Today would have been my mother’s 104th birthday. She died a few months shy of her 97th. She was a complicated woman.
For 40 years after I’d left home, anytime I visited she’d corner me and spend hours telling me stories about her life. In college I wrote a story about the experience of being trapped, listening to the repetition. Years later aspects of one of her childhood anecdotes became a short story. https://wordsforabetterworld.org/a-confession-story/ I have yet another that uses certain facts she told me about my paternal grandparents, who died before I was born, but the rest is made up.
It’s fair to say my mother was a tragic person, perhaps the inevitable result of a very smart woman being oppressed from so many angles and never able to do much with her intelligence. She was born in 1920 in a tiny Arkansas town, the 6th of 7 children. She described her mother as cold at best, though she was close to her father. But he died when she was 24.
She graduated high school at 16 because they skipped her two grades. I don’t know how education was regarded in her family. Her oldest sister, the firstborn, went to college. I don’t know why my mother didn’t. From what I observed, she might have excelled at engineering. When she recounted her life story all those times, she often sounded jealous of her sister for getting an education. When I was little, though, she started telling me I’d go to college over her dead body. I think that was due to her losing control over my sister, 14 years older than me, after she went to college.
My parents married when they were 18. He was from a different, equally tiny Arkansas town. I think they met when they were 12 and she had a crush on him ever after. That’s not a story I heard a lot, so I might be misremembering. When I was in college I gave my mother and my grandmother hardcover sketchbooks and asked them to write their life stories. My mother didn’t say anything or do anything with it. My grandmother said if I wanted to learn about history I should go to the library.
My father was an alcoholic, and after trying various jobs in the late 1930s/early ‘40s joined the Army for life. In addition to my much-older sister, they also had my brother ten years before me.
When my mother was a young adult, just starting out, I don’t know what she imagined her life would be. It never occurred to me to ask, because the stories she told were rigid in allowing for no other possibilities.
Whatever she wanted, she never got. She was not a drinker – “I’ve never had a drop and never will!” Being at the whim of my father’s binges, being under the Army’s control to send us any new place every couple years, having to work to keep us housed, believing her Arkansas family mocked and looked down on her (they might have), she was full of rage. Not being in control of her own life might be why she fought so hard to control everything else. She also had serious depression and anxiety, including social anxiety that kept her isolated. I don’t know if those were inherent conditions or if they were the results of living her life.
It’s her birthday, so I’m not going to tell the bad stories here. I’ll say: She was generous. She could make the world’s best chocolate cream meringue pie from scratch. She sewed a whole box of Barbie and Ken outfits for me the Christmas I was 9. She made an abrupt switch from Republican to Democrat when Clinton ran for president – primarily because he also was born in Arkansas, I think. But her opinions followed: She read lots of political nonfiction, and she spent a decade telling me I should watch Jon Stewart and Keith Olbermann before I ever listened. She was a staunch feminist, of the “I’ve had all I’m going to take of your shit” variety.
I’ve told some of the bad stuff elsewhere, as I believe we each have the right to the truth of our lives. As Anne Lamott says, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” (My exception: I don’t have the right to say much about generations going forward – my daughters and grandsons. They have the right to talk backwards – I’m fair game if it ever comes to that.)
The main thing I would say is I never knew the woman in this photograph. I was shocked when I found it. The woman I knew would not have played on a seesaw. Another photo shows my father laughing on the other end. In those pictures lies a story I was never told and don’t know how to imagine.
