The Mom Away From Home

By Rachel Bailey

To view Beth Cooper's audio slide show on Sandra Patterson, click the image.

A day with Sandra Patterson is a hailstorm of pet names. During a half-hour period one Monday morning, she uses 165 of them. “Baby” is by far her favorite, clocking in at 62, but she’s also fond of “sweetie” or “angel” or “love.” For young men, she prefers “boo,” though she also uses it for an older woman in high-waisted jeans with an explosion of fluffy gray hair springing from her head. For the ladies, it’s “princess” or “precious.”

Patterson, or Miss Sandra, as the patrons of the University of Georgia’s Snelling dining hall know her, is 49 years old. She can be found at breakfast or lunch positioned between the two turnstiles that mark the entrance to Snelling. Behind a small desk that holds a computer screen and a space heater, she pushes her chair aside. Miss Sandra prefers to stand, poised to embrace each member of the parade of students who filter into the dining hall as she shouts her refrain: “Come on in and enjoy!”

During a lull, a student leans on the Snelling entrance gate as sun streams through the atrium. While he waits for his bagged lunch to be brought out to him, he regales Sandra with a story about his weekend.

“Miss Sandra,” he says, “you wouldn’t believe this. I drove two hours away to go skydiving this weekend, and when I got there, they said the weather was too bad!”

“Well, it were windy,” she says with a smile, “I stayed home and got some rest. It was wonderful.”

According to Miss Sandra, everything in her life is wonderful. Her weekend, her mood, her morning. There is a sweetness that permeates everything about her, from her diminutive stature and girlish bangs to her favorite food at Snelling, waffles with butter and syrup. This woman, it seems, never has a bad day. 

“I always been the type that, when I walk out the door, I leave my problems at home. I don’t bring ‘em to work,” Miss Sandra explains. But what if she’s in a bad mood? How does she manage to come to the dining hall with a grin and an endless supply of pet names every day?

“I might be having a bad day. But when the customers come in and I speak to them, I feel better,” Miss Sandra says.

Not everyone is a believer, however.

“How can anyone love everyone at lunch?” asks Martin Steine, a junior who has been passing through Miss Sandra’s turnstiles for the last three years, “For someone to act so enthusiastic about everyone… it just doesn’t seem sincere.”

The answer lies in the one thing Miss Sandra says makes her sad: “To see someone mistreating another person. I like to see someone treated fair, equal.” This, it seems, is Sandra’s personal philosophy, to treat everyone fairly. In her case, that means greeting everyone she meets with the same enthusiasm and attention to the details of their lives.

For many students, Miss Sandra is one of the first liaisons the university has to offer. During orientation, as they are herded from one building to another, most of them will encounter Sandra and her enormous, gap-toothed smile during a lunch-time visit to the dining hall.

“They do look scared,” Miss Sandra chuckles, “but they find their way pretty quick. I cuddle ‘em, let ‘em know if there’s something they need let me know. They’re away from home.”

It’s not just students who are new to the UGA community who enjoy a maternal snuggle from Miss Sandra.

“I think people make a point and go out of their way to come to Snelling to see Sandra,” says Bryan Varin, cafe manager of the dining hall.

Even during peak lunch-hour traffic, kids linger on their way through the turnstile, waiting for a hug and a “How was your weekend?” Miss Sandra multitasks, taking cash from visiting parents here, using a small button on her desk to buzz other dining hall employees into the building there, all the while greeting students with “Hello love, don’t you look pretty today?” or “Are you feeling better today? Go get you some vitamin C.” Those students who don’t wait their turn for a hug she reaches out to, landing a quick pat on their arms or backs as they go to collect their trays.

“Sandra fills a maternal role in the dining hall. It’s reassuring as a manager to know there is a person of her caliber greeting customers. She obviously cares a lot about the students and the customers in general,” Varin says.

“I think I picked up this role because my mom passed when I was young,” Sandra says in a rare moment of self-reflection, “I see y’all as my kids. You reminds me of my childrens. I just love what I do.”

For Sandra, it’s all about family in the end. “I believe in family gatherings. If we all together, that’s the way we always are. When I am here and we’re together, then we can always communicate. It’s like a family here.”

Her children, Miss Sandra says, don’t have any problem sharing their mother’s love with others.

“Oh, they love it, they love it. They’re not jealous or anything. They know everybody’s my kids, including their friends.”

Sandra describes a close relationship with her father and older sisters, who helped her raise her first child, Kisha, when Sandra was only 18. Now, her youngest child, Sasha, 22, finds herself in the same position of young motherhood with her four-year-old Dynasti. Miss Sandra has been helping to raise Dynasti, just as her family helped her with Kisha.

“I’m giving [Sasha] time to get herself together. It would be easy if I could say drugs or alcohol but it’s not that. I believe she is struggling with being a mom because she is so young she probably couldn’t deal with it.”

This selflessness and forgiving nature characterizes everything Miss Sandra does. She is happiest, it seems, when she is able to take care of others. It’s no surprise, then, to learn that before having Kisha, Sandra was studying childcare at Athens Technical College, where all three of her children later studied. 

Though she’s worked in various capacities in UGA food services for 16 years, Miss Sandra still fills plenty of her time with young children.

“I spend most of my time outside of work with the grandkids,” she says. In addition to Dynasti, she has Carlos, 12, and Tiberius, 10.

Sundays at Miss Sandra’s are, in a way, much like her job at Snelling – there’s lots of food and the company of many loved ones. 

“I mostly cook big dinners on Sundays. So that’s when [my kids] will bring their friends by. Call me up, say, ‘Mom, can I bring so and so?’ I say, ‘Yes bring ‘em, I cooked enough.’”

If all this talk of grandkids, family dinners and wonderful days sounds like a walk in the park, don’t be fooled. 

“It’s not a party. I have hard times. But I try to make the best of ‘em anyway.”

One of the hardest times, for certain, occurred when Miss Sandra’s middle child, Tobias, 27, underwent open-heart surgery to correct a heart murmur at the age of two, causing her to take 3 years off work to care for him.

“It was easy but hard. The easy part was just dealing with it and doing it. The hard part was I didn’t have much finance, and I was traveling a lot back and forth to Augusta- that’s where he had to go to get checked on, so he had his surgery there.”

It’s telling that to Sandra, the easy part of such a trying ordeal was dealing with it from day to day. What few statements she makes about the difficult aspects of her life are colored by a pragmatic optimism and magnanimity that call to mind the Dalai Lama’s two ingredients for happiness: generosity and compassion.

Perhaps we could all learn something from the woman who greets us on our way to lunch or late-night pizza: love your family, love strangers, heck, love everyone and when making a big Sunday-night dinner, always make a little extra for unexpected guests.