Janice Ethel Swartz Skaggs: My Mom Was a Nut

Merry Christmas from my mom. . . . the nut.

I haven’t been doing this blog very long, but I knew when I began it that the time would come when I needed to write memories about my mom, and I knew that could be emotionally draining for me. Nobody had a more profound effect on my life than Mom did, with her wonderful qualities and even her faults. I know God is in control of everything, but I can’t help feeling cheated that she went as suddenly as she did. On the other hand, Dad suffered for weeks and months before he passed, and I wouldn’t have wanted her to go through that either.

On this date, Thursday, December 1, 2022, Mom would have been eighty-five years old, having been born in 1937. She was godly and wise. She was stubborn. She was a good listener. She had a temper. She was a faithful friend. She could be blunt. And she was unquestionably . . . a nut.

She had a wonderful sense of humor, something any mother of four sons needs in abundant supply. So to avoid growing maudlin, I decided to write this post focusing on her sense of humor, with gratitude to my brothers Keith, Eric, and Joel for their contributions.

An Audience of One

Mom loved making other people laugh, but she didn’t need a big audience to be funny. In fact, she enjoyed being funny when the only audience was herself. When I say that, I’m referring to some of the stunts she would pull on us (naïve, innocent) boys when we were young. Here’s a typical example from my brother Eric.

Mom was always feeding into my imagination with her stories. She not only read them, she acted them out with voices and emotion. She’d have been a good voice actor had we lived in a big city. When I was about four years old and we lived in the old white house in downtown Fredericksburg, Mom was back in the laundry room ironing clothes. It was near Halloween because I remember she had hung up a cartoon of a witch flying on her broomstick. It was a party decoration. I was just outside the laundry room door playing when I heard a sinister/cartoonish witch cackle.

Eeeeh-heheheheh!

I immediately ran into the laundry room. “Mom, why did you laugh like that?” I think I was worried she was going a bit crazy.

“I didn’t laugh. You must be hearing things.”

So I went back to my toys. Again, I heard a sinister cackle.

Eeeeh-heheheheh!

I bolted back into the laundry and got the same results.

“I didn’t hear anything. What do you suppose it was?”

My eyes looked towards the witch picture.

“Do you suppose it was that picture laughing?” she asked with a serious expression.

I stumbled out of the laundry, seriously wondering if that paper witch could have laughed out loud!

I finally figured it all out later, when I was about twelve.

Now, that was Mom through and through! She was just having fun, entertaining herself and being creative at the same time, not worried in the least that she might be causing her son to grow up with some sort of complex. Because she knew that he knew, way down deep, that she was the cackler.

I had similar experiences with her. I remember as a very young child that one day she said to me out of the blue, “Stevie, did you know I can fly?”

Even as a kindergartner I had suspicions that I was being strung along, but she certainly had my interest. “Can you?”

“Sure, let me show you!” We went into the living room, and she put a footstool in the middle of the floor and stood behind it. “Now, watch!” And she tucked each hand under its corresponding armpit and started flapping her elbows. Sure enough, after a few seconds of wild flapping, she was standing on the footstool!

I couldn’t help thinking that it was sort of a hoppy little flight. In fact, it looked to me as though she had just jumped up there. But she swore she had flown, and to prove it she demonstrated it a couple more times. And who was I to argue?

Did I spend time after she left the room attempting to duplicate her feat with my own hands tucked under my own armpits? I plead the Fifth.

She also told me that if I turned my head fast enough, I could see my ear. I never had much success with that, even though when she demonstrated she swore she could see her ear. No matter how fast or suddenly I swung my head violently to one side or the other, I never could see my ear. Not wanting to disappoint her, I told her once, “I think I almost saw it that time!”

“Keep trying!” she said.

Now, what was the point? To entertain me? Yes. To make me think? Yes. To have her own private chuckle as she watched my diligent efforts? Oh yes.

Sometimes—again, this would have to have been when I was very young—when we were eating lunch, a ghost would join us at the table. You could tell it was a ghost because unexpectedly one of the chairs on the other side of the table would move slightly.

“Did you see that?” she would ask, feigning surprise.

“No, what?”

“Did you see that chair move all by itself?”

“No.” But now my eyes were riveted on said chair. Waiting. Waiting. And then, just when I was about to look away . . . the chair moved.

It moved a good four inches or so! Suspecting that maybe, just maybe, I was being had, I dived under the table to look. There were Mom’s feet, crossed demurely beneath her own chair. And it looked to me as though her legs weren’t long enough to reach to the other side of the table anyway, so maybe . . . maybe there really was a ghost?

But I suspected otherwise.

Here are more memories from my youngest brother, Joel.

Mom always used to read Sir Kevin of Devon, Harry the Dirty Dog, and several other books to me, but mostly she read from a Bible story book. She put so much time into it that I literally knew more Old Testament than my Sunday school teachers on several occasions!

I always thought it was funny that Mom loved action movies. She saw The Terminator (edited for TV, back when that meant something) and told all of her friends (and maybe even her Bible-study partners) about how good it was. One of them (I forget who) rented the R-rated movie with foul language and a sex scene and was incensed that Jan Skaggs had recommended it!

She was funny when she meant to be funny, and she was funny when she didn’t mean to be funny!

Brother Keith shared this memory with me.

Remember Sunday morning: “GET IN THE CAR!! WE ARE LEAVING RIGHT NOW!” We four boys would load up and shiver in the sub-zero chill for five minutes or more. No Mom. Finally we’d elect someone (usually Eric) to go risk a peek in the house. He’d come back and report, “She’s in the downstairs bathroom,” and then pantomime putting on lipstick.

Getting four boys loaded in the car was, no doubt, quite a challenge. Plus she had to help teach Sunday school and play the piano in front of two hundred people.

Right, Keith, but I wonder whether she hustled us out to the car while she finished getting ready so that she could have a little—short-lived—peace and quiet. . . .

Another car-related story: I don’t remember this, but Mom told it many times over the years. Again, I was very young, and one day she said, “Stevie, you want to take a little ride in the car!?”

I certainly did! An unexpected car ride might mean a trip to Wooster. And that might mean a trip to Mr. Wiggs department store. And that might mean I would come home with a new toy!

“Sure!” I replied and jumped into the back seat.

“OK, here we go!” she said.

And she pulled the car about fifteen feet forward—from the driveway into the garage. “Here we are!”

My disappointed response exhibited itself in a loud wail of betrayal! I know she felt bad about it almost immediately. Jokes were supposed to be fun for her and intriguing or puzzling for us—not heartbreaking.

Discipline

Even her discipline could be (unintentionally) funny sometimes.

One time a baby—probably Eric or Joel—was crying and loudly carrying on unnecessarily. And all of a sudden Mom, who’d had enough, burst out with, “AHR RAHR RAHR RAHR RAHR RAHR RAH! See? How do you like it!?”

The baby looked back at her, eyes as wide as possible . . . and stopped crying.

I remember another time, though, when discipline didn’t work out the way she planned. One evening we boys were getting ready for bed, and Keith was on the top bunk. I don’t recall what he did, but it made Mom mad, and she said, “I’m going downstairs for the paddle!”

Now, let me explain about the paddle. Yes, we had a paddle in our home when we were kids. But it was very rarely used. It served mainly as a deterrent to crime, doing little more than hanging ominously from a nail in the broom closet. When the situation warranted it, Mom would ask, “Do you want me to go get the paddle!?” We would soberly, honestly shake our heads no, and that was usually the end of it.

Anyway, as I was saying, one evening Keith’s infraction was so serious that she went all the way from the upstairs bedroom down the hall, down the stairs, through the foyer, living room, dining room, and to the far end of the kitchen to retrieve the dreaded paddle. Then she retraced her steps all the way back.

We boys waited in cowed silence. This was really going to be bad. We heard her coming back up the stairs, down the hall, and then, there she was, in the doorway, paddle in hand! What we didn’t know was that by the time she made the trip downstairs and back, her anger was spent, and she was thinking that paddling Keith was probably an overreaction.

Nevertheless, she strode across the room, told Keith to lie on his stomach, lifted the paddle, and brought it down on his bottom. But instead of a loud, satisfying WHACK, it just sort of went pip.

There was a moment of silence—a pregnant silence, I daresay—broken only when Mom, failing to hold back a laugh, made a kind of snorting sound in her throat. Suddenly we all burst out laughing at the way the event had reached a sudden, unexpected anticlimax. Keith never did get paddled that evening.

Two More for the Grown-Ups

OK, I will tell you two other funny stories about Mom. These are for the adults in the room. Kids under eighteen, go to bed—or I’ll get the paddle!

The first is from when she was young, back in high school. She and two or three other girls and a male teacher had to move a piano across the gym floor. It was heavy, and the casters weren’t cooperating. Now, you need to understand: Mom never swore. (Well, almost never, but we’ll save those stories for another time.) And she certainly never swore in school back in the 1950s! So the girls and the teacher were pushing and shoving, and Mom started to say, “Oh, this is heck!” But as the sentence formed itself in her head, she thought, “Wouldn’t it be awful if I accidentally said, ‘Oh, this is hell!’?”

And then, of course, she heard herself saying loudly, “Oh, this is hell!”

For years after, every time she told this story, she said, “And after it came out, I gasped a huge gasp, clapped both my hands over my mouth, and ran out of the gym!”

Nonchalance after a social faux pas was not in her nature.

Left to right: Barb Bender (?), Millie, Mom.

Much later in life she and her sister Millie enjoyed making latch-hook rugs together. I inherited the first rug Mom made. It was her own pattern, and it was supposed to be a white horse with black spots. It looks more like a cross between a llama and a dalmatian, but I love it.

Anyway, the elderly sisters enjoyed their time together hooking rugs, talking and laughing. One day as they sat quietly working, Mom said, “You know what, Millie? I bet we’re the two oldest hookers in Fredericksburg!”

I am sure the two of them laughed long and hard at that one!

When I asked my brothers for memories, Keith wrote, “She made me feel like I was her favorite. I suspect that three other boys felt the same.” And I was surprised and gratified to read that, because I always thought I was her favorite.

I love you, Mom! You were the best, and I miss you greatly!

Copyright 2022 by Steven Nyle Skaggs

Mom and Dad were inordinately proud of their four sons. Left to right, Joel, Eric, Keith, Steve.

Here’s a candid shot I sneaked one morning while Mom and Dad

 were having their daily prayer time together.

Left to right: Great-granddaughter Amara, Mom, and her sister, Millie.

Mom LOVED entertaining babies. She could make any child laugh by putting a toy on her own head and saying, “Ah-BOO!,” making it fall off, and then making a surprised face.

Visiting Dad’s grave, May 2020. Little did we know Mom
would be gone in just a few weeks from a heart attack.
This is the last photo I ever took of her.

And this is the last photo ever taken of me with Mom, May 2020.

When we came to Mom’s house after she passed away, we found this still-uncompleted puzzle on her worktable.