While in graduate school I was given an assignment to interview one of my parents and ask about his or her childhood. I knew immediately which parent to contact for this report. My father had always shared his childhood with stories of his parents, uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters and his many adventures. He entertained us and friends with amusing and fascinating tales of those "old days".
My mother, quiet and reserved, faded into the background during family time. In fact, since I was raised as a tom boy, wearing jeans and tagging after my father on his fishing expeditions, chores at home and in town, I had never really discovered much about my mother.
She taught us manners, proper English and all of the etiquette she often quoted from Emily Post, the good manners columnist. She was gentle, but insistent on good manners from each of her children. She kept an immaculate house. Anyone could drop in at any time and she would not be embarrassed by clutter. I learned early to pick up my messes and be casual in the out-doors.
The semester for this psychology class was soon ending and I had put off the assignment for weeks. I couldn't believe it would turn out to be so difficult, at least the thought of doing it was gnawing at me. With two weeks left, I drove the five hours to visit my folks and tackle the task. I waited until my father was out and about and swallowed hard and asked, "Mom, what was it like growing up and....."
I never finished my question and my mother put up her hand to her face, sat down and said, "I've been thinking a lot about that lately". She proceeded, with little prodding from me to share her childhood memories.
Her grandmother had died when mother was five. She was the youngest of six children. Her siblings were married and had established their own homes. For the next decade my mother was shuttled from married sister to married sister, always sleeping on sofas, helping out with chores and quietly remaining on the outside of their busy lives. She had a friend whose mother cleaned houses of the rich folks in town and at times she went with her and played quietly while the cleaning was done. One of the ladies in one of these elegant houses took a fancy to my mother and taught her proper table settings, posture and manners. My mother yearned for an elegant house with a bedroom of her own.
When she was seventeen she met a handsome French Canadian who rode an Indian motorcycle. He fell for the pretty, sweet girl and they were married a year later. My mother had three children within the first five years of marriage (I was an after-thought six years later) and she put aside her dreams of elegance and with the depression around the corner, was consumed with cleaning, cooking, baking, canning, ironing, diapers, and all of the toil that was the life of the housewife of the twenties and thirties.
As the depression receded and my three older sibling went off to the military and college, my mother became focused on making her home into the best and most tasteful in the neighborhood. She read Good Housekeeping, shopped carefully, spent little on herself, and gradually made a comfortable home for her family.
As my mother shared her stories of her lonely childhood I remembered how concerned she had been for a neat and clean house and how irritated I used to be over her "fussy" behavior. I had been a constant companion with my father and his books and magazines, ignoring her decorating magazines, preferring Time, National Geographic and newspapers. I remember thinking that her life was shallow and unimportant in the total scheme of life. Somewhere along the way I had become determined to not be an ordinary housewife as she.
On the drive back to the Twin Cities after our visit, I cried for the entire five hours. I cried for my mother's bleak childhood, my years of being ignorant of her past and her years of protecting me from the pain of her early years. My tears brought understanding and forgiveness of both my mother and myself.
A few months after my conversation with my mother, she was hit by a drunk driver while leaving church on Thanksgiving weekend. My father had minor injuries, but my mother sank into a coma and died three months later, no communication between us again.
When I saw the movie, "The Ya, Ya Sisterhood" I thought that there are other mothers who try to protect their daughters from raw truths that they believed would hurt them. Now I believe that it is only in revealing the darkness, as well as the strengths that we can understand ourselves and others and accept ourselves and others, warts and all. Understanding leads to forgiveness and healing.
At least, in my experience this was so and I am forever grateful for that difficult assignment I was so reluctant to complete many years ago.
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