What Mammaw Said

What Mammaw Said

UNTIL I WAS WELL into my thirties, I didn’t realize that not all women are exposed to an extremely wise older woman. I was lucky and doubly blessed. I not only knew such a woman, she served as my personal and professional mentor and hero. She was my master teacher. She was my Mammaw.

Now, you city girlfriends who come from well-to-do families will ask, “What’s a Mammaw?” I realized when I moved from my small, country town to the city over thirty years ago that city girls have this loving, trusted older woman in their families they call Grandmother or something really snazzy like MiMi. Well, in the country, we just call her MAM-MAW. There’s a heavy accent on the MAW (let your jaw drop “a-ways”) if you want to say it properly.

Mammaw was a very unusual woman for her time. She was a banker for over thirty-five years—in an age when women weren’t supposed to enjoy successful careers; she raised a family (including my mom); she was the church treasurer and a champion forty-two domino player; and she could dance the Charleston like a professional (although she was a closet dancer; my Methodist grandmother married a Southern Baptist). But she was something else: she was a near master at living in peace even when her life was in turmoil. As I think back on her life of grace and the beautiful legacy she left her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, I thought perhaps you would enjoy getting to know her too.

John Maxwell, in his book Thinking for a Change, says this about creating a legacy: “If you are successful, it becomes possible for you to leave an inheritance for others. But if you desire to do more, to create a legacy, then you need to leave that in others. When you think unselfishly and invest in others, you gain the opportunity to create a legacy that will outlive you (emphasis added).”^a

A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children. (Proverbs 13:22, NASB)

Mammaw died with not a penny to her name, but I am dripping with jewels and riches beyond belief because of her influence. Because she unselfishly invested in me.

^a John Maxwell, Thinking for a Change (New York: Warner Books, 2003), 109.