Mothers

This week's essay has been contributed by guest blogger, Momsomniac. I'd like to extend my gratitude to her -- for contributing her memories of my mother and for being such a good friend.

As I thought about how to write this, I realized that much of what I had to say casts my own parents, particularly my mother, in a bad light. So I want to start by stating – emphatically – that my parents are not Bad People. They were barely more than children when they married. To my mind, my mother, who dropped out of high school at 17 to marry my father, was a child. They grew up in relatively traditional working class families, my mother with no small amount of abuse at the hands of her father. So all things considered, they did okay. And if they were unable to untangle the mixed messages they gave me and my sister – words in support of the modern notion that we could be anything we wanted to be and actions in support of the notion that women existed to please men - well, that doesn’t make them bad. It makes them human. So, in light of that ...

I have two stand-out specific memories of Nancy, and two more general ones that I only realize are a reflection of her parenting now that I am, myself, a parent.

All of these memories, as with so many memories, are memories of myself, but with Nancy in them. There are two reasons for this -

One is that I was a teen-ager, and like many teen-agers, as my world expanded with new feelings, thoughts, and desires, it also shrunk to my own line of sight.

The other is that, as Deb has stated earlier, Nancy was not a parent who was ‘ever-present.’ She certainly DID some parenting, as I recall, but she didn’t go out of her way to insert herself into the lives of her children or their friends. That, in a way, makes these first two stand-out memories more special.

The stand-outs:

1) When my parents’ marriage was falling apart, my mother, who had devoted more than half her life to waiting on my father, didn’t handle it well. I never knew what she’d do, or how she’d respond to things. One week-end, the group of us had been playing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) at Deb’s house and we had just wrapped up the game. As I had been instructed, I called my mother and asked her to come get me.

It was around 5 o’clock. She told me she’d be there at 6 and that I better be out front to meet her. I suppose I spent a little time hanging out with Deb, and then dutifully went out to meet her a little before 6. Six o’clock came and went. No Mom.

After a while, Nancy came out and tried to get me to go back inside. I wouldn’t. I don’t know if Nancy thought I was an unusually obedient child or if she understood I was afraid. In any event, after about another hour, she brought out 2 stools (buckets? chairs? [memory is unreliable]), and she sat outside with me until my mother showed up at 11 that night. I don’t recall if she stared at my mother or if she just turned and walked back inside. I do recall that she didn’t say a word. It felt ... good.

2) I went through puberty when I was in the 3rd Grade. By the time I finished 8th grade, I was tired of my peers trying to touch me and asking questions about my breasts. I was more tired of teachers holding me after class for no reason, or making comments about my body. So I did what any thoughtful pre-teen who felt out of control would do; I developed an eating disorder and lost 30 pounds (I don’t mean to be flip – I just don’t think people realize how much this can be about unwelcome sexual attention).

In any event, by the time we moved to Florida, I looked as if I had never seen puberty and didn’t have any hope of seeing puberty any time soon. This is when I met Deb and her family.

One of the boys in the D&D group “run” by Deb’s brother had insisted I be allowed to play after a conversation he and I had about books. And when I came to the house, Nancy then insisted that Deb be allowed to play. I recall being afraid that all this would cause me to be seen as an interloper, and eventually I was, but not before Deb and I became friends. This was important, because I had moved from a small town where I was well known and well-liked by my peers to a place where everything good about me was seen as a threat to the current order. I needed friends.

I was allowed to spend the night when these games were played solely because Deb existed. A sister to one of “those boys” made the house safe, in my mother’s eyes. Without Deb, I would not have had even this short stint of being a part of a group of friends. And often when I spent the night, I would wake up early and there would be no one awake except for me and Nancy.

I had gradually begun to gain my weight back and I appeared to be going through a very late puberty. And one of these mornings, Nancy tried to talk to me, to get me to talk to her, about how my body was changing. I was rather amused, because she couldn’t have been more wrong about what was happening to me. But on another level, I felt deeply moved that a friend’s mother would be concerned that no one had had this talk with me, and would try to take this on for herself.



General memories that I only realize NOW are about parenting:

1) There was one night I recall running (with the D&D group) all around Deb’s neighborhood, playing Frisbee on the tennis courts, and being chased by “police” because we were out after curfew (likely neighborhood patrol – there was no curfew where I lived a few miles away).

Nancy was no doubt at home, secure that we were pretty good kids and that a group of kids heading out with Frisbees on a beautiful night was nothing to worry about. This was probably normal for Deb and her brother. But I had never felt so free in all my life.

2) Deb and I would spend our nights devising skits, telling stories, and “experimenting” (let’s lie down and try to say the alphabet backwards while we rub our temples and see what happens). At the time, I thought Deb wanted to do these kinds of things because she was younger than me. But over time, I realized that this was just ... Deb.

See, at 13 there were already a LOT of messages in my life about how interested I was supposed to be in boys. These were often not positive messages, more along the lines of what I call the triangle of shame (girls only matter if boys say they do; all boys want is sex; sex is bad), but clearly I was supposed to be very interested. I wasn’t, but I thought I was supposed to be, so I tried. Except for when I hung out with Deb, when it didn’t matter.

She couldn’t have cared less about the boys sleeping in her brother’s room downstairs or what I thought of them. And though it’s clear that she had her own awakening and struggles later, I do suspect that the way she was mothered gave her the freedom to be herself at that time. And as an extension of that, as long as I was with her, I was also free to be myself - utterly indifferent to boys, fascinated by other things entirely, and all ...

So to sum it up, to my mind, Nancy in many ways gave me Deb, who has been my friend since I was about 14. And that was 30 years ago. Who would not be grateful for that?



Momsomniac (Florida, 1985)

Drowning

“Someday, when you kids are all grown up and don’t need me anymore, I’ll swim out in the ocean until I so tired that I can’t swim anymore. It will be a gentle way to go, just like falling asleep.”

My mother’s discussion of suicide filled me with fear. I begged her not to drown herself, told her I’d always need her. I felt responsible for convincing her to stay, to live, to be my mother forever. At that moment, she seemed so distant, already miles from shore, too far to return, already drowning, already dying. I didn’t know what to say or do to bring her back.

Afterwards, I thought a lot about that conversation and her suicide plan. It worried me, certainly, even though it was years distant. I felt like a burden had been laid upon my shoulders, one that I had to bear alone and in silence. It seemed wrong for a parent to tell their child about their intent to commit suicide, and I wished that she hadn’t told me. By telling me, though, she invited the possibility that I could prevent it from happening; I could keep her alive. And yet, she seemed so definite, so certain, that I felt helpless to change her mind.

Did she really mean it? Was it just a cry for help, or an expression of her feelings of despair at that moment? I cannot say for sure. I felt at the time that it was not merely a momentary whim, but something she had thought of more than once. She described it in detail, and dwelt longingly on this idea of peaceful death.

I don’t remember my mother as chronically depressed. In fact, I would have characterized her as cheerful for the most part. Other than these occasional conversations about suicide, and one or two bouts of crying, I am hard pressed to find specific memories of her being deeply sad. Perhaps she hid it well. Or perhaps these episodes were uncharacteristic, merely intermittent bursts of misery. Regardless, I am sorry for the pain she felt at those times, but I cannot help but feel a kinship with this depressive side of her.

I struggled with depression for much of my adolescence. I know how hard it is to keep that ache inside, how one longs for connection and comfort. I think I understand why my mother needed to express her wish for an end to the pain. Her vision of suicide resonated with my own desires for a release from suffering. But did she understand the distress she was causing me? Did I understand the distress I caused others through my depression? I knew, but it didn’t change anything; indeed, it just made things worse.

I’ll never know if my mother would have carried out this plan, as she died well before it was to be put into effect. I hope she would have weathered her emotional storms, as I did mine. But I wonder . . . not really knowing her internal landscape, I’m not sure whether these were the kind of storms that pass by, or those that get worse and worse, leaving only desolation in their wake.

Hats

My mother wore hats. Not all the time, certainly, but often. She had a whole collection of hats in her bedroom – mostly wide-brimmed hats. There was the suede hat with a floppy brim, a favorite of hers. She also had a black, Amish men’s hat that my brother and I brought back from our visit to Pennsylvania Dutch country, and a similar black hat that had a narrower brim. That was the hat she was wearing when she got hit by a car.

She and I had gone to pick up her boyfriend at the airport one night. On the way back, she was making a left turn across a divided highway and didn’t see an approaching car, which clipped our van as we pulled into their lane. None of us were injured, but my mother was very upset about the accident and, I presume, worried about the people in the other car. She jumped out of the van and ran across the road without looking, and that’s when she got hit by a car. Her body tumbled off onto the shoulder. Her boyfriend then got out of the car and ran across to her.

This left me alone in the van, which was running and still sticking out into the intersection. I remember being very calm as I tried to figure out what to do. I was too young to have a driver’s license, but I wondered whether I should move the van to a safer location. Or should I stay with the van, but not move it? In the end, I left the van running and crossed the highway (after carefully looking for cars!) to see how my mother was. Both of the cars that had been involved were on the side of the road. I saw the cracked and crazed glass of the windshield that had hit my mother’s body, and I remember being surprised that such a slight person would be able to inflict so much damage. I had the image of her body as a bag of sand, shattering the glass as it impacted the windshield. She was lying on the weedy berm, unconscious and still. Her hat wasn’t on her head; it must have blown off when she was hit. I knew she would want her hat, so I hunted around until I found it. I brought her hat to her, just as she was coming around.

The first thing she said as she opened her eyes was, “Where’s my hat?”

“It’s right here. I have it for you.” I felt smugly pleased that I knew her so well.

An ambulance came. My mother was the only one injured (the people in the car that had clipped us were fine). I remember her holding onto her boyfriend, and her blood was seeping onto his jacket. I worried that the blood wouldn’t wash out and had to restrain myself from saying so. She refused to go to the hospital, even after repeated urging from the ambulance driver. She was fine and wanted to go home, she said. I assume her boyfriend drove us home, although I can’t remember. I do remember the deep bruises and abrasions on my mother’s back the next day and how sore and achy she was. Yet, amazingly, there were no broken bones, no organ damage. I didn’t understand how she could emerge with such minor injuries – after all, she had shattered the windshield of a car! At the same time, it never occurred to me that she could have died in the accident. I was calmly sure that she would awaken and would, of course, want her hat.

After she died, I kept most of her hat collection. In addition to the various hats she wore, there were items of unusual headgear, including a full fencing mask. I started to collect hats of my own, and I wore hats (both hers and my own) throughout high school and college. Wearing her hat, I could recapitulate her style and feel connected to my mother. Gradually, though, I stopped wearing hats with any regularity. Maybe my sense of style changed, or maybe I was able to let go of my mother’s style and find my own. Or, more likely, it became obvious that it was unusual, if not downright odd, for women to wear these types of hats. As I tried to understand the often confusing, unspoken rules of women’s fashion, it was clear that my collection of hats did not fit in, and I just didn’t have the requisite panache to buck the system successfully. Although I wore them less, I still held onto the hats, now displayed on the wall or crowded into a closet. Gradually, I got rid of some of them, as it became clear I wouldn’t wear this one or that. I finally persuaded myself to give away the fencing mask. But when I look in my closet today, I still have a few hats – mostly my own, some gifts from others – the straw hat I wear for gardening, the patchwork Guatemalan hats, a red beret. But there amongst the diminished collection is her floppy suede hat and her black hat. It might even be the one I rescued from the side of the highway.

Marriage and Dating

My mother and father got divorced when I was four. When asked later whether she would remarry, my mother would say “I made that mistake once; I won’t make it again” or something to that effect (a sentiment I have heard from other divorced women of her generation). I don’t know what put her off marriage; she rarely spoke to us about her marriage to my father and she was careful not to speak ill of him. But she never did remarry.

She didn’t swear off men, though. Many, if not most, of her friends were men; I can’t remember any close female friends she had. She also actively dated and had a number of boyfriends. I don’t remember who she dated when I was very young, but I remember her later boyfriends. One of them teased me in a way I found rather demeaning – he made fun of my height and liked to smear my glasses, which annoyed me to no end. Another made passes at me, which while flattering and exciting, was also confusing; it also showed poor judgment on his part and was in bad taste, to say the least. I did like one of her boyfriends, a beefy, good-natured Italian man who used to bring us cannoli. She had rather eclectic taste in boyfriends, as they were fairly disparate in age and varied in both looks and temperament.

She never seemed to lack for boyfriends, so I assume she was popular among men. While her relationships with men were often ongoing, they also seemed less serious as she certainly seemed to make no commitment to any one boyfriend. In fact, at one point, she had two or three boyfriends at the same time. I remember that one of them (Bob) stayed with us for a while when he didn’t have a place to live, and she continued to have one of her other boyfriends sleep over during that time. This resulted in some jealousy and hurt on Bob’s part, which he poured out to me as he taught me guitar. He hoped I would comfort him in his pain, and although I cared for him, I knew this relationship was a bad idea. I don’t think I ever told my mother about the talks Bob and I had or his attempted seduction of me; I don’t know what her reaction would have been. I was relieved when he moved out.

When I was in high school and college, I was intrigued by the notion of group marriages. I had read many of Robert Heinlein’s novels, and his later works offer a vision of a society in which group marriages are the norm (multiple men and women committed to an economic and child-rearing unit, as well as being sexually intimate in various pairings and groupings). He captured a view of sex as recreational fun rather than necessarily deeply emotional, and rejected the need for sexual monogamy as the core of intimate, committed relationships. I found this idea to be compelling, both in its functional ability to provide an extended family network of choice and its vision of sexual agency for men and women. I thought the idea of a group marriage offered a potential solution to the challenge of combining work and child-rearing, as well as providing a broader economic base than the nuclear family. I was also drawn to the ideal of sexual freedom, in which men and women could engage in sexual relationships as they chose without fear, shame, or feelings of jealousy.

In retrospect, I can see that Heinlein’s utopia is built on a traditionally male vision of sexual freedom. The freedom to have casual sex with any and all partners, the cornerstone of the sexual revolution, may have been an androcentric (male-centered) model of sexuality. Not all men and women desire or enjoy casual sex or multiple partners, and sexual jealousy is not so easily conquered for many people. While I still value the vision of sexual freedom, I suspect it needs to be more nuanced and recognize a diversity of human needs, including the desire for intimacy and long-term bonding.

But I think part of the reason that this vision of sexual liberation and alternative family forms was so compelling for me was how it paralleled my mother’s choices. I never made this connection before, but my mother not only rejected marriage as a goal, but also the traditional model of serial monogamy. Rather than having one monogamous relationship at a time, my mother dated who she liked and enjoyed herself without shame. She never tried to hide these relationships from us or from the other men she dated (as far as I know). My mother provided a model of a woman who owned her own sexuality and engaged in relationships on her own terms. That provided one strand of my own emergent feminism, that women are entitled to their own sexual agency, and that they are not possessed by men. Whether they choose to embrace monogamy, polyamory, or celibacy, these must be choices women make for themselves, not at the behest of their partners.

Interestingly, my mother was planning to move in with Bill (one of her long-term boyfriends) after my brother left for college. This seems to reflect a shift from her prior relationship pattern of more casual relationships. I presume that she had become more serious about that relationship and was willing to commit to it more fully. I don’t know what precipitated her decision to move in with Bill – was she just waiting until we were older and she was less responsible for our care? Did her feelings toward Bill deepen? Had he signaled a new willingness to commit to her? I don’t know, but it clearly indicates that she was capable of serious, committed relationships, and that she was able to trust in the future of this relationship. She died before they were to move in together, so I don’t know whether this would have turned out well or poorly. But I hope that it was a decision my mother made on her own terms. And, true to her own adage, she never did talk about marrying him.

Nancy Driessel Stearns (date and location unknown)

Family stories: My brushes with death

“And when you were a baby, your brother saved your life. Your mother put you and Duncan in the bath, and she went to answer the phone. You weren’t too steady, sitting on your own, and you slid under the water. Your brother pulled you up before you could drown.”

Every family tells its stories – the funny anecdotes, the dramatic tales, the loving moments – the narrative of its collective past. For some reason, my family has a series of stories of how I almost died while in my mother’s care. I almost drowned when she abandoned me in the bath. While we were traveling in Europe, my baby carrier tumbled off the mantelpiece and I hit my head on the hearthstone. I fell down the basement stairs in our house onto the concrete floor. The most dramatic story, though, was when my mother left me to chase a groundhog. The groundhogs were decimating the garden, and my father declared war. The groundhogs were to be killed on sight. My father and brother went out, armed with baseball bats, to bash in their skulls (I suspect this was not a terribly successful strategy, but I do have a memory of a bloody baseball bat, so perhaps they got one, after all). One day, my mother was driving me home, and as she came to the top of the steep hill of our driveway, she saw a groundhog scampering across the lawn. She stopped the car and jumped out to get the groundhog. But she was in such a hurry, she failed to put on the emergency brake. As I sat in the car, bemused, it started rolling down the driveway toward the busy street below. I was young enough that I didn’t think to get out of the car. There I was, rolling toward an imminent car crash while my mother chased a groundhog, oblivious to my danger. She came back in time and stopped the car before it hit the street; I wasn’t hurt at all. But what I remembered about the story was my slow, solitary, backwards trek toward certain death, all because my mother chased a groundhog. And she didn’t even get the groundhog.

In retrospect, these stories seem to reveal a thread of maternal negligence, but I never thought of them that way. I told them as tales of danger to impress my friends. To me, these were exciting stories of my brushes with death and my inevitable ability to survive. I sometimes joked about my mother’s tendency to put me in danger as a child, but I never seriously thought of these as indicating bad mothering. It’s interesting, though, that these became family stories, and I wonder what they meant to the rest of my family.


Me, in front of the garden that we were protecting from groundhogs (Piscataway, NJ, 1969)

Apple Kuchen

My mother carefully arranges the apple slices on the batter, each slice overlapping the previous one.

I have very few memories of my mother cooking. I remember the food itself – tuna noodle casserole, hamburgers (both involved potato chips, a special treat), spaghetti with meat sauce –- simple, Midwestern fare. The fanciest meal I remember was beef stroganoff, simmering away in the electric skillet before it was poured over egg noodles. I remember cookouts on the Hibachi grill, and the fun of toasting marshmallows afterwards, trying to make them perfectly golden brown on all sides before they fell into the coals. I remember brown paper lunch bags in the refrigerator for my brother and me to take to school, with our initials written on them (including our middle initials, since otherwise, we were both “DS”). But all of these memories are of the completed meal; none involve scenes of my mother actually preparing the food.

I only have three memories that involve my mother cooking. I remember her making pancakes after Tom, one of my brother’s friends, slept over. Tom was able to eat massive quantities of pancakes; he said the secret was to eat continuously without stopping, so you wouldn’t have the chance to feel full. She made stack after stack of pancakes, and he just kept eating and eating them. I also remember her helping me make taffy for a taffy-pulling party I had. She was dreadfully sick, and the day was grey and miserable, but she hauled herself out of bed to help me make the taffy so that my friends and I could pull it. We buttered our hands to pull the hot, sticky balls into long strands. It was supposed to be cut with scissors or a knife, but we couldn’t get anything to cut through that taffy, so we just hit it on the table so that it smashed into bits. The pieces of taffy flew everywhere -– we found taffy behind the washing machine months later.

I remember my mother making apple kuchen (or apfelkuchen) -– it’s kind of like an apple tart, but the base is more cake-like. She would cut the apples into thin slices and lay them out on the batter, each one overlapping. It looked beautiful and tasted delicious. When my mother died, I looked for the recipe and couldn’t find it. My maternal grandmother found a recipe for apple kuchen that she thought was the one my mother used, but it didn’t have enough detail for me to really follow it precisely, and I was never sure it was my mother’s recipe. I don’t know why this dish mattered so much to me. Maybe because it seemed unusual –- I didn’t know anyone else who made it and most of my friends had never heard of apple kuchen. It never occurred to me at the time, but this dish is most likely a reflection of the strong German influence in Wisconsin, where my mother grew up.

I doubt my mother had any passion for cooking. She was a competent cook – I’d probably go so far as to say that she was a good cook –- but she was also perfectly willing to serve us Chef Boyardee or have us prepare our own meals, so I don’t know that she had any special love for cooking. I don’t think she taught me to cook; although she may have taught me the basic rudiments of cooking, I didn’t feel equipped to prepare a real meal until much later. I do wonder if my mother taught me to bake, though. I was making cookies and cakes long before I could cook dinner. Maybe that’s why I wanted that recipe for apple kuchen.

I gave up recreating my childhood meals some years ago. I used to make tuna noodle casserole, but could never find anyone as enthusiastic about it as I was. I tried my hand at stroganoff, but it never entered my repertoire. I don’t grill, and the days of toasting marshmallows are long behind me. While I do make spaghetti sauce, the recipe I use probably bears little resemblance to my mother’s. And I haven’t made apple kuchen in over a decade. Somewhere along the way, I switched to making apple pie. I’m not sure why. Maybe I couldn’t recreate the apple kuchen I remembered from childhood. Maybe my taste changed. For whatever reason, I let go of yet another connection to my mother.


My brother and I, making cookies (date and location unknown)

Self-defense

My mother taught me how to kill a man when I was in first grade. “If you break this bone in the neck, right here, it’s fatal.” I was terrified by the idea of our bodies being so fragile that one bone would be the difference between life and death. I didn’t want to be able to kill someone so easily. But, seemingly oblivious to my wide-eyed fear, she went on to explain how to poke someone in the eyes or kick them in the crotch.

What prompted this lesson? I was attacked on the school playground. A boy came up to me and said he wanted to kiss me. He pushed me up against the double door and put his hands around my neck. I started to have trouble breathing. A group of children formed a semi-circle, watching the events unfold. I don’t know whether the kiss happened or not – all I remember is that I couldn’t breathe. It didn’t even occur to me to struggle or fight back. Eventually, a older child, a patrol, came by and broke up the tableau. I sat on the steps and got my breath back.

I don’t know whether I told my mother about what happened or whether she found out from the school officials. I don’t remember whether she was sad or angry or bewildered when she heard. I just remember the lesson in self-defense that came in the wake of this experience, and how frightening I found it.

I wonder what prompted her response – why tell a five-year-old how to kill in self-defense? Maybe it came from her own experiences; I seem to remember that my mother was enrolled in a self-defense class at some point during my elementary school years. Perhaps she was part of the women’s self-defense movement and felt that I should learn these lessons early. After all, it was clear from my assault that even a young child was not safe and could not count on adults for protection at all times. Maybe she thought that I would feel better if I had confidence in my ability to defend myself against another such attack. If so, she misjudged me. I viewed the event as an anomaly and had little fear of a recurrence. The talk of self-defense implied the real possibility of future violence, perhaps of a more serious nature, and that frightened me. I also felt inadequate to the task of a counter-attack; indeed, I strove throughout childhood to avoid fights, preferring cowardice to being beaten up.

I’d like to think that she didn’t mean to scare me. I want to believe that she was just trying to teach me strength and self-reliance so that I could weather the dangers of the world. Truly, how should a parent respond to the child’s first experience of violence? We can offer the comforting promise of a safe haven (“mommy will always be there to keep you from harm”), but it is a lie, and we know it. The appallingly high rates of rape and abuse leave no doubt that girls and women (and boys and men, for that matter) are vulnerable to assault – the potential for violence lurks all around. Yet girls and women are not helpless victims and we need not wait to be rescued; we can fight back, to gain the space to flee, or even to kill our assailant if need be. And this lesson – being alert to the dangers of violence and knowing how to confront it effectively – is one that, unfortunately, should be learned early.

I never did learn how to kill someone from my mother; I couldn’t figure out what bone she was talking about. But what I really regret was that I failed to find the strength she was trying to teach me. I struggled for years to embody the kind of self-confidence that would allow me to stand with stalwart courage in the face of personal danger. Even as an adult, a passing threat from adolescent boys was often sufficient to cow me. Did my mother have that strength? Would she have walked tall and talked back to the catcalls on the street? I think she did. In my memory, I see her standing bold and unafraid, standing up for herself with a brazen disregard for what others might think. But maybe that’s just what I wanted her to be, just as she wanted it for me.


Nancy Driessel Stearns (date unknown)