Happy Mother’s Day
“Laura was a free spirit. I wasn’t like that; I was very traditional. But Laura could do anything. You’re like her that way. I admired her.” These words were from Madeleine, a friend of my Mom’s from Gimbals’ days, circa 1945.
Laura the free spirit: I had never thought of her this way. I knew she was beautiful, smart and determined to have the life others wanted to deprive her of. She was determined to speak English without an accent, to be a super American. But I saw her as protective, fearful, worried, judgmental, opinionated, harsh. As I list those words I feel them all describe me at times—I think it’s a Mom-thing.
I was always told I was like my Father’s side of the family. I looked to my Dad for protection from my Mother’s temper and her irrational attachment to whatever she had just said. I had my Father’s coloring, his wit, his unwillingness to be bound in small steps along the known path. Maybe this is what they found in each other—Laura and Sylvan. This free spiritedness-within the comfort and predictability of making it the suburban middle class way: the family that wants all for its children and exacts only modestly for itself. They were the “greatest generation” writ small into my own history.
My Mother met Sylvan, a sophisticated man—well rounded both physically and intellectually—just over a dozen years after she came to America, after she had reunited her family in New York and moved them to Fort Worth Texas. She was full of tenacity and life. He was glib, bemused, and independent. They both came from extremely traditional backgrounds, families and cultures. They were educated in those ways and reverent of them.
Both of them came of age during the war and were “marked” by the journey. It was the forge for their life together and the heritage they gave me, that mark upon their whole generation. As I watched my Mother fade away in her hospital bed I felt that generation let go the fierce history it had slogged through. I became an orphan, hopeful of keeping one ear open to the transition before me.
In this year since her death, my mind very willingly let go of that woman I saw robbed of her wit and sensibility over a period of nine years. Instead the swirl of other memories, some encapsulated in writings here, have bounced back to fill in the spaces where love and memory fill in the landscape. It’s a lovely process to mark on a Mother’s Day.