By Tim Sanders

Sunday is Mother’s Day, but I won’t be giving my Mom a card or flowers. My mother died on Oct. 14, 1997.

My mother also died on Jan. 24, 2008. Miraculous? Well, almost. I was fortunate enough to have two mothers, and both were amazing ladies.

Marie Sanders and her husband, Lloyd, adopted me when I was 10 months old. Throughout my young life, she was the only Mom I ever knew, and the fact that I was adopted did not affect that relationship. Being an adopted child was actually preferable, Mom told me, because adopted children are never accidents; they’re always chosen. It sounded reasonable to me.

Mom taught me the rudiments of reading and writing long before I started school. She taught me to appreciate melody and harmony, and to recognize the difference between good music and noise. (That, by the way, makes turning on the radio nowadays a horrible ordeal.) Mom was there to care for me when I was sick, and even when I was faking illness to avoid school. (She was a firm believer in thermometers, so I learned early on the effectiveness of placing the device on the hot air duct in my bedroom so as to run my temperature up to the minimum stay-at-home requirement.) Mom and Dad both loved animals, and Mom dutifully allowed me to house whatever wild creatures I brought home. To her, the joy of watching woodchucks, squirrels, blue jays and such wander about the house more than compensated for whatever mess they may have produced. Had I brought a bison home, she’d probably have accommodated it. ("Yes, you can keep him in your room, but the first time I catch him grazing on the carpeting, he’ll find himself on the back porch with the musk ox.") Snakes, of course, were a different story, but nobody’s perfect.

When I was very small, Mom sometimes joined my friends and me in our backyard games. Once she even took it upon herself to teach my neighbor Donna Miller and me the proper form for pole vaulting over the clothesline with a fragile wooden lath we’d found in Dad’s lumber pile behind the garage. To her credit, after that stick broke mid-vault, she did manage to crawl into the house under her own steam. Mom would remind me of that incident several years later, when I attempted to launch myself down the driveway on my niece Becky’s new skateboard, with similar disastrous results.

Suffice it to say that Mom was a good mother, and she had the scars to prove it.

But there was another mother in my life. During World War II, my birth mother worked at the Continental Motors plant in Muskegon, Michigan. The factory produced air-cooled engines for tanks, landing craft, and other military vehicles, as well as Rolls Royce engines for the P-51 Mustang. Jeannette was a single mother with four children to support. Life wasn’t easy for her and her children in those days. Pay was poor and groceries were skimpy. So when she gave birth, first to my sister Darlene in 1945, and then to me in 1947, she gave us up for adoption. It wasn’t an easy decision, but she couldn’t afford more children, and knew we’d have a chance for a better life that way. Had she been a different sort of person, and had federally funded abortions been readily available, I might not be writing these lines today.

Jeannette and her family went through several difficult years, and by the time she finally met Charlie Ranger and married him in 1959, her children were grown. Charlie was a good man, and gave Jeannette the love and stability she deserved.

I didn’t meet Jeannette until I was 23. Marilyn was pregnant with our first son, Steve, and I thought it would be a good idea to locate my birth mother and find out more about my medical background. Our first meeting was very interesting. As it turned out, Jeannette and Charlie were close friends of the people whose lakefront cottage in northern Michigan was next door to my parents’ cottage. She had seen me next door playing many years before, when she and Charlie visited the Whitmores, but of course had no idea who I was.

We exchanged Christmas cards with Jeannette and Charlie over the years, and even visited them at their home along the Muskegon River in Michigan. We sent pictures occasionally, but I never really got to know Jeannette until we met my brothers and sisters. After that, we saw her more often. I learned that she was from a family of eleven children, and that my ancestry was Dutch. I also learned that her brother, my Uncle Clarence, had been a trumpeter with several swing bands during the late 1930s, and became a company bugler after he was drafted into the Army during WWII. According to several articles in newspapers at the time, he may well have been the inspiration for the song "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B," popularized by the Andrews Sisters.

Jeannette, or "Nettie" as her friends called her, was a tiny woman with a big heart. She enjoyed fishing and camping, and loved her children and grandchildren. She also loved a good joke, and had a wry sense of humor which she often betrayed with an arched eyebrow and a sly grin. In her later years she had physical problems, but she was no complainer. Even when she was hospitalized and near the end of her life, she retained her sense of humor. She joked with her doctors and with the attendants, and when I spoke with her on the phone a few days before her death, she assured me she was doing fine.

Marie Sanders was 88 when she died in 1997, and Jeannette Ranger was 94 when she passed away earlier this year. My two mothers never met, but they shared a son. Maybe they’ve met now, and shared some long conversations. And maybe, just maybe, they’ve resolved that age-old question of whether to blame a son’s idiosyncrasies on his environment or his heredity.