom. Grandfather Osmond, who my brother Donny has always resembled, had been killed by a bucking horse. The blow from the horse’s hoof ruptured my grandfather’s spleen, causing immediate and severe internal bleeding. He died within an hour in my grandmother’s arms. My father was only six weeks old when this happened. There were no EMTs for my
grandmother to call, no extra money set aside, no life insurance policy, and no government services that she could turn to for assistance. She couldn’t lean on family and friends as it was the middle of World War I and most of their relatives were also struggling to get by. There weren’t many opportunities for a young widow with children, so she relocated her little family often to find work: from Wyoming to Idaho to Utah to California and then back to Wyoming until finally ending up in Ogden, Utah.

I’m pretty sure that my father didn’t have many memories of carefree days without some type of hard labor that was necessary just to get by. As he grew up, no one ever asked him if he “felt like” working. Even as a child, he had to pull his weight and contribute to the family as soon as he could. By the time my father was five, my grandmother had married a man who wanted a wife. Not sure he was at all interested in the thought of raising children, though. She wasn’t wholeheartedly enamored of him, but he provided some relief for her in a world where being a single mom was frowned upon. He was a talented piano player and saw great opportunity in my young father, who had a powerful singing voice for a small boy. He would sit my dad on top of an upright piano and have him belt out popular tunes of the day. Then he would have my dad pass the hat for coins.

My father knew what was expected of him and complaining was never an option; this man was a tough character with very little patience. Whenever the stepfather was displeased with my father for any reason, he was left outside to sleep under
the porch steps, which happened more times than my father could count. My dad’s two older brothers were pressured to be out on their own at very young ages. As soon as Dad was old enough to lift and carry a heavy bag, he delivered and sold newspapers; by age fifteen, after an altercation in which he had to physically defend his mother from his stepdad, he was kicked out of the house and left to survive alone, responsible for putting the clothing on his back and figuring out how to get an education.

My brother Merrill recently met a man at a retirement home who had known my father back then. He told a story my father had never shared with us. After being homeless for a bit and sleeping near a river, my father made his way to a cousin’s home in Idaho and instantly went out to try to find work. The man described how my father had come to the store owned by his family to ask for a job. He was turned down, but he didn’t let that discourage him. He returned the next day with a broom and began cleaning the doorway and sidewalks in front of the store. The day after that, he held the door open for customers and greeted them. The customers took note and commented on the courteous boy at the door. By the end of the week, he was hired to work inside the store, where he started out sweeping floors and quickly took on more and more responsibility. The owner ended up liking my father’s work ethic to such a degree that he hired him to help out at his house, too. This man at the retirement home told my brother that he remembers how my father would sing while he worked and always had a cheerful attitude, even when doing very hard labor. For example, at
one point he was given just one week to dig a half-mile ditch that was three feet deep, all on his own.