Today is my mother’s 100th birthday, though she left us for God’s ineffable realms back in the summer of 2000. Victoria Albina Przybytek was a Wisconsin farm girl born of Polish immigrant parents in 1924. After the War she left the family farm in Necedah, Wisconsin and moved to Chicago to earn her nursing degree at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. She met my father in 1946, married him in 1949, brought me into the world in 1952, and my sister Gretchen in 1956. She (like my father) was a spectacular parent, who (like my father) taught me a great deal, in part by example, and in part by specific instruction. She taught me to pray, she taught me to waltz and polka, and she welcomed my friends, even when we were rowdy Boy Scouts holding noisy Fox Patrol meetings in our family room.
Both of her parents came to live with us in their last months, and she taught us, by example, that caring about and for others and helping them was one of life’s most important purposes, one she pursued not only as a daughter, spouse and mother but also by profession, working as a nurse until her retirement. She did her best to care for my father for the eight horrible years he fought cancer, though after his death in 1978 she was never quite the same.
Her personality was warm but also mystical, trusting that God and his angels would help her through the inevitable problems that life confronts all of us with. She had many fascinating stories to tell us of her life, her dreams, and her visions. She gave Gretchen and me freedom to roam the neighborhood and learn what such roaming could teach us–which, looking back, was critical in my journey to adulthood.
When I first brought Carol home in 1969, my mother and my whole family embraced her as though she were already one of us. As my sister said once a few years after I married Carol, “If you two ever divorce, we’re keeping her.” Not to worry, heh. I knew what marriage was supposed to be like because I watched my parents’ marriage and did my best to follow their example. After 48 years of marriage (and 55 as inseparable best friends) Carol and I can confidently say that my mother’s lessons were successful. I’m sure that my parents are now together in God’s realms, healing one another of the pains they had suffered here on our beautiful but imperfect Earth.
In short: I would not be the man I am, were she not the mother she was.
