Mark Woods: For Mother's Day, the story of a mother of 10, a bookmark and "well-loved" books
It has been 21 years since Tabetha Cox celebrated her first Mother’s Day as a mother, a few months after giving birth to her daughter Julie.
“When I first learned I was going to become a mom, that was the first time I ever had a panic attack,” she said. “It hit me that I had a huge, huge responsibility.”
She was 23 years old and she didn't feel prepared. Her own childhood hadn’t given her much of a blueprint for how to be a mom. So she started reading, book after book. She put together an elaborate birth plan, several pages long, detailing how she was going to give birth without an epidural. And then she got into labor room and all of that went out the window.
“I remember saying, ‘What is happening?’” she said. “And they’re like, ‘Well, you can’t really know what it’s like until you experience it.’”
She figures motherhood itself is like that. And she’s certainly experienced a lot of it since then.
She now is the mother of 10: seven daughters (Hayley, Audrey, Patience, Desarae, Julie, Sydney and Kaitlyn) and three sons (Corbin, Kenneth and Connor), ranging in age from 29 to 14.
As you might imagine, they’re rarely in the same place at the same time. But to help me write a Mother’s Day column, Tabetha did manage to gather four of them — Julie, 21, Kaitlyn, 17, Sydney, 16, and Connor, 14 — and meet me at a Starbucks near their Clay County house. Desarae, 26, who was home with a sick baby, joined the conversation via Facetime.
As for how motherhood went from zero to 10 in 21 years — and why some of the children are older than 21, some are almost the same age, and some have different last names — Tabetha explains that when she got married, they became a blended family, adding her husband Josh’s children. Then they had two children together. And kept adding more.
“Along the way, we gained more children through love,” she said of adoptions and, in some cases, temporarily taking in children. “I’ve always tried to have my house open to anybody in need.”
To explain this and more, you need only go back to her own childhood, when she was in need.
A small trailer and Mrs. Brodie's classroom
She was born in California, a rural part of the state known for producing almonds and wine. Her mother was 13. Her father was 12.
Some of her early childhood memories are of a cramped trailer, a place where she shared the one bed with three siblings and her mother.
Her small school — about 65 students in kindergarten through eighth grade — was her safe place. And her teacher, Mrs. Brodie, felt like her mother.
“She was the one who washed my clothes and made sure I ate,” she said. “She was the one who taught me that I didn’t have to be ashamed of my appearance when my haircut was bad. She taught me how to speak, how to be heard.”
Mrs. Brodie also taught her that it was OK to dream of a life beyond the trailer.
She remembers reading fairy tales, fantasizing that someday she’d meet a prince and live in a castle. Her mother would tell her not to dream too much. That wasn’t reality. Her lot in life already was determined.
Mrs. Brodie told her otherwise.
The teacher didn’t tell her she was going to live in a castle. But when Mrs. Brodie asked her students what they wanted to be, and Tabetha said maybe a nurse or something else involving helping people — not a doctor, she said, because doctors were smart and rich — Mrs. Brodie told her: “You can do anything, but you have to work for it.”
When Mrs. Brodie took maternity leave, Tabetha stopped talking. She basically became mute. She thinks that was because she feared her teacher wasn’t coming back.
A flower bookmark
She does have a good childhood memory from one Mother’s Day.
There was a cutting board that pulled out of a counter in the trailer. On Valentine’s Day, her mother would get cards, write notes to the children, and leave them on that cutting board.
So for Mother’s Day, Tabetha decided she wanted to do something for her mother.
Her mother loved reading and had read “The Chronicles of Narnia" and other books to her.
So Tabetha picked some flowers and pressed them into waxed paper to make a bookmark, then left the bookmark on the cutting board for her mother.
“I remember she cried,” she said. “And it made an impression on me, because I realized you don’t really need money to make people feel loved or special in some way.”
She says she doesn’t have many more happy memories, Mother’s Day or otherwise, from childhood after that.
At age 12, she was put into foster care because of neglect. Her siblings were placed in different homes. She was alone, moving from foster home to foster home, until at age 17 she was emancipated from the foster care system.
After getting a degree in musical theater, she went into the Navy and became a Master-at-Arms. She was stationed in Nevada at Naval Air Station Fallon, home of Top Gun.
“I think the hardest I’ve ever worked was after 9/11,” she said. “We had seven months straight of 16-hour shifts, no breaks, on our feet, just high alert out in the desert.”
It was as a military trainer — getting Marines and sailors to learn things they might think they didn’t need to know — that she realized she might be good at teaching. She spent seven years in the Navy and didn’t want to leave. But after meeting her husband while they were serving in Italy, and knowing they both needed to be deployable at all times, she decided to get out. And that’s when she went on the path to a school classroom.
Before that, she had resisted the idea. To her, being a teacher meant being Mrs. Brodie. And being Mrs. Brodie meant being much more than a teacher.
“For a long time I avoided teaching because I felt the responsibility of it,” she said. “And it felt like too much.”
But once she became a teacher, she was all in. In 2018, she was named Teacher of the Year at Sadie T. Tillis Elementary and became one of five finalists for Duval County’s Teacher of the Year.
She had a variety of different roles with the schools, including a tutoring program that partnered with READ USA, a Jacksonville-based youth literacy nonprofit. That led to Rob Kelly, CEO of READ USA, asking her to join his team, initially as tutoring program director in 2021 and now as chief programs officer.
“It was like my dream,” she said. “You’re offering me a job where I get to work to work with books and children and help them experience the love of literacy and see what doors that opens for them? … I felt like I was stepping into Mrs. Brodie’s shoes.”
'Unconditional love isn't hard'
She asks Kaitlyn if it’s OK if she tells the story of how she joined their family. Kaitlyn nods.
Kaitlyn was on a soccer team with Sydney. Nobody was picking her up after practice. So they began driving her home. But they weren’t really sure where her home was. She’d asked to be dropped off in different places. And when Tabetha asked questions, the answers and non-answers felt very familiar to her.
They reminded her of herself at age 12.
They eventually decided they needed to get Kaitlyn into a safe place — and that place was their home. They got guardianship of her. And she’s been a part of the household for nearly five years.
Through the years, the kids have been a part of making it all work, always finding room in their hearts and four-bedroom house for one more, filling up bunk beds, expanding into the den.
In the next few years, the last of them will be grown.
Ask them what they want to do, and it’s clear they haven’t been told not to dream. Sydney is a singer-songwriter and hopes to get a record deal and make that a career. Connor talks about computer game development. Julie already is following in her mother’s footsteps. She recently started working in Duval County Public Schools as a special ed paraprofessional for children with autism.
And via Facetime, Desarae adds her own perspective, as a new mother.
She’s one of the daughters Tabetha Cox gained through marriage. But Desarae says she always refers to her stepmother as Mom. Like when she says, “My mom taught me unconditional love isn’t hard.” And even though she’s currently in the finance world, and would like to become an HR director and maybe get a master’s degree, she says becoming a mother herself changed her priorities.
“Ultimately — it might sound really cliche — but I think my big dream is to be the best mom I can be,” she said. “And I’m thankful that I have a really great example of that.”
'Home, Sweet Home'
The children say that when their mother comes home from work, she’s always there for them. Helping them with homework. Talking with them about whatever they’re struggling with. Mothering them when they’re sick. Taking them out for some one-on-one time. And reading. Always reading.
When they were little, sometimes they’d start the day by jumping into her bed, asking her to read something. And often those days would end with her reading more to them.
They recall how she was so good at doing all the voices.
“I remember, ‘Home, Sweet Home,’” Sydney said, describing a children’s book about a frog who lived in a rusty bucket and went searching for a new home. “I still have it. It's all messed up and the spine is broken but …”
“It's not messed up,” her mother said. “It's well-loved.”
Julie mentions “Chrysanthemum,” a children’s book by Kevin Henkes that tells the story of a young mouse with a unique name and a message about being yourself. The hero? A music teacher who becomes a mother.
Connor recalls his mother reading to him something he liked, the dystopian novel “City of Ember.”
She read "The Chronicles of Narnia" to them. And then there’s “The Night Before Christmas” — which they read every year, as you might guess, the night before Christmas.
They all bring this up, sitting in the living room, drinking mugs of hot cocoa.
It’s hard to fathom now, but there was a time when Tabetha Cox didn’t like Christmas. It meant family and tradition. And she had neither. So once she had children, she says with a laugh she might’ve gotten a little carried away.
“I just did all the traditions,” she said.
She does have another tradition, for any day of the year, that can be traced back to her childhood and that one Mother’s Day.
When she gives one of her children a book — when she gives anyone a book — she always includes something else.
A bookmark.
These aren’t handmade, flowers pressed into waxed paper. But the message, the reminder, is the same. It doesn’t take an expensive gift to make someone feel loved, on Mother’s Day or any other day.
mwoods@jacksonville.com
(904) 359-4212
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Mother's Day for a mother of 10
