lately at night after i go to bed, i have lain awake, thinking of mom. i know that people have dealt with losing their mothers since the beginning of time...but that doesn't seem to make it any easier for me. hopefully-and i will say "knock on wood" here-it will be many years before i pass away and samantha has to deal with that, but when i think that way, i realize that how ever many years samantha still gets to have me here, it will be that many years before i get to be with my mother again.
i have decided that i kind of want to use this blog to write about memories of growing up, to give samantha glimpses of events that have helped carve my personality-who i am and how i got that way, to help her to better know my grandparents, and what it was like growing up in the late 60's and 70's in the small town of lake city, tn. along with that, maybe some comfort for loss of her mamaw.
i know that what i write will not be in chronological order, so i will try to estimate the times as best i can.
i have thought a lot lately of when mother married her second husband, oscar cox, and the feelings she had to have as a young woman. i know the excitement of finding someone to fall in love with, making the decision to marry, all along believing he is the person that you will spend the rest of your life with.
it was 1971, and mother was in school at the jacksboro vocational school   to be an LPN and i was in 2nd grade at lake city elem school when she started her clinicals at the old lake city hospital. she met oscar cox, who was an ambulance driver there in town. they fell in love, and were married in july 1972. i was 9 years old.
my dad had married janie when i was 6, and promptly ceased to exist for me. evidently, mother was dead set on him not being a part of my life, that when my sister was born and my dad wanted his child support lowered, she made him agree to give up his visitation rights. to hear her tell it years later, she didn't have much persuading to do-he gave them up rather quickly, and willingly. i remember sitting outside of my grandmother and papaws house on friday afternoons, waiting for my dads car to come around the bend, being disappointed every time i heard a car coming that turned out to not be him, and crying when it came time to take a bath and go to bed.
so i think mother thought that she had found a suitable replacement for my dad, and by that time, i guess i thought so too. i'm sure that things were starting to look up for mother. she had graduated and was an LPN, had a job at the local hospital, and was a happy newlywed, looking forward to a new beginning.