Hi Friends~
Mothers Day…we’re you having the feels? I sure was.
Through the years growing up as the eldest of six children, the relationship with my mother was “momplicated”, as it probably is for so many mothers and daughters. My own two beautiful daughters included. Our fun dinner conversation at Bellworks Mabel restaurant included “why did you let me cut off all my hair!?”
My mom, Rita
She displayed her high energy on the tennis court, and in the 70s exercised on the floor on the shag carpet (before Jane Fonda!), while we kids and my dad watched TV (the beloved Mary Tyler Moore, All In The Family, and Carol Burnett). She didn’t walk up the stairs, she ran. She read voraciously and quoted poetry and authors’ texts. She listened to opera and show tunes on the gigantic record player in the living room, could type 100 words a minute, and did shorthand like it was her actual language. What even was that??
She had a high bar for me academically, while at the same time modeling the traditional housewife role, implying that would be my life choice too. And it was. Complicated, yes. More on that in a future post…
My mom was born in 1927 growing up during the years of women working in the WWll war effort, then afterward women being lauded as stay at home 40s 50s mothers, happily getting a new vacuum for Christmas. (Here we are again).
The conflicting message
Born in 1953, I was noticing. She was wearing 50s wasp waist dresses, (a repeat of restrictive 19th century corseted gowns), a disempowering change from the powerful image of Rosie The Riveter, influencing women back into traditional, submissive, “feminine” gender roles after the freedoms of WWII.
At the same time, the ethos of “you can never be too rich or too thin”, (attributed to icons like the Duchess of Windsor and Babe Paley), and fashion fit for a flat, thin body that equated slimness with success, self-control, and high status, an image that suburban housewives aspired to.
It goes without saying – but I’ll say it anyway – that this continually repeated influence through decades has fueled restrictive body image and the idea that women need to achieve a “perfect” , meaning smaller size, and overall weaker position in the world at large. (Yes. Here we go again).
Career on hold … then…
The revolutionary voices of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem reached my mom’s suburban circle only to a point. Rita already had six children. A career remained off the table until my youngest brother was finally “launched” in the 1980s. She was delighted to start a career at Bell Labs in Holmdel as a word processor par excellence, with a weekly run to Annie Sez for Calvin Klein, Halston, and Diane Von Furstenberg skirts, blouses, and jackets.
She died only a few years later of a ruptured brain aneurysm over just a few days. None of us could believe that this vibrant woman could be taken down this way. We all, the six of us, had to process it all, and so especially did our dad.
Rita’s Legacy
Our mother-daughter relationship was complex, with interlocking, evolving layers, really impossible to define. There was lots of love, supercharged with high emotional energy.
Mom, I wish you could’ve been with me to share the years raising my six kids. I think you did such a good job raising us that I felt like I could do it too, and so often I wished that I could talk with you. Now I wish I could share this journey as a grandma myself.
You were gone suddenly at 59 in 1986 when my first three children were very small.
Your curiosity, high spirits, energy, and dedication to family are now evident in me, my five siblings, my six children, their spouses, and my fifteen grandchildren – athletes, academics, thinkers, and solid citizens.
These images are only the tiniest glimmer of the wild, and deeply fulfilling 46 years since the birth of my first baby, and the fifteen grandchildren, who would be her great grandchildren if she had lived to 99.
Yesterday on Mother’s Day, mom, you were in my heart and mind as I scrolled through photos, remembering your legacy.
I miss you.
x
Polli
