mommy

Grab your coat and get your hat,

Leave your worries on the doorstep.

Life can be so sweet

On the sunny side of the street.

Elizabeth Deanne Ibold, born November 10, 1928, at about 3 years old.

My mom, Elizabeth Deanne Ibold Wolff van de Velde, died on May 16, 2018 and I couldn’t manage to write a thing for 6 months. Then I wrote the 1st draft of this post.

Then I stopped again until today. Tomorrow is Mother’s Day, 2020 and in 8 days it will be the 2nd anniversary of her death.

Why did it take me so long to be able to write this?

Is this how grief works?

Despite the fact that her family was not Catholic, Elizabeth Deanne Ibold (now known to her friends as “E-Dee”) went to school at The Sacred Heart Academy in Chicago for 13 years, k-12.

E-Dee followed her older sister to Depauw University and joined the same sorority, Alpha Chi Omega. Luckily she had naturally wavy hair so that she could easily achieve the permed sorority sister look! She met my father Klaus on a blind date organized by Alpha Chi and his International House at Wabash University.

In 1950 she married Klaus Heinrich Wolff, a man 13 years her senior, a veteran of the German WWII army. Needless to say her parents weren’t thrilled.

Their honeymoon in March was spent at Starved Rock State Park in Illinois.

In 1953 Deanne and Klaus spent a year in Europe, living with his mother and step-father. Germany was still very war-shocked and it didn’t sound like much fun.

My mom loved being a mom, but she was also smart, ambitious and restless in her 1950s role as ‘Mid-Century mommy’.

She opted to stop at 2 children in an era of large families.

She wanted to DO things but her degree in art history wasn’t proving useful. She volunteered far and wide through the 60s and eventually, in the 70s, she settled her passion on the Middlebury Volunteer Ambulance Association. She became an EMT, a crew chief and ultimately attended Dartmouth to become one of the 1st Physician’s Assistants in 1974. It was around this time that she dropped one of the Ns in Deanne and became Deane to my sister and me and almost all her friends.

Her career in medicine focused on women’s health and included dozens of baby deliveries, as well as family medicine, years working for Planned Parenthood and The Shorewell Health Center. She was even Physician’s Assistant to Ben and Jerry at the Charlotte Family Health Center in the mid-80s!

She retired at 60 and changed her specialty to being an extraordinary Granny and an artist in multiple mediums.