Louella Marie Andrepont (1954-2024)
My mother, Louella Marie Andrepont, was born on 2 December 1954 in Crowley, Louisiana to William Calvin and Addlia (Quebodeaux) Andrepont. The youngest of four children, she grew up on a farm on what is now Brush Road, just outside of Iota in Acadia Parish. I have reason to believe she was named after my grandfather’s younger brother Jessie’s wife Luella, who died the year before Jessie was killed in combat in Belgium.
Here she is with my uncle Ricky (Elrick, named after Pawpaw’s father), who is three years older. The kid on the right is Ronald Pousson who I think is a cousin of ours.
Mom met my father Douglas when she was thirteen; they were three years apart in age and attended Iota High School, where she was in the same graduating class as my dad’s sister Matilda. Mom and Matilda were best friends for years. I don’t have a photo of them together, but here’s one of Mom. I do not know how old she was here. I seem to recall from conversations about it that she was not in high school yet.
From everything I’ve heard, I almost didn’t happen, because a three-year gap is pretty big when you’re still a teenager or young twentysomething and Dad had other girlfriends before he and Mom finally married. She was seventeen and he was twenty. They actually had to marry twice because as good Catholics, they had to go through the actual marriage Mass so that any children would be considered legitimate. But they got the civil marriage first, in Florida. Probably about the time these photos happened.
Dad wound up stationed in Spain with the Navy and though Mom didn’t go over with him at first because she was a great big homebody, she did fly over to join him.
If you just look at the years we were born it looks like Mom is twenty years older than me, but her birthday’s in December and mine’s in January. So she had just turned nineteen here. (I know this was sometime in December because there’s another photo in the same batch that is of Dad sitting in front of their Christmas tree.)
I was either ten pounds, two ounces or ten pounds, five ounces, depending on whom you ask. Also Mom’s smallest baby. She was about 5’9” or so, but STILL. Sorry, Mom.
This is my favorite baby photo with her.
Mom was back in the States by the end of 1974 and Dad was remarried by the time I was two (in fact, going on three, because that was also a December event), so they split up while I was still a baby. At first, Mom had custody and Dad had visitation, and apparently they were both okay with that arrangement.
I will never know the particulars of what happened, except that Dad’s second wife claimed later that Mom had neglected me and Dad claimed that Mom had asked him whether her second husband could adopt me. Whatever the case, remember Aunt Matilda, who was Mom’s best friend for a time? When I was three and a half, Aunt Matilda picked me up to go visit my dad… and then no one brought me back.
Years later, when I was seven, the woman I thought was my mother sat me down with my dad for a talk and showed me the above photo. They asked me who the woman was.
“…The babysitter?” I guessed.
I got to visit with my mother somewhat after that, though the visits stopped again in 1985 because Dad was stationed on an aircraft carrier and hardly ever home, and my stepmother didn’t want to deal with my mother.
No flies on my mother. She tried to make something of her life. First up, as the first woman police officer in the town of Iota, Louisiana:
By the time I got back in touch with her because Dad was finally home, she had set her sights higher: first woman to run for police chief in Iota, Louisiana. That was in 1990. I can’t find the article online now, so I am very glad I got the clipping:
Even Aunt Matilda admitted Mom had been a good cop. It was a high point that would not be repeated.
Except possibly by becoming a grandmother. I had my first child in 1996, and my brother Doug paid for Mom and Dad to come see us a few months later. Here’s Mom at the mall in Savannah, Georgia.
(I got a photo of her and Dad together when we went to City Market. Alas, I can no longer find it.)
Our relationship was always sporadic: on-again, off-again. I’d be under some weird restriction when I was still a child, or I would have a lot going on in my life later, and we’d fall out of touch or else she’d say or do something amazingly thoughtless or aggressive and I’d be angry at her for years. And no one ever really told me much about her; of what they did tell me, my brain would store away the bits of information like some kind of demented squirrel because they were all I had.
What I do know is that I get my artistic ability from her side of the family; she used to draw buildings like I draw people. She also had a lovely singing voice and there were several musicians on her side of the family, so that’s where I got my aptitude, such as it is (I never actually became a musician; I did have piano and organ lessons for five years, though). And… the writing. She used to keep a journal in spiral-bound notebooks; I saw her writing in them a few times. Probably had a compulsive element to it. I’ve done that, too — just mostly by blogging. Oh, and then there was crocheting. I got a lot of my crafty from Dad’s female relatives, but I got into crocheting because of Mom.
She had this wicked and inappropriate sense of humor. One day we were in her kitchen and she took a fork out of the drawer and one of its outer tines was bent. “Look!” she exclaimed. “You can eat and pick your nose at the same time!” She also had a knack for mimicry; she once imitated my stepmother’s ranting and I was in absolute stitches. (I had a rough adolescence with my stepmother. You have to consider the context.)
She was always very home- and family-oriented. Loved her grandbabies and all the other kids too.
In fact our worst estrangement came after she had lost her mother and my youngest brother within six months of one another. No one on her side of the family told me about either death when it happened and by the time my grandmother passed, I had had quite enough and said some things about it on my Facebook. Word got back to her. We exchanged written blows. I wouldn’t speak with her again until 2021, also the last time I ever saw her in person.
She even cooked for me.
I don’t know how many times she married; I know it was at least four. Her final marriage, to a man ten years her junior, lasted at least a decade and ended with her death. I met him, and I immediately didn’t like him, but I kept that to myself because she seemed happy.
And that cost me what remained of my relationship with her, and may have even cost me my mother. If I had liked him, I would have taken her up on her offer for me to stay with her when things didn’t work out with Dad. And the accounts I have heard of how she died make me wonder if Maybe-Fourth Husband didn’t just let it happen. According to the grapevine, she had stopped eating, and then she died sitting up in her chair in the living room. He is ten years younger than she was and he knows how to use a phone. He has not even tried to contact me since. I doubt he ever will.
There is so much more to her story, I’m sure. I don’t know most of it; the people who do know seem to want nothing to do with me. All I know is I lost my mother when I was three and a half, and I’ve gone this past half-year not knowing how to feel about her death. It doesn’t seem demonstrably different from when she was alive.
But when I saw her obituary and how it didn’t even mention the history she made in her hometown, I knew I was going to write something like this eventually. It will never be enough. But it’s what I can do.
Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.
A lovely tribute to your Mom,Dana.