Today would have been my mother's 90th birthday.
One year ago today my kids and I were with her, and my children gave her an "angel" teddy bear. My mother collected teddy bears because as a young girl she was friends with several other girls in her very small town in Missouri and as a club they called themselves the Teddy Bears. They remained friends all their lives and I think only two of them survive.
When we went to see her on her birthday last year she was calm and sleepy, which was her "normal" state then. She had been in a nursing home for four years, and because of things misfiring in her brain, and the cocktails of drugs they gave her there, she was—to quote the Pink Floyd song—"comfortably numb." She sat forward just a bit in her wheelchair when the kids came into her view....T1 and T2 always caught her eye. I don't know in her last few months that she understood that they were her grandchildren, but she did know that shorter, cuter, more active people were in her room than normally appeared there, and she reacted to them. I talked to her and told her happy birthday, but I don't know how much of it made sense to her.
The next day we went to see her again, and this time she was angry. I could tell as soon as I walked into the room. Even though Mom was in very poor health she could still show emotion, and on that day-after-her-birthday I realized as soon as I said hello to her that she was mad, and I felt like it was directed at me. She refused to acknowledge me and had a "set" expression on her face that I remember very well as a child..a look that meant she was not pleased. After sitting with her for a few moments I realized that the anger was her way of telling me that it was time to go. Not for me to leave, but for her to move on.
When I got back in my car that day I called my sister and told her what I had seen. A week later my brother visited Mom, and called me and told me he had the same "feeling" when he saw her....that she was mad, and ready to go.Three weeks later, she died.
I report all this because since her death I have had her "permission" to read letters she and my father wrote to each other while they were courting, and during their early marriage while he was overseas serving in the Army in WWII. There are hundreds of letters, and I have started typing them—a few a week,—and forwarding them to my family to read. In those letters I am seeing a side of both my parents I didn't know. You know how you sometimes wish you could go back in time and meet your parents when they were teenagers, or in college? It is sort of like that...I'm finding out what songs she liked to listen to on the radio, what movies she went to see, how she spent her free time, how much she loved my father, and how hard it was for them to be apart.
Even though I've only read and typed about 20 percent of the letters I have learned that my mother was funny and smart. I knew these things already, but reading the letters is like hearing her voice all over again but in a younger, more carefree voice. I have also realized that the lifelong "teasing" she endured for being a bit of a "scatterbrain" is actually something that started when she and Dad were dating. There was a popular song by Frankie Masters called "Scatterbrain" and it was one of "their" songs. And, in trying to follow Mom's stream-of-conciousness writing style I can see why Dad would have used that as a term of endearment for her. She often flits from a serious topic (the draft and her worries for Dad going in the Army) to something silly someone at work said to her, all in one paragraph.
I've also learned from the letters that Mom was frustrated by her limited career choices as a woman in the early 1940s. She was getting a degree in education, but after having taught a couple of years at a rural schoolhouse to earn money to keep attending college, she was disillusioned by teaching, and really didn't want to go back. In those days teaching was one of the only "professional" jobs a woman could have. Even though she eventually did get a degree in education, and taught off and on for many years, I am beginning to understand in reading the letters that it really wasn't what she dreamed of doing.
I think this is why she encouraged all of her own children....three daughters and one son....to follow their dreams. The world was a very different place for her daughters than it was for her. This especially was true for me having been born so late in her life, I got to take full advantage of the freedoms and opportunities created by the women's movements of the sixties and seventies...something I think most younger women take for granted. I often wonder what Mom would have been if she had been able to choose any degree she wanted when she was in college. My best guess is that she would have been an architect or interior designer. She loved studying houses and floorplans and dreaming of ways to arrange living spaces.
So today would have been Mom's 90th birthday. For you younger women reading this blog, consider this: When my mother was born women could not vote. That amendment to the constitution was passed when she was three years old. Think about that....think about how your place in the world would be affected if you could not even participate in the democratic process of choosing your government.
In her lifetime there were two World Wars, and two "other" wars...in Korea and Vietnam. There have also been the two wars in Iraq, and numerous other military actions and "operations." She and my father watched the Twin Towers fall, and I think that day they remembered back to watching newsreels of Pearl Harbor exploding in flames, and probably wondered what sort of World War we were going to be drawn into this time.
My mother (and father) grew up in rural Missouri and as children lived in very modest circumstances by our standards today. But in spite of the fact that a Great Depression had caused families like theirs to be cautious about how their money was spent (go watch a "Waltons" episode if you need a refresher on this) they both managed to graduate from college, as did nearly all their friends in their high school class of 27 young men and women... an accomplishment I still find astounding for the time.
Later in her life my mother finally found her "true" vocation. She became a librarian. She loved showing her patrons the world through books. There were no computers when she was in her library, and she was to many people in my hometown the first "google" they experienced. Ask her a question, she could almost always find the information you were looking for. Tell her you are writing a research paper on moths and she would bring you a stack of 14 books to use as reference. She would call friends and acquaintances who were experts in certain areas for reference if she couldn't find the information there in the library.
Mom loved a birthday celebration and reveled in being surrounded by family and friends to talk, laugh and have cake.
I'll be having a piece of cake today in honor of Mom. I'm sure she is enjoying her 90th surrounded by her Howard, her parents and brothers, and of course, her Teddy Bears.
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3 comments:
This is a very nice piece. Thanks for writing it.
I have a question, though. Is it necessarily wrong for young women to take their right to vote, choose a career, be who they are born to be for granted? Don't get me wrong- I'm all for studying history and for counting your blessings. But what better tribute to the hard work of suffragists and others who worked for women's equality than for a smart, talented, confident girl -- I'm picturing Thing 1 here -- to consider her options entirely open, to not even for a second think "I can't do that because I'm a girl"?
As an aside, I threw an afternoon birthday party for a girlfriend on Saturday- cake, ice cream, punch, wildflowers, pretty table setting, babies and dogs crawling on the floor. I thought, as enough guests arrived that there was a "happy chatter," that it was just the kind of party MPF would have enjoyed.
Point taken...I didn't mean "take for granted" in a derogatory sense, but rather in the sense that you mean...that most young women today DON'T have to even think about limitations to their choices. That has really changed even in my lifetime. I can remember that in spite of the fact that my own parents encouraged me to be or do whatever I wanted, I still encountered in my early career...and even as recently as the early 90s...resistance to the idea that a woman should be promoted, or paid, the same as a man. I have been referred to in a condescending way as "that gal" by a male coworker, and have been told that because I was one of the women working in an office it was my personal responsibility to see that the coffee was made and ready for the men to drink (I balked...long story, and I won't go into it here, but I did NOT make the coffee). In my last "real" career-type job I was being paid 20 percent less than an equally qualified, and grade-scale level male employee, just because, as I was told, his pay "expectations" were higher than mine. And this was at a university.
I guess because I grew up right in the middle of the so-called sexual revolution and at a time when the Equal Rights amendment was being considered, and ultimately never passed, that I do still find astonshing to think that anyone would ever NOT consider a woman to have equal rights to a man....yet here in this country, and in countries and cultures all over the world that is still very much the case.
When Thing 1 talks about what she wants to be when she grows up I always tell her she can be whatever she wants to be....and I believe it. The beauty is she truly can be, and you (Sgt@arms) and your sister are perfect examples of this. Your grandmother would be overjoyed with the things you have both accomplished and the things you have done. You have travelled, dabbled in art and music, educated yourselves in many, many topics, and are still strong, centered, nurturing women. You are examples of all the things she dreamed about....and some of the things she actually did. You are her best example of what the women of her generation worked so hard for.
On the other note....no one loved a pretty table and happy chatter more than MAF...she would have been pleased as punch!
why can't you have something light-hearted and meaningless on your blog like, say, a picture of a woman with a stick coming out of her shorts, instead of this tear-jerking birthday message?
this is truly a touching expression of our special ancestry. thank you! i was just telling someone at the farm today about mamaw turning 90 and we had a pleasant chat about grandparents past. i had not read this entry yet, but i was thinking about what HHF and MAP might have thought about how i'm playing around in the weeds all day when they were good and ready to get away from them after the depression. my conclusion was that they would see my smiling face while rooting around in the tomato trellises and think it was just fine.
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