The Northwest Voice

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As I sit here on Mother's Day, not being a mother myself, I find myself thinking of my father's Aunt Garnet. Not only has she been deceased for over thirty years, but she never had the opportunity to become a mother. I would like to pay hommage to her this morning for the great mother she could have been.

My father was born and raised in eastern Kentucky, where coal mines and unemployment run their gnarly fingers through the eerie woods and hollers. His mother and aunt (Virginia and Garnet) were the town beauties, the daughters of a dry goods merchant. Virignia married an abusive alcoholic eleven years her senior, a man who was kicked off of the police force for brutality. The man I call grandfather.

Needless to say, my father and his four siblings had one of the roughest childhoods imaginable. Poverty, hunger, and abuse riddled their existences. That's when Virginia's sister stepped in. Garnet Bonda. She'd had her share of abusive relationships and it left her scarred, unable to have children of her own. Aunt Garnet took the children out of the home and raised and loved them, disciplined them and made sure they were well-dressed for Sunday school each week. She did homework with the five youngsters, all on her own, in a time when being a single mother was practically unheard of in those parts.

Garnet shielded the kids from drunken visits and made sure my dad never had to stand in the welfare line, located right in the middle of the town where classmates jeered him. For the first time in their lives, the kids had bottled Cokes to enjoy after school, clothes and shoes that weren't threadbare, and a mountain of gifts each Christmas morning. Thanks to Garnet, the kids learned about the love of Jesus at church and all five of them graduated high school (a statistic that would have been much lower had they remained with their parents). Three went on to graduate college.

So, Happy Mother's Day to Garnet Bonda, as well as to all of the un-mothers in the world that have raised children that weren't their own.