Remembering Mothers

Published 5:00 am Sunday, May 13, 2018

Women who give birth, more importantly life

Mother’s Day is a huge topic. Honoring the women who gave birth is one thing but sometimes it is the women who raise children, teachers or mentors that are the most important in someone’s life — and worthy of this day’s remembrance.

To salute all women, three sisters were selected to tell parts of their stories. Like Abraham’s heirs, the family lines blanket the Teche Area. Starting the story with their mother brings the reality of a single woman’s dance with destiny into full flight.

Alcee and Aline Babineaux parented 10 children, seven girls and three boys. Aline was giving birth for 23 years, said her three remaining daughters, one who followed with a 20 year span of her own. Their loving mother never learned to read or write, but her intelligence impacted the family just the same. These three sisters admitted they never really thought about how far the descendants reach into the community, but knowing them proves this to be true.

The Indest Line

If you had a diagram of the Babineaux family, the acorn that grew from Coteau would be the size and shape of a historic live oak tree.

“We lived in the country, and Mama wanted her girls to be ladies foremost in her mind. She was a very proud woman,” Joyce Babineaux Indest said about her mother. “Some lady in town told me one time, that my mother told her that we, her seven daughters, were her flower garden.”

Mother Babineaux wanted her girls to look nice all the time, inside and out.

“She taught me that you never, ever spoke back to her. Respect is what it was and that’s gone down to my children. My children respect me. They may not like it and many times, I said, ‘You can think it, but you dare not tell me.’ One of my boys answered me back one time, and when the daddy came home, he took (the boy) into the tool shed. He came to apologize to me after. He has been almost the nicest of my children since then. They never answered back me in anyway and I got that from my mother,” said Indest.

The effort to pass that along to her grandchildren’s generation has become a little lax, the interviewees all agreed. They still have a lot of respect but there is a lot more talking in today’s families.

“I think now with smaller families, you have more conversation, speak your mind kind of thing, but none of them have been sassy,” said Marie Indest Brodie, one of the seven children of Joyce Babineaux Indest, four boys and three girls, plus 17 grandchildren and 22 great-grandchildren.

Joyce Indest was influenced by her mother about how to dress. Her daughters are grateful some things have changed.

“When I wake up in the morning I dress up and I’m ready to go anywhere. I don’t know if I can say that of the girls,” said Indest, called “Maw Maw” by the grands. “My mother was always nicely dressed and would not ever have walked away from the house without a girdle.”

The Shea Line

Harriet Babineaux Shea, “Mamon,” French slang for mother or grandmother, had seven children. She remembers her mother as a patsy.

“You could just wiggle her around. If you asked her if you could go to the movies, she’d say ‘No.’ I’d say, ‘Ok, we’re leaving at 5 o’clock.’ She’d say, ‘Ok.’ She was a patsy,” Shea said. “I wasn’t wild, I was aggressive. I had an older sister that was laid back. I did everything before her. I was aggressive.”

That trait may have come in handy due to being the youngest of 10. She grew to have confidence to achieve what she desired. It also could be how she was able to cope with losing her son Steve to cancer in 2009 and recently surviving pancreatic cancer. Her fortitude has always been family focused.

“Mama wanted to learn to sign her name so I took it upon myself to try to teach her, not the alphabet, but to sign her name,” Shea said.

Their mother was self-educated and passed the importance of learning onto her children. In the Indest line alone there are seven teachers among the grandchildren and spouses. Consider the number of students over the years that have studied under their tutelage. That’s influence. After 23 years of mothering, Joyce Indest also went to work as part of the Iberia Parish School Board for 17 years. Shea, too, was a teacher, to her children.

“I tell (the children and grandchildren) all the time, this is what Mamon use to do,” Shea said. “One thing is, whenever one of my daughters would come with her boyfriend and say they wanted to get married, I said, ‘You have to go talk to your father, or grandfather if the case may be. He’d say, ‘Can you support my daughter? If you can’t, leave her here.’ ”

Their Papa Babineaux said, “My one wish is that I see them all marry WELL. That’s what they wanted for their daughters, to marry and marry well — and go to church. Religion was the biggest part, Shea said.

A mother of six children with one deceased, three boys and three girls, 23 grandchildren and 35 great grandchildren, Shea said they had a good time going to church because they would pinch each other and do other things misbehaving. They’d get slapped, but wouldn’t get too much reprimanding in church.

“One of the rules (from Mother Babineaux), if you walked into a house like this, and you didn’t stop and say hello — look out. You were going to get it later on,” Mary Indest Resweber said. “You never passed by an adult without stopping and saying hello. And when she had company you politely got up and left the room. Or, if there was no place to go, they would speak in French so we couldn’t understand them.”

All of the Babineauxs spoke both English and French.

The Patout Line

Verna “Grandma” Babineaux Patout gave birth to five children, three girls and two boys. One daughter is deceased. With seven granddaughters and 13 great-grandchildren, she can watch the girls and at times see the reflection of the seven Babineaux sisters.

A woman of the world, having visited 43 countries and 49 states, this granny likes to show her colors. And why shouldn’t she. Although she settled and retired in New Iberia as a high school counselor after teaching many years at Catholic High School, her stories are far more varied. At 95 she is the oldest of the three sisters.

She designed her own home, mostly, at 73, after trekking the Himalayas at age 67. Patout has seen a lot of life which included volunteering in the community, enjoying hobbies like stain-glass making, calligraphy — which she still uses — taking courses in French, Spanish, Morse Code and modeling. Right after high school she worked in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where she “helped” build the atomic bomb. Almost drowning during a white-water rafting trip down the Snake River “didn’t stop me,” she said.

With so much from one member of the family, it’s easy to see how thick the book would have to be to completely tell the Babineaux story. Her memories of Mother Babineaux are the same as her sisters, plus one.

“When we would misbehave — when I would misbehave — she’d tell Harriet, ‘Go outside and break me a little branch.’ She was going to whip me with it, which she never did, NEVER did. But she’d always say that,” Patout said.

Naturally, Harriet would go break the branch. “And (Mama) would say, ‘If it’s not big enough, you’re going to get it,” Harriet Babineaux Shea said, as Joyce Babineaux Indest said, “I never got a whipping.”

One of Patout’s daughters shared something Mother Babineaux passed down to her through her mother, Verna Babineaux Patout.

“My mother loves astronomy and her mother did. She would tell us stories about that,” Annette Patout Blair said. “Every now and then when I look at the stars I think of the two of them.”

They talked about a particular constellation.

“She told me about the three kings in the sky, and of course I was thinking of a picture of the eyes, the ears, everything,” Patout said. “Mama said, ‘Whenever I see the three kings, I’m going to wake you up and show them to you.’ I was so excited. It was the three stars, (Orion) and of course I was very disappointed because I didn’t see the faces.”

Patout said because her mother was uneducated, she spent her life regretting not taking the time to tell Mother Babineaux the moon did not break up and come back together because of the way it looked in its cycles.

“I always regretted I didn’t sit with her and explain a lot of things she probably would have loved to hear,” Patout said.

Mothers are precious people worth the time and effort to tell them so. You just never know how far a mother’s influence might reach. One of Alcee and Aline Babineaux’s sons, Louis, fathered a former governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco. From Coteau to state government, the reach and family legacy transcends the mind.

Babineaux Heirs

Andrew Babineaux (d)

No children

Lawson Babineaux (d)

Babineaux (3 sons)

Hebert

Louis Babineaux  (d)

Babineaux (4 sons)

Blanco

Cadwell

Cox

Elsie Broussard (d)

Broussard (2 sons)

Dodson

Laperouse

Angelle Freeman (d)

Elias

Nichols

Martrine Gastineau (d)

Gastineau (1 son)

Joyce Indest

Indest (4 sons)

Brodie

Mouton

Resweber

Vivian Myers (d)

Myers (1 son)

Danna

McKee

Verna Patout

Patout (2 sons)

Blair

Trappey

Harriett Shea

Shea (3 sons)

Holleman

Mullen

Zaunbrecher

plus three more generations