Remembering Erma via Kyran

 

"No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there is wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick." -- Erma Bombeck

I was so happy to see that Kyran Pittman, blogger and author of Planting Dandelions: Field Notes From a Semi-Domesticated Life wrote this week about finding Erma Bombeck in the foreign land of picket fences and domesticity. She was an American icon, that woman… and, well...

I admit it. There were many days that I secretly wished that Erma Bombeck was my mother. She was just so down-to-earth and accessible (something my mother wasn’t able to do easily) and regularly at my fingertips in my hometown newspaper.

I started reading her column when I was around 11 or 12 (I don’t believe my mother ever read her column or books) and I got so excited when I could hear her voice and see her face when I was in my teens, eating breakfast before school started with her and “Good Morning America.” I guess you could say she might have mothered me in ways that my own mother never could.

When she died so relatively young I was heartbroken, but I didn’t quite understand why I took it so hard. Then when I began writing again as a coping mechanism for becoming a mother at forty, it finally hit home. She spoke to the future writer in me… and the future mother in me. She was everyone’s friend and mother and comrade in housework and parenting with humor, and I loved her for it.

Kyran Pittman possesses so many of the same qualities in her voice as a writer and a mother that Erma Bombeck had. And Kyran, if you're reading this post, rest assured... there is a child out there who is reading your blog or even your book on days when his or her own mother isn’t accessible.

 

Comments

[Kyran]

What a startling and lovely thought, that a child or teen might idle across my site and find some nurture there. It gives me a whole new way to look at my blog!