“Too Young to March”
By
Gerry Niskern
Several million of our youngest citizens should have taken to the streets around the nation in protest last week. The country’s infants needed their formulas and the stores were only stocking around 43% of the usual amount.
Not all babies have a “Dairy Queen” in residence. Not all mothers want to breast feed, for many reasons. That is their choice. The giant baby formula business is cornered by four companies in the United States. Abbott, the largest owns 40% of the market.
When one of the baby formula factories was shut down in February due to problems, it caused a large deficit , along with supply chain issues that were already happening because of the pandemic. Select batches of Similac, Alimentum and EleCare were recalled. Other factories could not make up the severe shortages quickly enough. And our former President’s trade policy made it very hard to have truckloads sent from Canada.
Of course, the infant formula scare reminded me of raising my own kids. I feed the first two, but son #2 was different. A couple of months after birth he developed an allergy to milk products. Everything came up. In desperation, I resorted to consulting a pediatrician. The family doctor who delivered them always took care of any kid’s problems. After checking the baby out thoroughly the specialist recommended I give him buttermilk! He accepted it, loved it, and thrived on it. Who knew?
I was also reminded of stories I heard about great-grandmothers, on both sides of the family, resorting to “sugar tits” to keep a fussy baby happy. As it was explained to me, long ago mothers used to mix some sugar and butter together and place it on a clean cloth which they rolled into a cone and gave it to the baby to suck on. Hey, whatever worked!
Luckily babies in today’s world have every type formula to meet their nutritional needs. Our country has very strict standards but our government has arranged for some European countries who meet those standards are going to help supply the desperately needed formula.
The shortage is an ongoing problem and we are going to have to look for a more permanent solution. Production and supply demands must be meet. Every day the need grows.
Feed those young citizens!

“My Maxim Mother”

By

Gerry Niskern

One of my greatest embarrassments as a kid was to be given ten cents to go to the grocery store for a loaf of bread. “But, Mom,” I used to argue, “The clerk always says it’s eleven cents. A penny for the tax.”
“Tell them it’s a sin to tax our daily bread,” she always declared indignantly, “right is right.”
I didn’t realize it until many years later but I was being raised by the maxim method. My mother had a maxim or proverb to fit every occasion. The many squabbles between my sister and me were settled with one of us being told to just be big about it.
Mother brushed and braided my hair into pigtails every morning until I was twelve years old. The answer to my pleas to have it cut and permed were met with the admonishment, “Young lady, you are skating on thin ice with all those crocodile tears.
Her sense of timing was eerie. When I was a teenager I was convinced that she had a built-in alarm that told her exactly when my boyfriend and I had reached the edge of our front yard after a date. The front door light suddenly blazed across the porch steps. I’m sure she breathed a sigh of triumph and smugly said to herself, “ I nipped that in the bud.”
I don’t know how she knew I had ditched high school one day even before my girlfriend and I came strolling up the street after the usual dismissal time. The front door opened with a flourish as she declared, “She was mad as a wet hen because I hadn’t attended school that afternoon and if I thought I had gotten away with it I had another thought coming. You’ve cooked your own goose and your dad is going to come down on you like a ton of bricks!”
Family holidays, birthdays and even funerals were command appearances.
“What do you mean? You have a date?” she would ask. “Your Aunt Annie was the salt of the earth. I don’t care if you can’t remember her. The eulogy is at two o’clock…be there! After all, blood is thicker than water.”
Long after I was married and became a mother myself, she continued to mother the young women who worked for her and my dad in their small manufacturing business. She always started Monday morning with samples of a new recipe that melted in your mouth for everyone. She brought them cuttings from her flower garden to start in theirs. As she helped them at their worktables they were given liberal doses of her views on good morals. She advised them to take the bull by the horns and break it off with boyfriends that were not treating them respectively or were always four sheets to the wind. “After all,” she’d say,
“Everyone knows that a leopard can’t change his spots!”
When a new girl came to work that was having a hard time financially and was between the devil and the deep blue sea, I would get a call from Mom. “Clean out your kids closets and bring me everything they’ve outgrown. My new girl’s kids needs clothes.” A cash advance on their first paycheck always accompanied the clothes when my dad wasn’t looking.
She always encouraged my talent in art even as a child. “Hitch your wagon to a star and you can do anything you want,” she declared over and over again
Years later, during one of my most important gallery interviews, I was asked where I had been showing. Imagine my horror, when I heard myself answering that I had been hiding my light under a bushel basket. I couldn’t believe I had actually said that to the very puzzled young gallery director. “Oh, no,” I thought. “I’ve finally turned into my mother.”
Then I thought again, I’m proud to be like someone who was worth her weight in gold!