My Mother, Myself
My birthday is coming up, so I’ve been thinking about my mother, who died nine years ago. Our relationship would fuel about a dozen years of weekly visits with a shrink, but I’ve never had the time to get shrunk. (Or, as I prefer to think of it: Just put all the craziness in a trunk, close the lid, and sit on it for the rest of your life.) I was born in the 1950s when she was 42, at a time when women that age did not routinely turn out their first and only child. There are many upshots from that, most notably that I cannot ride a bicycle (”It’s fine! You might get hurt!”), which is a drag since my darling husband is an avid bicyclist. Another big upshot: She was my fifth grade teacher. Hello, shrink!
Anyway, tales of the amazing Mary could fill an entire blog, but I do wish Mama was around to be the only old lady in my ultra-conservative Alabama hometown to vote for Obama — and to revel in the success of her beloved grandchildren, both of whom ended up going to college in the south. I often think that if I had my mother’s chutzpah (to use a decidedly non-Baptist word), I would now be in command of a magazine with a million readers, twirling the Tony Award medallion on my desk for the play I’d managed to produce in my spare time. Oooh, she was a powerhouse! I can only hope I set the same example of hard work and can-do spirit for my adorable children that the amazing Mary did for me.
Tags: Barack Obama, mother, only child, psychiatrist