Phyllis E. Combs

By Julie Maniglia

My mother, Phyllis Combs, is now being laid to rest, and the family is gathered to say goodbye. I want to write something about her for her Memorial Book.

I suppose that people tend to evaluate a person’s life by their “accomplishments” and determine a person’s worth by their own definition of “accomplishments.” Was the person successful at earning money? Did the person have a lofty title? Were they famous? Were they fabulously creative? Did they follow all the cultural rules and regulations of their society and fit into a cultural idea of piety, or were they just the opposite...rebellious and an outlaw against convention? Just what does make a person valuable?

Depending upon your point of view, perhaps you will dismiss Phyllis as accomplishing very little in her life.

I think that each life is part of the fabric of God, however. We are all knit together in a fabulous tapestry and each thread of the fabric is important, whether or not some people understand and/or appreciate that.

Mom was in some ways conventional and in others a rebel.

She married young. She was only 18. I think she longed for a different life than the one she ultimately chose. She often said she would have liked to have become a flight attendant, but fear held her back from pursuing that dream. Instead, she married my father, Donald McDowell.

The marriage was Mom’s way of fitting into society at the time, but she was not happy. She gave birth to me and named me after my grandmother, Julia Truitt.

That marriage did not last.

She then met and married Arthur Combs. She inherited another child, Eddie, whom Arthur brought with him from his previous marriage. Mom was not prepared to deal with a rambunctious boy and, after several years, Eddie was allowed to return to live with his own mother. Mom apologized to him many years later for not being able to mother him properly

Two more children were born...Mark and then Scott, the baby of the family. I told Mom I wanted a sister, but we got Scott! We put ribbons in his hair until Art made us stop and got him a haircut.

Mark was a troubled child and was ultimately diagnosed as schizophrenic. He ran away when he was a teenager, killed someone and ended up in prison. This caused our mother much heartache. She always wondered if she’d done something wrong or if there was something she could have done differently.

As for my own relationship with my mother, it was always volatile. We did a lot of laughing, crying and fighting. Sometimes we wouldn’t speak to each other for a while, but we’d always end up mending our fences. We had a lot of Thanksgiving dinners together and some apart. She took me in when my second husband beat me up and I had nowhere else to go, but we could never live together for too long a time after I grew up. We argued about religion...a lot. She helped me hang wallpaper in my house. She had a good eye for interior design. She also sewed and made some of her own clothes and helped me mend mine. I have her recipe for banana bread.

She was my anchor in this life, and sometimes I felt like she was weighing me down like an anchor. She was needy and co-dependent, but so was I. We shared a lot of the same fears and had a lot of the same questions. She made me think about God and why I was here.

Her life was messy...in some ways conventional and in other ways rebellious, but she always did the best she could, I believe. We were knit together, side by side, in that tapestry of God’s. She made a difference in my life and she gave me life. So, I say, “thank you” mother.