About My Mother and Me

So already, this is a tale of two sixteen-year-old girls and a movement. The movement was second wave feminism. The two sixteen-year-olds were my mother, who turned sixteen in 1944, and I, who turned sixteen in 1971. So this is also the story of a mother and a daughter.*

 

My mother, Thelma Soble, passed away earlier this month on October 2 at the age of ninety-six, and since then, I've been doing a lot of remembering and thinking; hence my realization that this is a tale of of two sixteen-year-old girls and a movement. My mother was very nice, and I was usually pretty nice--and we locked horns a lot when I was in my twenties and thirties. I suspect that that had a lot to do with who we each were and the messages we each received as teenagers.

At sixteen, I was often sad, sometimes angry, extremely cautious, quite self-conscious, often judgmental, and very good at one thing: learning. I was also surrounded by female friends and female teachers who were basking in the promises of equality and self-realization offered by the women's movement. The first issue Ms. magazine** came out in 1972, but it was Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, and Woman's Day that kept arriving at my house monthly.

My mother, who herself had been a very good learner, never aspired to be, as far as I could tell, anything but a very smart wife and mother who, I believe (though my sisters might disagree), saw herself as raising three daughters who would be wives and mothers, even if they did something else besides that--but not anything that would ever vie with their commitments to home, husband, and family. 

 

Meanwhile, my friends were reading The Feminine Mystique and The Female Eunuch, and even though I was not, I was listening to what they said about them. 

Then in 1973, my color-inside-the lines self got into Radcliffe. Of course my parents were proud and excited--but for very different reasons than my female teachers were, especially my French teacher, Mrs. Mederos. "What a moment in time to be going to Radcliffe," she told me. "The whole world is changing, and you will have choices I never had."

Then, of course, I made the same choice she had made, and became a high school teacher. But I didn't become a wife until three decades later, and I never became a mother.

With my dad at Marina Bay on her birthday

And my mother was never disappointed in me. Worried, yes, about how I would navigate the world without a responsible man to guide me or take charge altogether. Worried, yes, that I might be lonely. Sad, I think, that I wouldn't be a mother, but not because she felt I owed it to her to produce grandchildren. But never disappointed in me. I give her so much credit for that. Flexible, loving, and insightful, she was able over time to adjust to and genuinely support the life I had, which probably wasn't the one she'd imagined I'd have.

 

No, the person who was chronically disappointed was I, in her. I first felt this way when I was sixteen. While I was having my secret thoughts about my feminist future, my mother was often sitting at the kitchen table playing double solitaire with her mother while her father watched his afternoon shows in our family room.

I hated that my grandparents were at our house so much of the time doing what I thought were stupid, useless things. Plus I loved doing my homework at the kitchen table, and when my mother and grandmother were playing cards there, I couldn't.*** So I angrily told my mother one afternoon, "You have to decide what's more important to you, being our mother or their daughter." Pretty brutal, I know.

 

Once my sisters and I were grown up and out of the house, I wondered why she didn't seize the opportunity to make her world bigger. She did expand her world briefly--to take an adult-ed Hebrew course, an adult-ed Mandarin course, and a part-time job at the local bookstore. And she was out of the house plenty, always busy transporting local elderly relatives--we had many of them--to their various doctors' appointments, the pharmacies where their prescriptions had just been filled, and the department stores where they needed help buying something they couldn't bring back home without having someone younger and stronger available to carry it inside.

 

Over the next two decades, we generally got along and had plenty of good times, but often bumped into those places that made us know how different our attitudes were. When I told her I relished being independent, she told me that she loved being dependent. When I told her that I loved having good friends, she told me she didn't feel the need for good friends because she had family. When I told her I liked coming up with ideas for what to do and getting others to join me in doing them, she told me she preferred waiting for others to come up with ideas and then being invited to join them. "I like to follow someone else's lead," she told me. 

 

A visit with her grandson and great-grandson

Most often, she followed my dad's lead, and the two of them were enthusiastic attenders of every concert in which I sang and every school event in which I was any way involved. And she was always game to travel to Maryland to visit her grandchildren, who were crazy about her, just as she was crazy about them.

 

But mostly, she happily stayed home and, from my point of view, kept her world small, family-focused, and familiar. Periodically, despite my knowing she wouldn't change, her habit of saying no to so many invitations and opportunities frustrated me. After all, she was smart and curious, so why not take the next step? Why not spread those wings? 

 

It wasn't until about eight years ago, not long after I had stopped working at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, that I understood her resistance to saying yes to the new, especially the new and potentially challenging. 

 

That morning, I was taking her to a cardiologist appointment, and she was still adjusting--or not adjusting--to my father's and her new life at Orchard Cove, the senior living community in Canton.  It was a terrible time in her life. She was at the beginning of dementia--no one had used the word Alzheimer's yet--and she knew and could feel that something about herself was different and wrong. It still breaks my heard to think of how lonely and frightening this must have been for her, and I'm only glad that in the later stages of the disease, she seemed no longer to suffer with this sense of not being herself. 

That morning, while telling me that she was struggling to remember things, she told me a story she'd never told me before. When she was sixteen, her father had said to her, "I would never tell you anything important because you forget things." Mind you, my mother was an excellent student, had no cognitive disabilities, and was especially adept at learning languages, which generally requires memorization and the application of rules.

My mother and her two sisters on her 80th birthday

Growing up, I had never thought that my grandfather was a particularly nice man; I'd always felt that he preferred to reign over his family rather than to be an equal member of it, and my mother, aunts, and grandmother always seemed to me to be overly concerned with pleasing him. So all I could imagine was how devastating his comment must have been to my mother. Whatever she was struggling to remember seventy years later, she had no trouble recalling his wounding words to her teenage self.

And to think of how such words would have played over time, despite her academic achievements and so many other indicators of mental acuity. I'd always felt my mother lacked confidence, that she wondered if she really measured up, and now I understood at least part of why she shied away from situations in which she might fail, might risk hitting some kind of wall,  might somehow prove that he was right and that she couldn't be trusted with anything "important."

At around the same time, I was writing a lot, having continued the habit of writing morning pages I'd begun while doing Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. Difficult as the years were as my mother's Alzheimer's worsened and she necessarily progressed from Independent Living to Enhanced (assisted) Living, and finally to Skilled Nursing at Orchard Cove, I realized in retrospect that I had written my way into a new, more nuanced, and definitely kinder understanding of her, three pages at at time. Leave it to writing to surface all the possible perspectives through which any one person might be seen, appreciated, and understood--especially if you believe, as I had come to believe during my years as an educator, that everyone is always pretty much doing the best that they can. Including my mother.

One day when we were visiting my mother on Skilled Nursing, my younger sister Lauren remarked to me, "I'm surprised to see you being so loving with Mummy. You always seemed so angry at her." I explained to her the important role all those morning pages had played in my ceasing to sell my mother short in some very important ways. She had always done the best she could.

All of that set me up to be a really good companion to my mother over the last five years of her life. Of course, the fact that she quickly became one of those very sweet, cheerful, loving Alzheimer's patients--so many people don't--certainly helped. And so I close with the words I said at her graveside burial service a few weeks ago, feeling so grateful that her long life gave me ample time to love her without anger and to be with her: she deserved nothing less.

 

First of all, just to say how nice it is to see all of you here. Thank you so much for being here with us.

 

Before we start sharing memories of my mother from before she had advanced Alzheimer’s, I wanted to talk you about who she was during these last few years. Because it’s too easy and incorrect to think that Alzheimer’s erased her altogether, even though it definitely changed what she could take in or do, and what she could express.

 

I’d like to talk about that expression part for a minute because my mother always loved language, loved words, loved wordplay and word craft. If you saw her obituary, you know that she adored crossword puzzles and that she was very good at writing clever rhyming poems. She was a French major in college, so when she arrived on the Skilled Nursing Floor at Orchard Cove, she regularly spoke French with the staff members from Haiti and Cameroon. And up to the very end, if you were wearing a T-shirt with words on it, she could and would read those words aloud, though I don’t know how often she understood them.

 

One of the ways I knew the mother I had always known was still very much there was because of the deliberate ways she used the language that she did have—and what it said about what she thought mattered in life. For example, if I told her that Scott and I were going to visit his dad, or that my cousin Nancy [her niece, the daughter of her sister Elayne] was hosting everyone for the Seder, or that one of my college roommates was coming to visit—anything involving spending happy time with the people who mattered—she always said, “That’s nice.”

 

My mother at twenty or twenty-one

When I told her about something I was going to do that was going to take effort, that was going to require me to learn something new—like taking a poetry-writing course or rejoining the choral group that I’d been singing in before COVID--she always said, with authority, “That’s good.”

 

And when I gave her a good, long hug, she would often say, almost dreamily, with her blue eyes sparkling, “That was lovely.”

 

Then there were the words that, according to the Orchard Cove staff, she usually said with a smile whenever any of them helped her with something: ”Thank you.”****

 

I want to end by telling you that two days before my mother stopped eating and drinking, she and I had a really wonderful visit. She greeted me with an exuberant, bright-eyed “Hello, honey,” and then we watched part of an episode of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” As many of you know, even though there’s a lot of Jewish content in it, it’s not a family show—there’s lots of swearing in it, and sometimes even some partial nudity. And my mother LOVED it! Every time someone swore, every time something racy or off-color happened, she said, with a really gleeful smile, “Oh my goodness!”

 

I’m going to cherish the memory of my last visit with my mother as much as any of my older important memories of her.

Despite her long years as someone with Alzheimer's disease, I can attest that in some of the most important ways, she was always herself. This morning, as I've been preparing to post this blog, I keep hearing in my mind's ear the first line of a Theodore Roethke poem: "I knew a woman, lovely in her bones."***** My mother was lovely, and I feel proud to have been her daughter--and proudly very much her daughter. 

 

P.S. And one more thing: be careful what you say to sixteen-year-olds. They remember.

* Screen shot of painting accompanying the following blog post: thisihumblyspeak. (2021, October 28). To the memory of mom. thisihumblyspeak: moments of thought and life reflections. https://thisihumblyspeak.com/2021/10/28/to-the-memory-of-mom/ [Note: this painting is by Donna Ashworth and is called "SOMEWHERE INSIDE OF YOU IS A LITTLE GIRL.]

** Screen shot of the cover of the first edition of Ms. Magazine; from the Ms. website: https://msmagazine.com/about/

*** Screen shot of banner drawing on blog called Lev Hardware: Lev, A.M. (2022, January 27). i am not painting even when i am painting. Lev Hardware: ghost girl. https://levhardware.wordpress.com/

**** The nurses and aides at Orchard Cove didn't just take good care of my mother. They loved her, and they were explicit about that. I will always think of them as family as well as truly compassionate professionals.

***** Roethke, T. (1975). I knew a woman. The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (p. 122). Anchor Press/Doubleday.