It’s not often that you find three generations of mother-daughters as involved as the Klemmer/Skarda family. Having deep conversations and manning their booth of handmade crafts together at local markets, grandmother Debbie Skarda, mom Tammy Klemmer and Klemmer’s 12-year-old daughter, Zoey, live, work and stay close.
During the Covid pandemic, Skarda and her husband joined Tammy and her family in Ooltewah to be nearer, something Tammy says she’s still getting used to.
“When I need childcare options, I still don’t think of them first because they moved down when Zoey was 5 or 6,” Tammy says.
Today, the family is regularly — and at times, constantly — with each other.
One of the clearest indications that this family is related is their knack for crafting. Skarda’s lifelong love of art has inspired most of her children and grandchildren to create.
“All my life, I’ve tried to do different projects. I think I’ve done just about everything,” Skarda says.
Today, Tammy mainly crochets, Zoey makes clay jewelry and various other crafts and Skarda has been dubbed the”resin queen” for her resin art — though her favorite art form is painting. One of her paintings is above Zoey’s bed, a cat on a black canvas with white lines for the whiskers.
Skarda is also working on keepsake memory boxes for each of her grandchildren, a tradition she started for her siblings and recently started selling to the public.
Like any family, working together has its ups and downs.
“We’ve actually had people say, ‘You guys are mother and daughter, aren’t you?’ and it’s not the comparison of our looks,” Tammy says.
Instead, the similarities show up in their mannerisms and how they interact, from booth setup to closing for the day.
“There’s a bit of fighting,” Zoey says, which Tammy insists is just disagreeing.
Still, Tammy and Skarda are always together at the booth, with Zoey there most weekends as well when she’s not doing another activity.
“There have been markets where we couldn’t sit down,” Skarda says. With the three of them handing out change, selling to customers and helping people pick out items, they stay busy.
Zoey says she loves the conversations with customers and picking a color scheme for her mom’s crochet creations.
In work and life, compassion and communication is at the forefront of their family.
“There’s a big difference in the way I was raised and how my kids were raised,” Skarda says.
As the second oldest, she, along with her six siblings, would often have to take care of each other with limited support.
In contrast, Skarda’s kids would often tell her things that you might not usually tell a parent — like details of their dating lives. While sometimes taken aback, Skarda was always happy to provide that sort of environment for all her kids.
Aside from crafts, she coached Tammy’s swim team in high school during a time when Black student athletes were still facing discrimination from some of their competing swim teams. Skarda opposed this and instilled in her children the importance of being kind to everyone.
“She was always my best friend,” Tammy says. “I never kept anything from her.”
With her own children, Tammy has kept a similarly close relationship, one Zoey can attest to. “I’m with my mom basically every second of every day,” Zoey says.
Tammy home-schools her children (she also has a 15-year-old son, Lukas) and says she has the tough conversations with them that they’d otherwise be having with classmates.
“My mom is probably a bit less strict than most parents,” Zoey says. “Most moms, after watching their child break their arm falling off a rock wall, wouldn’t let their child get back on the wall.”
But Zoey, an avid rock climber, did get back on that wall, with her family supporting her.
“I try to find that middle ground, but you have to let them grow up,” Tammy says.
Skarda says her children have achieved everything she hoped for them. And Tammy, much as her mother had taught her, says, “My expectations for my kids are to grow up being kind people.”
If there’s one thing this family has learned over the years, it’s that time together is precious.
“Life’s too short,” Skarda says.
And Tammy agrees. “Spend life with your family,” she says.
Follow the Klemmer/Skarda family on Facebook at Facebook.com/KlemmerSkardaCreations.