Where there's a will

If she could, Shirley Miller would swap the sad moments for happier ones. But what she would never change is being a mother.

That part of her life turned out exactly the way she had hoped.

"I was a good mother. I am a good mother. I shouldn't say was. I am. I was good to them," says the 76-year-old Sioux Falls woman of her sons Michael and Jim. "They knew I loved them because I told them all the time I loved them."

On this Mother's Day, Shirley Miller's story is a tribute to the will of one woman – and a testament to the will of women everywhere.

South Lake Avenue

Shirley Miller wishes she had had her mother's legs. Her mother's legs were long and curved and perfect. They were like Roman columns.

Shirley keeps a black-and-white photo of her mother and father in a simple frame on the armoire in her bedroom. In the photo he has his arms wrapped around her waist. Her nylons are rolled down to her ankles in keeping with the fashion at the time, and the wind is blowing her dress to the side. There is a wooden fence behind them and behind that a plowed field. They are young and smiling.

Married on July 4, 1931, George and Pearl Aurit had 11 children. Shirley was their first.

Shirley spent her youth helping her mother cook, wash clothes and clean their house on South Lake Avenue even when it didn't need it. A person, Shirley says, could have eaten off their floors. "My mom was a tough lady, God love her. We used to call her mean, but that was just her way of controlling her kids."

George Aurit, by contrast, was soft-spoken and gentle. Though he had dropped out of school after the eighth grade, Shirley says, her father was a mathematical whiz who started his own construction business. The house he built for them on South Lake Avenue had two bedrooms and a bunkhouse in the basement. "We were stacked up like cordwood. But we didn't know any different."

It took three heart attacks to kill George Aurit.

The first occurred on a clear autumn day in 1951. George had driven Pearl and Shirley downtown in his 1949 four-door Ford to shop. He parked the forest green sedan at 14th Street and Phillips Avenue and told Shirley and her mother he would wait there. When the two returned to the corner, it had turned dark. They looked for the Ford, but it was gone. Shirley and her mother took the bus home where they found George lying in bed. When Pearl asked him what was wrong, he said, "Mother, I feel like I've got a ton of bricks on my chest." An ambulance rushed him to McKennan Hospital where he was placed in an oxygen tent. He would spend a month in the tent and have two more heart attacks.

George Aurit rarely drank, but he smoked three packs of cigarettes a day – usually Camels but sometimes Lucky Strikes. On the day her father died, Shirley had driven her mother to the hospital in the morning and then gone home to prepare for work. Later that morning before Shirley left for her job at National Bank of South Dakota, someone from the hospital telephoned and told her to come immediately. Her father had died.

At 5-foot-8, George Aurit had not been a big man, but the years he had spent building homes and businesses had left his body muscular and lean, and the month he had spent in the hospital had done little to change that. Standing next to each other at his bedside, the nurse told Shirley she had been checking his blood pressure when her father turned to her and said, "I'm starving," and died.

Shirley had wanted to go to college to be an elementary school teacher – a decision her father embraced. "Of course when he died, there was no way," Shirley says. She continued working at the bank. Her mother took a job packing bacon at John Morrell. In the afternoons even in the summer, her mother would come home from the meat packing plant so cold she would turn on the furnace.

Shirley says her father used to tell her mother he didn't have time to enjoy his children. He was too busy working. He intended to enjoy his grandchildren, though.

"My mother was never able to say she loved us," Shirley says. "But my dad did."

At this thought, Shirley Miller starts to cry.

A way out

If her father had been alive, she never would have married Frank Miller. Shirley Miller is certain of it.

Shirley didn't even like Frank Miller when the two started dating in spring 1952 after the death of her father. He laughed at his own jokes and had a way of ignoring Shirley when others were around. He was his own greatest interest.

Frank wore his thick brown hair slicked back into a ducktail. His teeth were white and neat like porcelain tiles, and because the owner of the men's clothing store where he worked gave him a discount, Frank could afford to dress in suits even though his family had little money.

Frank was well-known and well-liked. Now, 57 years later, Shirley wonders whether this is what most attracted her to him.

"I didn't have that many friends. I was from the wrong side of the tracks as far as the kids from Cathedral were concerned. Frank was the opposite. He was very popular. He had a ton of friends, and I think I was enamored of that. I probably felt like I should be pleased that he wanted to marry me."

Doubt also led Shirley to Frank. When her father died, the responsibility of raising her 10 brothers and sisters fell even more heavily on her shoulders. Though she loved them, the thought of spending her life consumed in their care – far-fetched as it might have been – weighed on her mind.

Marriage offered an escape.

"There was no way on God's green earth that Frank was anything like my dad," Shirley insists. Still, she married him April 23, 1953, in the rectory at Christ the King Church almost a year after they began dating. She and Frank wore matching green suits. The thin brown pinstripes in the cloth were the same color as her hat.

Sitting next to Frank in the car after the wedding, Shirley thought she would be married for the rest of her life.

In the fall of 1953 Frank was drafted into the Army, and during the next 21 years Shirley followed him to Army – and then Air Force – bases in Austria and Germany and Michigan and Minnesota and Tennessee and Arizona and finally in California. For the first two years, it was the two of them. Then, in April 1955, their first son – Michael – was born. Two years later Shirley gave birth to Jim.

"He was no father, and he was no husband," Shirley says of Frank. His request for remote tours in Formosa, Thailand and Korea where Shirley and the boys could not join him meant there were entire years Frank never was home.

"You figure whatever you've got is OK, and you learn to live with it. I learned to live with the situation because my kids were so important to me. They were really the only thing I ever had."

Frank was stationed at George Air Force Base northeast of Los Angeles when he retired from the military in April 1974. One Sunday afternoon as the four of them ate dinner, Frank told Shirley he wanted to leave.

Shirley had taken an accounting job at an oil and gas company not long before. After Frank moved out, she would come home from work and drink white wine and eat microwave popcorn in the Garden Grove condominium she had picked out after Frank quit the Air Force and she finally was free of military housing. Often, she would call Frank and – crying – ask him when he was coming back. "He would say he wasn't coming back. He didn't say divorce. He just said he wasn't coming back."

One night Shirley walked into the bathroom, locked the door, took a razor blade from the medicine cabinet, sat down on the floor and placed the blade against the skin of her wrist. She was still sitting on the floor with the blade still pressed against her wrist when the police broke in and took her to the psychiatric ward of a Long Beach hospital while Jim stood watching on the sidewalk outside.

She spent two weeks in the hospital. Frank visited her once. During that visit he asked for a divorce.

In her youth Shirley was striking. Her auburn hair – kept short – fell across her forehead in a wave. Beneath eyebrows arched like the edge of a coin, her eyes contained a quiet comfort. They were like looking into still green bays.

Shirley says her father liked to tell her that she either would get married and have a dozen kids or join the convent once she grew up.

It always made her laugh.

Shirley says she only wanted a husband who loved her.

"That was my hope – somebody who could really love me for what I am and what I was, and it just never happened."

Did as she was told

Once a year, Shirley Miller visits her oldest son Michael, his wife and their six children. Michael is a chemical engineer in Fort Worth, Texas, and his devotion for his children and the gentle patience he offers them remind Shirley of her own father.

"He is a wonderful, wonderful father and husband. He adores his family."

Slightly bent at the back, Shirley Miller has the appearance of someone hurrying into the wind when she walks. Since September, she has been a cashier at the Hy-Vee grocery store on South Minnesota Avenue. From 3 to 6 in the afternoon, her lane at Hy-Vee seldom lets up. At the end of her shift, her knees are throbbing.

"I can hardly crawl out of the car when I get home. But by the next morning, I'm fine."

When she was hired, Shirley was told the store needed someone to work 20 hours a week. Before long, she was asked whether she could work more. And more still. Her only days off now are Saturday and Sunday.

Shirley has no choice but to work. Her monthly Social Security benefits are not enough to pay all the bills, and because Frank failed to set up his dependent survival benefits after he retired from the military, she lost her portion of his pension when he died six years ago. Her only assistance from the military is the health benefits she receives.

Initially when she returned to Sioux Falls in 1998 after working in California for 24 years after the end of her marriage, Shirley landed a job as the parish secretary at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church on East Eighth Street. She kept the books and prepared the payroll for the church. She put together its weekly bulletin and helped congregants in any way she could. "I was responsible for that parish 24/7," she says.

In July the parish administrator at Our Lady of Guadalupe walked into her office and told her its predominantly Spanish-speaking congregation needed a secretary who was fluent in Spanish and English.

"He broke my heart," Shirley says. "I had been there for 10 years and really did give 200 percent to that parish. I was very proud of what I had done."

Financially, Shirley is convinced she has done everything one is supposed to do in preparation for this point in her life.

She has worked.

She has saved.

She has invested.

Never in her life has she been late on a payment. Never in her life has she written a bad check.

Without the money she earns at Hy-Vee, Shirley says she could not afford the house she and her youngest son Jim – a teller at a Sioux Falls bank – share a couple of blocks from Roosevelt High School. After living out of a suitcase for the 21 years that Frank was in the military, she likes nothing more than to come home from work and cook dinner for her and Jim while Foxy – their wolf sable Pomeranian – shuttles from room to room waiting to bark if someone happens to knock at the door.

"I will do everything in my power not to lose it," she says of the perfectly kept split-level house from whose porch flies the American flag.

George Aurit found disciplining his children difficult, but when her mother demanded it, Shirley says, her father made the offending child kneel in the corner and recite the rosary. She says God never gives a person more than the person can handle.

"I don't think I always liked my life all those years," she says. "But I don't regret it. I know what I have to do to survive, and I do it."