I wish I hadn’t been so young when my mother died. Like many Baby Boomers, I was so wrapped up in outside things, the day-to-dayness of working fulltime, trying (and often failing) to keep up with my kids and their gazillion activities, along with all the usual domestic crises. I really didn’t know her, and at the time she seemed more like a relic of the past than a modern role model. It’s only been upon reflection over many decades that I have come to a more nuanced view of her life, from her own perspective. We may have lived parallel lives through the 60s, but our choices and life experiences could not have been more different.
My mother, Lois Mae, was born the youngest of six in 1928 in the tiny town of Canby, in Oregon’s rural Clackamas County. In her early years her Norwegian-immigrant family lived on a small farm in a tiny wooden house with one bathroom. She and her sibs lived free-wheeling, unsupervised childhoods that would cause social workers to call the cops today: as a toddler being pulled to safety out of the road by her diaper by her alert collie, as a kid holding onto the fenders of logging trucks to pull her up the hill on her bike from the river where she swam with her friends, and generally roaming fearless and free every day till dark when it was time to go home for dinner, where she was the only one allowed to sit in her father’s lap and always got the chicken wing because she was the youngest. She remembered her childhood fondly and scoffed at the notion that her family was poor. “Everybody was poor,” she said, “and we were happier than the kids I see today.”
But this isn’t a clichéd tale of the good ol’ days before television, computers, smart phones, and clicks sapped the life out of us and buried us in an avalanche of useless consumer stuff. It’s instead a snapshot of the seismic societal changes my mom faced as a woman, whose lifetime spanned WWII and the rest of the tumultuous twentieth century.
Mom and Dad were very progressive for their time. When I was a kid Dad was on the school board and Mom was president of the PTA. The new public high school I attended reflected their (and most of their neighbors’) beliefs at the time: FDR libs, each and every one. Members of the Black Panthers came to talk with us one day in the library of our white, suburban, East Bay high school, and for one field trip the school bus dropped us off in San Francisco’s Fillmore District so we could see racist urban poverty, firsthand. My parents vehemently opposed the Vietnam War and took me to anti-war rallies. Before his career as a drug addict and dealer took off, my brother had a hip, young, pony-tailed attorney who saved him from the clutches of the draft, courtesy of Dad. They supported abortion on demand and my mom, an RN trained during WWII, worked as a volunteer at Planned Parenthood. They had long, boozy, smokey dinner parties with like-minded friends and gossiped endlessly and passionately about the politics of their day. One such discussion concluded that First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy had to be frigid: Why else would her husband screw anything that moved? Different times.
And yet…in some ways mom’s marriage looked more1940s than1960s, a fact that occasionally chafed as she watched the ‘60s pass her by. “Why didn’t anyone ever tell me I could be a doctor?” she once mused sadly. Her and my dad’s duties were rigidly defined, as befit an American couple married in the late ‘40s ─ so rigid that, when my mom came to West Virginia after my daughter was born, my dad soon called to ask how to operate the washing machine, the dishwasher, and the Mr. Coffee. In fairness, this was probably the result of overlaying their respective upbringings during the Great Depression over their own marriage, an uncomfortable fit for many women of her era by the time the ‘60s rolled around. My mom felt stifled by the cultural norms of her youth, about living under their embedded strictures; but she couldn’t quite leave them behind, either. In candid moments she said that she was as responsible as my father for this dilemma; it was just something they both fell into when they were young newlyweds.
In a 1969 photo taken at LAX, where my parents waited with me before I flew off to yet another adventure at an art institute in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, Mom looked glum. However much she struggled to wish otherwise, she couldn’t help envying my freedom and the openness of the world to me. At 19, I didn’t see this, of course, though Mom was wise enough to recognize and understand the dynamic. She frequently said that young people are naturally too wrapped up in their own hormonal newness and the excitement of their lives to think much about the old folks (or the “parental units,” as they were called at the time.) My beloved mother-in-law used to caution me against expecting too much from my children. “It’s not an equal relationship,” she explained. “Parents always love their children more than their children love them. They love them so that they will love their own children.”
Though my mom never wavered in her love and support for me, small cracks in that support appeared after my kids were born. Having a professional career was all well and good, she thought, but wasn’t I gone too much? If I was going to work so much, why did I bother having kids in the first place? (I was a reporter who had to drop everything every time a plane crashed or some other newsworthy event happened.) She just couldn’t intellectually shake the embedded belief of her youth that mothers should hang up their educations and professions on their way out the maternity ward door.
In times of reflective sentimentalism, some women apparently look back nostalgically on those pre-feminist times. Today, when the great majority of American mothers work outside their homes, a vocal, politically conservative backlash heavy on blame asserts that fulltime motherhood (preferably with lots of babies) is every woman’s true destiny. Some women espousing this belief even wear long cotton dresses and bonnets that would not have been out of place during the days of the American Revolution, a baby on one hip and a toddler clutching her skirt. Go figure.
Several days before my mother died, I apologized to her for not making more of an effort to understand her struggles, for not being a better daughter. “Don’t give it a second thought,” she said, looking up from her wheelchair with a smile. “Kids are always like that. But they also give you the most love.”
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