Honor Thy Mother
Mom-brownies parade - 1950s
I'm time traveling this week. The journey began when I pulled one of my three remaining storage treasure bin out of the closet. In it was my Dad's 1938 road trip album documenting his adventure through Michigan with a college buddy, complete with maps and black & white pictures with paper corner covers pasted to its brown pages. His perfect fountain pen script detailed each day -- the small town they passed through; tourist cabins and rooms they rented; woodland hikes and waterfalls they explored; girls they met, kissed and left behind; beers they drank, food they ate and miles they traveled. He was 23. What an adventure.
There were also family letters dating back to the 1940's revealing family secrets, crises and conflicts. My own history was there as well -- my school grade cards starting in 1953 when I attended first grade in one of Decatur Alabama's segregated schools and my diaries from 1970's, 80's and 90's unlocking memories, spilling stories of struggles within myself, marriage and divorce, business ventures, friendships won and lost, and family.
This all confirmed my suspicions that our family, like many, had a complicated history. On the outside we were prosperous, mid-western and middle-class, but on the inside we struggled, each of us in our own way.
My mother was unable to be the mother my sisters and I needed. As adults, she told us one night, after a few too many bourbons, how she really didn't want to have children and didn't like us much until we were about 8 years old. That secret, long kept through our childhood, explained why not one of us wanted a life like hers. When she died at age 82, she weighed 275 pounds, had proven herself to be an alcoholic, and had let herself become an ordinary, vulnerable old woman.
But then in that box of old papers, I came across the eulogy I gave at my mother's funeral in March, 2006 that reminded me that our mother was more than a caricature of a 50's housewife. I share some edited excerpts from it here...
Our mother was an ordinary woman, not famous nor an outstanding member of the community. Married in September 1942, she went where her husband went and did what he wanted her to do. She accepted her life as it came to her, giving up her happy days working in an office, making her own way, surrounded with girl friends. She was a child of the depression who lived life as expected of women of her generation after the war - as a homemaker who raised the kids while the husband worked, grateful for escaping her family's poverty of the 1930's.
However, being an ordinary woman didn't mean that she didn't care. She helped our great-grandmother who lived with us feel useful up until her death in 1955 at age 89. Mom taught us to sew exquisitely, and to cook well, even when the only ingredients were leftovers. She introduced us to classical music, despite the fact her daughters are tone deaf and her husband would only listen to Montavani and Barbershop Quartets. She led our Brownie and Girl Scout troops where she endured years of afternoons and camping trips with giggling, teasing and sometimes gnarly girls. She chaired the area Girl Scout cookie drive, defending hundreds of cookie cases stored in our garage against her husband's open threats to have them towed away. She tried to treat us fairly even when it blew up in her face, like the time we all got ice skates for Christmas, because I, the oldest, wanted them. She taught us how to shop for bargains among the expensive clothes, and check the seams on clothing to ensure they wouldn't fall apart in the wash. She made sure we knew how to set a table, exhibit good manners, dress nice in public, and shop with good taste.
Being an ordinary woman didn't mean she wasn't smart. She never went to college, loosing out, she thought, to her brother who did. She was determined that we should. It was our mom who kept the household books, stretched the dollar, and found ways to get more with less. Her book keeping was so accurate that when accused of a $10 error, her husband had to apologize when my playful baby sister, Karen, swept a $10 bill out from under the refrigerator. She was an inveterate bridge, rummy and cribbage player, counting cards and executing well-honed strategies.
Being an ordinary woman did not mean that she was boring. She was adventurous and curious. She climbed the Great Wall of China and hiked Alaska. Even in declining health, she pushed herself to see Scotland and Mexico. Her husband's idea of adventure was the annual drive to Florida visit to his parents. Mom was the one who'd take risks, explore new places. She gave us our independence. We were free to roam and get bloody noses fighting boys. Only the dinner whistle could bring us home. The three of us are outgoing and social today because we watched her strike-up conversations with people wherever she was. She wanted to know them, their opinions and share her own.
Being an ordinary woman in the turbulent times of change challenged her. She never understood the 70's - 80's, but she persevered, supported her rebellious kids, and didn't stifle the evolution of our own ideas and beliefs. She was level headed with deep common sense that told her we'd emerge intact eventually. She wrote us letters when we were in college, gave us financial support when it was needed, and provided warm gatherings when we returned home for holidays because she knew the importance of consistency in lives that were full of angst and change.
Knowing Mom as we did, burying her ashes in a black plastic box would never do. Mom wore vibrant colors, never black. For her, plastic boxes were only for leftovers. So, my sister Elaine found an urn. It's style and colors are southwestern -- Mom's favorite place on earth. It was on sale -- a common sense bargain she would definitely approve of. And, the urn is large enough to give her ashes room to move around -- just like her loose fitting clothes. Her urn is cushioned by her oldest great-grandson's stuffed dolphin and is buried next to her husband. Her remains have found a home, but her spirit, wherever it is in the cosmos is now free. Free as she always dreamed to be, but never was. We will remember our mother for who she genuinely was -- she was not ordinary. She was a good woman caught in the restrictions of someone else's ordinary life.