Ann Church was a one-of-a-kind mom
01-02-24
BY SCOTT CHURCH
The EUP Sports Den
BY SCOTT CHURCH
The EUP Sports Den
KENO – As most people who know me already know, my mother lost her battle with cancer just after Thanksgiving.
I can’t begin to tell you how hard this has been for my twp brothers and myself. She was our foundation, our rock, and now that rock is gone.
I know that is probably reading more like a blog post than a news article and that’s fine with me. News isn’t personal, but this is.
There are a few things I’d like to share about my mom that a lot of people already know, but they are worth repeating.
I spoke at mom’s funeral and did ok for the most part. I only broke down a couple times, but there were a lot of times I was close. I’d be in the middle of telling a story about her and realize that nothing like that was ever going to happen again. Cue the tears and the cracking voice here.
My mom raised us mostly as a single parent. My dad was killed in a car accident on Christmas Eve of 1976. From then on, it was us and her. My youngest brother, Clay, had just been born in September and so that added a new layer of difficulty for her. She had a few boyfriends through the years, one of whom lived with us for a time, but no one that approached a “father figure” status.
During those years, we tested mom nearly every single day. Whether it was not coming home when we were supposed to or coming home with a fishhook through the hand, it was always something. I don’t ever remember her yelling at us over the dumb things we did though, not even when my brother Graham and one of his friends hammered a hole through the garage roof so that they could have easy access to getting up there.
Some other bits of tomfoolery that probably should have gotten us yelled at or grounded include the time I buried my glasses in the back yard because I didn’t want to wear them. The time that we cut down a tree in our yard because it kept wiffleballs from going over the fence. We also removed a privacy fence from one part of our yard and put it back up to make our version of The Green Monster in the yard. There was Clay’s broken collarbone after a football game, although that didn’t happen in our yard. She took it all in stride.
I have loved sports since I was a kid and while part of it came from my dad and his side of our family, my mother was instrumental in our involvement.
She used to catch for my brothers and me, even when it got to the point that Graham and I were throwing hard enough that we were afraid we’d hurt her. She never hesitated though. I don’t know how many kids can say that their mom was their practice catcher.
Another thing she taught me was how to keep a scorebook. My dad and uncles played fast-pitch softball throughout our early childhood and mom was the scorekeeper. She taught us how to do it as well and it’s been a skill that I’ve used a lot more than I ever thought I would. It wasn’t exactly auto-mechanics, or carpentry or anything, and it didn’t exactly help with the girls, but still, a useful skill.
Our house was in the middle of St. Helen and our yard was the ballfield. There was a wiffle-ball or football game going on there nearly single day, regardless of the weather. Kids from all sides of town spent time in our front yard and mom never complained about it once. She would bring us out food sometimes and Kool-Aid was not uncommon. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my mom meant a lot to those kids. Several of them have told me since her passing that they looked at my mom as their second mom. And as an adult, I never have a conversation with any of my childhood friends without them asking how my mom is doing. I’ll miss that.
Mom was stubborn, and she was very adamant about how she wanted us to behave, both during sports and in everyday life. For example: Clay is eight years younger than me and the last thing you want as a 15-year-old is your seven-year-old brother playing wiffleball with you. So, we were jerks and invited an even number of people over to play and then told Clay he couldn’t play because it would make uneven teams. It worked until Clay went inside and told mom what the situation was. She came out and said that Clay was playing, and she would play as well to make the teams even. Needless to say, we played with uneven teams. Well played Mom, well played.
Another example of how stubborn she was: My mom placed a lot of value in her faith. She was in church every Sunday and therefore, so were we. It wasn’t anywhere I wanted to be, but we weren’t exactly presented with another option. “As long as you live under my roof, you’ll go to church,” was a common phrase in our house.
During my sophomore year of high school, our JV basketball coach wanted us to practice on Sunday mornings. In fact, he made them mandatory. I was happy about this, because not only did I get to skip church, but I also got to play basketball instead and I had the perfect excuse of “it’s mandatory mom, I can’t miss practice.”
I thought I was home free.
Wrong.
After a couple weeks of this, one of my friends came up to me on a Friday and asked me why my mom was at the school and who was the guy with her?
I looked for her, but never saw her and eventually started to think that my friend must have been mistaken about seeing her. When I got home though, I found out that my friend was not mistaken.
Turns out that mom had indeed gone to the school and had brought the pastor of the church with her to protest the idea of a mandatory Sunday morning practice. The school spoke to the coach and Sunday morning practice went from mandatory to “highly recommended.” As I sat in church that Sunday, I began to understand the depths of this woman’s stubbornness.
When we were young, we didn’t have money. We had tough times, although I know that they were a lot tougher for mom than they were for us. We were never denied going to the football or basketball games and the things we needed for our sports just seemed to find their way to our house. I know that these things happened because of personal sacrifices that mom made. Everyone says that their mom never asked for anything, and that’s true with mine as well. She valued our happiness over almost everything.
She’s gone now, and I’m struggling with it. Things don’t seem as important as they probably should at the moment. I know that it’s affecting my brothers as well.
In time, I’ll be ok, I know this, because that’s what mom would have wanted. She would tell us to live our lives and do the things that make us happy and to make sure we stay together as a family.
In closing, I’d just like to say thanks mom. You have given us a pretty solid plan to live life in a way that we can be happy and look ourselves in the mirror. I’m trying as best I can.
I can’t begin to tell you how hard this has been for my twp brothers and myself. She was our foundation, our rock, and now that rock is gone.
I know that is probably reading more like a blog post than a news article and that’s fine with me. News isn’t personal, but this is.
There are a few things I’d like to share about my mom that a lot of people already know, but they are worth repeating.
I spoke at mom’s funeral and did ok for the most part. I only broke down a couple times, but there were a lot of times I was close. I’d be in the middle of telling a story about her and realize that nothing like that was ever going to happen again. Cue the tears and the cracking voice here.
My mom raised us mostly as a single parent. My dad was killed in a car accident on Christmas Eve of 1976. From then on, it was us and her. My youngest brother, Clay, had just been born in September and so that added a new layer of difficulty for her. She had a few boyfriends through the years, one of whom lived with us for a time, but no one that approached a “father figure” status.
During those years, we tested mom nearly every single day. Whether it was not coming home when we were supposed to or coming home with a fishhook through the hand, it was always something. I don’t ever remember her yelling at us over the dumb things we did though, not even when my brother Graham and one of his friends hammered a hole through the garage roof so that they could have easy access to getting up there.
Some other bits of tomfoolery that probably should have gotten us yelled at or grounded include the time I buried my glasses in the back yard because I didn’t want to wear them. The time that we cut down a tree in our yard because it kept wiffleballs from going over the fence. We also removed a privacy fence from one part of our yard and put it back up to make our version of The Green Monster in the yard. There was Clay’s broken collarbone after a football game, although that didn’t happen in our yard. She took it all in stride.
I have loved sports since I was a kid and while part of it came from my dad and his side of our family, my mother was instrumental in our involvement.
She used to catch for my brothers and me, even when it got to the point that Graham and I were throwing hard enough that we were afraid we’d hurt her. She never hesitated though. I don’t know how many kids can say that their mom was their practice catcher.
Another thing she taught me was how to keep a scorebook. My dad and uncles played fast-pitch softball throughout our early childhood and mom was the scorekeeper. She taught us how to do it as well and it’s been a skill that I’ve used a lot more than I ever thought I would. It wasn’t exactly auto-mechanics, or carpentry or anything, and it didn’t exactly help with the girls, but still, a useful skill.
Our house was in the middle of St. Helen and our yard was the ballfield. There was a wiffle-ball or football game going on there nearly single day, regardless of the weather. Kids from all sides of town spent time in our front yard and mom never complained about it once. She would bring us out food sometimes and Kool-Aid was not uncommon. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my mom meant a lot to those kids. Several of them have told me since her passing that they looked at my mom as their second mom. And as an adult, I never have a conversation with any of my childhood friends without them asking how my mom is doing. I’ll miss that.
Mom was stubborn, and she was very adamant about how she wanted us to behave, both during sports and in everyday life. For example: Clay is eight years younger than me and the last thing you want as a 15-year-old is your seven-year-old brother playing wiffleball with you. So, we were jerks and invited an even number of people over to play and then told Clay he couldn’t play because it would make uneven teams. It worked until Clay went inside and told mom what the situation was. She came out and said that Clay was playing, and she would play as well to make the teams even. Needless to say, we played with uneven teams. Well played Mom, well played.
Another example of how stubborn she was: My mom placed a lot of value in her faith. She was in church every Sunday and therefore, so were we. It wasn’t anywhere I wanted to be, but we weren’t exactly presented with another option. “As long as you live under my roof, you’ll go to church,” was a common phrase in our house.
During my sophomore year of high school, our JV basketball coach wanted us to practice on Sunday mornings. In fact, he made them mandatory. I was happy about this, because not only did I get to skip church, but I also got to play basketball instead and I had the perfect excuse of “it’s mandatory mom, I can’t miss practice.”
I thought I was home free.
Wrong.
After a couple weeks of this, one of my friends came up to me on a Friday and asked me why my mom was at the school and who was the guy with her?
I looked for her, but never saw her and eventually started to think that my friend must have been mistaken about seeing her. When I got home though, I found out that my friend was not mistaken.
Turns out that mom had indeed gone to the school and had brought the pastor of the church with her to protest the idea of a mandatory Sunday morning practice. The school spoke to the coach and Sunday morning practice went from mandatory to “highly recommended.” As I sat in church that Sunday, I began to understand the depths of this woman’s stubbornness.
When we were young, we didn’t have money. We had tough times, although I know that they were a lot tougher for mom than they were for us. We were never denied going to the football or basketball games and the things we needed for our sports just seemed to find their way to our house. I know that these things happened because of personal sacrifices that mom made. Everyone says that their mom never asked for anything, and that’s true with mine as well. She valued our happiness over almost everything.
She’s gone now, and I’m struggling with it. Things don’t seem as important as they probably should at the moment. I know that it’s affecting my brothers as well.
In time, I’ll be ok, I know this, because that’s what mom would have wanted. She would tell us to live our lives and do the things that make us happy and to make sure we stay together as a family.
In closing, I’d just like to say thanks mom. You have given us a pretty solid plan to live life in a way that we can be happy and look ourselves in the mirror. I’m trying as best I can.