Dan Rodricks: In Baltimore, celebrating the Other Mother from next door | STAFF COMMENTARY
“I was blessed with two mothers to love."
Miss Margie was the tall woman with the spunky personality from next door, the one who reached for the little girl each morning over the block wall that separated the Rosteks’ rowhouse on Potomac Street from the Kanieckis’.
That’s what constituted dropping the baby off with the sitter in those days.
But Pam Rostek, who is now 41, would never call Margie Kaniecki her sitter. She was more than that. She was the Other Mother.
She cooked her meals, baked her cookies, got her off to school at Holy Rosary, took her to bingo at St. Brigid’s, took her shopping for groceries or dresses, to carnivals, to Polish festivals, to the stations of the cross during Holy Week, and looked after her until Pam’s father returned each day from his various jobs.
Pam’s parents, both immigrants from Poland, worked hard and long. Richard Rostek was a master of multiple skills whose full-time job started at 3 a.m. at Reliant Fish Co. Her mother, Eve Rostek, was a nurse who worked the overnight hours in the critical care unit at Johns Hopkins Hospital; she slept during the day. That’s why the over-the-wall handoff took place each morning.
And Miss Margie, in her 50s by then, refused to take a penny for her trouble because she didn’t consider it trouble. She loved the little girl. She liked helping neighbors. That was her way — and old Canton rowhouse way — especially after she retired, having worked thousands of shifts over 34 years at Crown Cork & Seal.
Miss Margie, who never married, cared for her Polish immigrant mother until her death in 1979, then looked after the little girl and her brother from next door.
“She always said that taking care of us filled a void for her,” says Pam.
And so it became a routine, starting in the 1980s with one of the Rostek parents handing the little girl over the wall.
Later, after her parents enrolled their daughter at Holy Rosary, Margie washed and ironed Pam’s uniform, and she walked her to the bus stop for school each day.
“She never drove, never had a license,” Pam says. “She walked everywhere. She lived in the same house her entire life. … She would walk up to Brenda’s on the corner and get her hair done every Thursday. She would go to all kinds of different dances when she was younger, at the Polish Home Club. She was a polkaholic.”
She swept the sidewalks along Potomac Street. She looked out for neighbors, and she gave good, blunt advice to people who asked for it.
“She genuinely loved helping anyone who needed it,” Pam says. “Margie never broadcast anyone’s negative business. She’d only share things to others that people would be proud of you for. So when you’d see that person she spoke with, they’d randomly congratulate you on those things. It was her way of sharing good energy in the world.”
Pam and Miss Margie became very close during the first 12 years of Pam’s life, and the relationship continued long after the Rosteks sold their rowhouse and moved into a house in the Hereford Zone in Baltimore County.
“Margie was an integral member of our family [even] after our move from Canton to Hereford,” says Pam. “Since Margie didn’t drive, we would come and get her so she could be a part of our family gatherings. We were truly the only family she really had … once the immediate connections passed away.”
It happens all across Baltimore — a grandparent or sometimes a neighbor pitching in to care for children of working parents — and while some of those arrangements last a few months or a few years, some last forever. Some women reach the stature of Other Mother, and such was the case with Miss Margie.
The relationship went through a challenge when Pam was 16 years old and got pregnant. That news hit Miss Margie hard. It was a tough, tense time. She stopped speaking to Pam, but only for a week.
“She said, ‘I thought that I had taught you better, but, you know, it is what it is and we’ll get through it.’” Pam recalls. “And then she threw me my baby shower.”
That was 25 years ago. Margie embraced Pam’s little girl, Monika, like a granddaughter.
The years went by. In 2012, Pam married a Marine Corps veteran, Harold Kuwazaki Jr. They bought a home in southern Pennsylvania. But, despite the distance, Pam stayed in touch with Margie and visited her on Potomac Street.
Last year, after Margie fell at home — she was 96 by then — Pam and her husband took her into their house, where she lived out her final days. She died in November.
Pam Rostek-Kuwazaki looks back across the years, forever grateful that her parents moved next to Margaret “Miss Margie” Kaniecki on Potomac Street.
“I was blessed with two mothers to love,” Pam says. “One taught me the value of sacrifice, education, hard work, perseverance, overcoming obstacles and how to beat the odds. The other stepped in when my mother was unavailable due to work. She provided a smile, stability, comfort, attentive ears and unwavering support. Both played pivotal roles in molding me into who I am today. The pressures of life don’t always allow for one person to do it all. Family isn’t always blood, and it’s a blessing when children have a community of supportive role models shaping their lives.”