memories of mothering before it was a verb

Work has always been important to me. Here I am at age three, helping my mother and grandmother do dishes. We are also packing provisions for a road trip. See slices of white bread already mayonaisse-d, on wax paper? My dad's parents lived in Atlanta and my parents, sister and I had driven to visit them from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. That trip, and the one to my mother's folks in Chicago were the only vacations my parents indulged in for years. We never stopped along the way, to "squander money" at roadside restaurants. My mother packed whatever we needed in a cooler. If we were making good time, we'd stop at a rest area where my mother would shake out a freshly ironed floral cloth to cover a picnic table. More often, we'd make do with meals in the barreling car, even though this inevitably meant one of us kids would get carsick, which my engineer father considered a small price to pay for making good time.

I'm struck by how dressed up my mom and grandma are to do housework. Perhaps it was a Sunday and we'd been to church that morning. But I recall my mother looking well groomed just about every day, even when there were eight of us kids to take care of. I get tired just thinking about how much work that must have been: finding stockings that matched (no pantyhose then), making sure seams were straight, pulling on heavy foundations, ironing dresses, even aprons. (Not much was dry cleaned. My mother ironed even my father's shirts.)

Dress-wise, my mother had a lot in common with Betty Draper which I guess is one reason I chose to play that character on Twitter. But the resemblance stopped at appearance, luckily for me and my siblings. (Although I do recall hearing that "Only boring people are bored.") She liked to keep up with fashions, but didn't want to shell out for department store prices. She sewed her own clothes and ours. She took us on shopping trips in which we wouldn't buy anything; they were scouting trips for latest trends. I recall a few bouts of embarrassment when she'd pull out a tape measure and surreptitiously place it against outfits on mannequins. But I was always pleased to put on a perfectly fitted new dress with smart buttons and stylish collar. She still dresses well, though she doesn't sew anymore. She keeps a figure that can fit into petites at Talbots.

Unlike Betty, my mother enjoyed being a stay at home mom. She'd gone to Chicago Teacher's College because she liked working with children. But she was always encouraging of my sisters and me to pursue passions that would lead to other kinds of work, too.

My mother and many of her generation wouldn't call themselves feminists. But their quiet work and steady support gave their daughters confidence to claim a stake in the workplace. And paved the way for their granddaughters to consider that stake an inalienable right. This Memorial Day, I'd like to acknowledge them.

hijacked on 9/11: childhood

Peggy Noonan has an interesting piece in the WSJ today on how 9/11 has affected the lives of children.

A young man who was 14 the day of the attacks told me recently that there's an unspoken taboo among the young people of New York: They don't talk about it, ever. They don't want to say, "Oh boo hoo, it was awful." They don't want to dwell. They shrug it off when it comes up. They change the subject.

I've found this to be true among my daughter and her friends who that day were freshmen at Stuyvesant, in the shadow of the Towers. They never talk about it. Though no doubt it has affected them profoundly.

It was their third day of high school. That morning, my daughter emerged from the subway (only the second time I'd let her ride it alone) to see people jumping from flames in the tower. She had headphones on, though I'd warned her about wearing them in transit. She later told me she was glad she did because they drowned out the screams of people standing with her on the sidewalk. She watched for a few minutes. Then walked on to school. She didn't want to be late. Halfway through the first class, an announcement was made instructing teachers on the East facing windows to pull the blinds. An hour later, the school was closed. The city needed a triage center to treat the wounded. (Wounded were still expected at that point.) The kids were released to the streets, told to "Walk north. Don't look back." The subways weren't going. Buses lumbering uptown were so crowded they weren't stopping. I'd been worried about her riding the subway alone. It hadn't occurred to me to teach her to navigate the 130 blocks without transportation. When she finally got home (by then I was frantic) she told me what she had seen and asked, "There were trampolines underneath to catch them, weren't there?" I was tempted to say yes. But I knew the news would make me a liar. When I said no, she looked away. I could almost hear the breaking glass of her childhood.

She and her friends never talk about that day, though it was long a topic of constant obsessive conversation among us parents. We worried about how seeing national landmarks felled affected our kids, both psychologically (is it good they never talk about it? or bad?) and physically (what about air quality? is the school still filled with flying asbestos?) The school was closed for three weeks for cleaning while our kids were switched to a school in Brooklyn. When the school was reopened, many of us sent our kids with potassium iodide pills that are said to help survive a nuclear attack. There was much talk in those days about "the other shoe dropping".

One of the few times my daughter has referred to 9/11 was when we were driving around to see colleges. She was in the passenger seat and reached out to change a song playing on the CD. "I can't listen to that," she said. "It's what was playing that day on my headphones." She skipped the track ahead. Then turned up music so loud it made talking impossible.