Image: Barbara Kautz
MUM
Growing up, my mother knew all about hardship. She was raised by an older sister after their mother died when she was 11. Her family struggled during the Depression because her father, a finish-carpenter, rarely found work. She and my dad married right before WWII and when he lay in a coma in an Army Hospital in India, she thought she would be a young widow. She could have thrown herself a pity party many times but didn’t. You just didn’t if you were the daughter of Swedish Immigrants.
Daddy survived and came home and the two started an interesting life together, raising four daughters, and sometimes four or more pigs! There were countless times when they had to pay one monthly bill but not the other, when she worried about one child over another. She could have felt sorry for herself many times, but she didn’t.
Mum was unfailingly cheerful, graced with the extraordinary ability to look at life’s hardships as adventures rather than roadblocks.
In 1964 I went to Denmark as an exchange student. When she wrote to Grethe, my host sister, and the only person in the family who read English, the first time, she didn’t describe herself as a woman who loved classical music or sewed all her daughters clothes. Rather, she quoted the entirety of Edgar Best’s 1917 poem It Couldn’t Be Done:
Somebody said that it couldn’t be done, but he with a chuckle replied, that maybe it couldn’t but he would be one that wouldn’t say no til he tried…Just start to sing as you tackle the thing that cannot be done and you’ll do it.
It was, I think, Mum’s battle cry. The way she looked at life. Yes, Mum was sympathetic to our teenage angst, like boys, clothes, and mean girls. Especially mean girls. Reading the poem now, I can see it was her guidebook to how best to teach her daughters how to cope with life’s unfairness and to never stop trying to be their best selves.
I remember sitting on the stool in the kitchen, while Mum listened to me wail about some injustice or that once again Bruce Gray picked on me on the bus ride home from junior high. Eventually she probably said:
It’ll be better before the cows come home. Or,
It’ll be better before you get married. Or, my favorite,
Nothing’s so bad that it couldn’t be worse from the day that you’re born til you ride in a hearse.
Barbara Kautz
May 2026