母亲节 我的妈妈是世上最伟大的母亲

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Hello, and welcome to the storycorps podcast. In this episode, we’ll hear story from Louisville, Kentucky. That’s where Wanda Zoeller  grew up. She was the youngest of six children. And she came to storycorps with her partner Susan Herndon.

Who would you say is the most important person in your life?

Oh definitely it would be my mother. I think I had the greatest mom in the world. We were very poor. And you know it's the beauty of it, I didn’t realize we were poor probably till I was a teenager. And I attribute that to my mother. She always kept a nice house, and I can remember times sitting in the dark. And of course,kids, you know, it was game for us, but we had the choice between food or utilities.

So if we had a lamp in the living room and we wanted a lamp in the bedroom, we'd take this light bulb out of the living room and carry it to the bedroom, then I might have one or two light bulbs that moved around the whole house.

It became a joke in the family. Because my dad would always add to the grocery list, when we were growing up, light bulbs and toilet paper. Mom would never get the light bulbs or the toilet paper because you’d have to get food instead. And you know my mother blesses herself, she pretty much let me do what I really wanted to do, and I’m sure there's a lot of things I did she probably preferred she didn’t know about, but she never hit us or whipped us. Although there was, trust me,there was times I wish she would have just spanked me instead of sat down and tell me , you know, that she was disappointed. She sat down and basically taught us there's consequences to everything you do. And if you can live with those consequences, then go ahead and make those decisions.

And, when mom died, the whole family was with her. I was lying in the bed next to her, holding her and telling her it was ok to let go because I knew it’s probably hard for her to let go of us. So we have to make sure she knew we were gonna be ok. And the very last thing she said to us was that she loved us. And… she was a huge influence to my life.

That’s Wanda Zoeller, with her partner Susan Herndon in Louisville, Kentucky. Wanda's mother Ethel Zoeller died five years ago.

Major support for storycorp provided by state farm insurance and by the cooperation for pubilc  broadcasting. Our podcasts are supported by the Fetzer Institute as a part of its campaign for love and forgiveness. Learn more, at loveandforgive.org. Our storycorps interviews are housed at the American Folk Life Center at the Library of Congress. And you can catch storycorp on the radio Fridays on NPR’s morning edition. I’m Michael Gravely on the storycorps podcast. Thanks for listening.