Thinking of My Mom on Mother’s Day

Mom after a Recital circa 1932

Grandma Crozier and Mom 1914

My mother, Margaret Julia Crozier McClellan, was born on April 16, 1914. From the day she was born, she was everybody’s darling—partly because of the fact that she was Grandma Osborne first grandchild, and partly because she was born to be doted on. I imagine that sparkling, almost too bright personality shone from a very early age. She was a smart, outgoing, and affectionate child, and that must have delighted her large extended family.

Mom and Her Much Adored Brother, Bud

By age six, she was playing the piano, no doubt impressing her music-loving family beyond words with her amazing talent. That was Mom’s thing. She played at family gatherings, she played at recitals, she played at school commencements, she played at church, and she even played at a tearoom in South Pasadena while she was in Junior College. Everyone thought my mom was destined to be a concert pianist some day, and part of her wanted to grab that brass ring too.

Mom and Dad
 June 6, 1937

At seventeen, my mother met my father, Graydon Elmo McClellan, at a church conference at Occidental College in Los Angeles. They fell deeply in love. Theirs was not an easy relationship—ever—given the differences in their temperaments. My mother was an extravert, my father an introvert. My mother was spontaneous and effusive; my father was thoughtful and cautious. My mother loved the world; my father studied it. Despite the ups and downs of their six-year courtship, they found they couldn’t live without each other; they married on June 6, 1937.

My mother never stopped playing her beloved piano, though, and my father encouraged her to continue. It was one of the things he loved the most about her, her ability to express beauty, joy, sorrow, and longing through her interpretation of Chopin, Bach, Rachmaninoff, and Brahms.

Mom with Joel
circa 1945

Roger
circa 1945

In 1940, my mother gave birth to her first child, my brother Joel. Oh, how she loved being a mother to that beautiful little boy! She read to him, sang to him, dressed him in the latest little boy fashions, and recorded every word he spoke—at least for the first eighteen months.

In 1943, my brother Roger was born. Talk about a mother’s love! Mom was positive that Roger was a loving and compassionate little boy, and she wrote that he was going to make a wonderful father some day (my mom was also psychic!). When my father was stationed overseas as a chaplain in the Army, my mother wrote lovingly of Joel’s and Roger’s cute actions and precocious sayings.

Johnny
circa 1949

In 1947, my mother gave birth to her third son, my brother John. An adorable little towhead with a sweet smile, Johnny captured my mother’s heart. I suspect that from Day 1 she plotted to make sure that this one would carry on her musical legacy (another example of Mom’s psychic abilities). By this time, my parents were settled in Santa Rosa, California, where my father was the pastor of a Presbyterian Church. Mom was busy with her three rambunctious boys, but still she played and sang, at home, at church, at family gatherings, at weddings and funerals.

Mom and Me
circa 1951

In 1950, I was born—the last child and the only girl. My mother loved us all equally, and she made sure that we knew it, but she was delighted to have a little girl to dress up (oh, those bonnets!) and dream for. Years later, Mom told me that when she held me in her arms right after my birth, she dreamed that some day I would be loved by someone as much as Mom was loved by Dad.

I remember growing up surrounded by my mother’s music. She would rock me at night and sing lullabies. She would play musical requests to get me to go to sleep (Debussy’s “Cakewalk” was my favorite). She would serenade me with hymns, folk songs, German lieder, and showtunes. She taught me to sing as soon as I could speak. She had great dreams of grooming me to be her little soprano skylark, although I realized eventually that I was more of a “car karaoke” singer; singing was always a joyful thing for me, but I never had the drive or desire to try to make it into something else. Mom being mom, though, held on to that dream far longer than common sense would suggest was wise.

Mom at the Organ, Madison Avenue
Presbyterian Church, circa 1963

When I was seven, Mom went back to full-time work as a music teacher in the Los Angeles school system. When our family moved across country, she continued to work outside the home—as assistant organist and children’s choir director at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York and as a public school music teacher in Washington, DC, among other jobs. She continued to play and sing, at home, at weddings, at funerals, and at family gatherings. She played piano to my brother Johnny’s cello (yes, her plans for him were paying off), and she and I sang showtunes together, even when we were barely speaking during my teenage years.

When I was in my late twenties, just testing the new waters of feminism, I remember quizzing my mother about any regrets she might have over giving up her career as a concert pianist. Her reaction was typical Margaret. She hadn’t given up her dream at all, as far as she was concerned. She had wanted to be a mother more than anything, and she knew that she would have had to sacrifice so much for a life as a full-time professional musician. With the life she had lived, she was able to combine her loves in a truly meaningful way. She had a husband she loved beyond words, children whom she adored, and a life with music woven through it like a leitmotif. Being a mother wasn’t settling for less at all; it was a gift that enriched her life in ways she couldn’t even have imagined when she was a young girl dreaming of being a happy wife and mother.

Mom and Me at the Steinway
circa 1998

My relationship with my mother wasn’t always easy. We were both strong-willed women who didn’t give up or in easily. Both of us were intent on having our way, which led to a great deal of strife between us when I was rushing through my teen years on my way to adulthood. Somehow through all of this, though, we found our ways to communicate our deepest thoughts and express the love we felt for each other. In later years, Mom and I found a happy rhythm when we were together. Whenever too much talk endangered that happy rhythm, we always had music to fall back on.

Mom's music became a happy part of our expanding family as my brothers married and had children of their own. Mom's particular brand of love was passed along to her grandchildren and eventually to her great-grandchildren. She delighted in the visits of her somewhat scattered family. After my father passed away in 1994, Mom took it upon herself to hop on planes and go see her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. She flew from Medford, Oregon, where she and Dad had moved into a retirement community, to San Francisco, Boston, North Carolina, and Switzerland. 

Mom in Paris circa 2000

One of my fondest memories is of flying with my mom to Switzerland in 2005 for my nephew Ian's wedding. Mom kept announcing to anyone who would listen that she was ninety-one-years old and she was traveling across the world to see her grandson get married. Needless to say, we were treated like queens everywhere we went, from the flights to the checkins at various hotels to the restaurants where we had "the best meals ever." Mom's suitcase never quite caught up with her, which she used as an excuse to shop for new clothes and then announce to everyone at the wedding that she'd bought what she was wearing in the most darling little shop in town.

Mom at Her 90th Birthday Gathering

A couple of years before Mom died, I moved to the Medford, Oregon, area to be closer to her. What a wonderful decision that was. We had so much fun together, partly because I had come to see my mother as more than just my mom; I saw her as someone who had an indomitable spirit and an endless supply of delight in everything around her—big and small. “Oh, the trees are so beautiful!” she’d say as we drove from Medford to Jacksonville to eat at her favorite restaurant, the Jacksonville Inn. “Oh, what a pretty blouse!” she’d say when I showed up at her apartment in something other than a T-shirt. “I’m so blessed!” she’d say when her children and grandchildren visited her. “Isn’t this the best ice cream?” she’d say, taking a spoonful of Umpqua Vanilla Bean.

When she had to move from her upstairs two-bedroom apartment to a first-floor one-bedroom assisted living apartment in Rogue Valley Manor, the retirement community she and my dad had moved to in their late seventies, she just kept going on and on about the fact that she still had a lovely view of the Rogue Valley and, even more important, her beloved Steinway fit in the living room perfectly!

Mom with Great-grandkids Lucy and Asa McClellan
August 2009

Mom had a massive stroke in July 2009, at the age of 95. I got a phone call the morning that it happened, telling me that she had been taken to Rogue Valley Medical Center. I quickly drove to the hospital, and when I walked into the small room in Emergency, there was my mother lying on a gurney. Mom looked up, saw me, said, “Hello, darling,” and burst into “The Sound of Music,” one of our favorite songs to sing together. I of course joined in, since that was clearly what was required. The emergency staff stared at us in amazement, given the fact that Mom had had a massive brain hemorrhage and they didn’t expect her to live more than a few hours, perhaps days. I’m not sure they’d ever seen anything quite like that little impromptu musical duet!

Mom lived another six weeks. As her grasp of reality drifted away bit by bit, she still managed to find joy in the people who cared for her in the Health Center at RVM. She found joy in the music we’d play for her on a little portable CD player. And she began finding joy in the world beyond this one. Mom would see things I couldn’t, and she would exclaim with delight in what she saw, grasping at something above her bed, as if trying to catch the hand reaching down to her from heaven.

In the last week of my mother’s life, I took her upstairs to her apartment, thinking she might want to see it again, to say goodbye. I wheeled her up to the piano, since she showed interest in it. Mom placed her lovely piano hands down on the keys and started playing one of her favorite Chopin nocturnes. Mom was channeling that endless well of musical memory, as she rocked back and forth with the emotion that Chopin triggered in her. I can’t help but think, as I look back on this astonishing memory, that this must be what the composer had in mind as he wrote down those notes for others to play.

Mom died in her sleep on August 27, 2009. I miss her every day, but I also know that she will always be with me. I think of all that my mother taught me. She taught me to seize the day, to bask in the joy of life’s surprises, big and small. She taught me to sing loudly and with feeling, even if other people turn around and stare at you. She taught me to tell people that I love them, to praise them for efforts, to let them know that I think they are special. She taught me to be a strong woman even in the face of a frightening sense of vulnerability. Most of all, she taught me that a mother’s love is unbreakable, no matter what. The hills are indeed alive with the sound of music, Mom. Thank you for helping me to see that. Happy Mother’s Day.