Meet My Mother, Part 1

Today we shall meet my mother.

The portrait I start to paint below is a vivid one; my mother was a vivid person and very colourful. Certainly, she made an impression when you would meet her: beautiful face, 5’7″, slender and shapely, she was a beauty, but her vivacity and intense interest in other people – in YOU, you fascinating thing, you! – were irresistible. I want you to meet her but really, it is I who wish to get reacquainted. She died more than 13 years ago, but her legacies and many stories live on. Let us begin.

My Mum

She was born in Indianapolis – or, as she called it, “India-NO-Place”. Please accept that as all you need to know about her feelings about her hometown. She also professed to a lifelong hatred of her name, “Henrietta”, preferring to be called Henri. For me, this male-sounding name was consistent with the forceful and considerable energy that she exuded, an energy that belied her considerable feminine insights and personal identity. She understood men but she understood women, too. 

 As a girl, she was fascinated by people and their stories; as a young woman she wanted, desperately, to go to medical school and become a psychiatrist. Her parents had little money, however, and what little they had went to support her two brothers through their vocational training, one becoming a physician and the other – frankly, I don’t remember what my other uncle did, I just remember him as an odd duck. 

Her dreams of medical school and psychiatry gone glimmering, she went to nursing school where she was given a uniform (part of the appeal of nursing, she said, was that she didn’t have to buy clothes which she couldn’t afford) and she had contact with lots of people. She told me many times how she thought that a hospital was the most exciting, interesting place imaginable. She demonstrated just how exciting it was by habitually sneaking out of the dormitory window to go on dates. She was caught and expelled.

She then transferred 2.5 hours east to continue her nursing studies in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she almost immediately met my father, a young physician nine years her senior. Any new nurse on the floor, especially a very attractive one such as my mother, garnered immediate attention from the medical staff. My father wasted little time in phoning her and asking her out. My mother describes her response to his request as ‘bitchy’, telling my father that she didn’t remember him and then asking him how tall he was. “My feet just touch the ground!” was his airy, good-humoured reply, and she was charmed enough to cancel her date for that evening and see my 5’8″ father instead. They married 3 months later, just after she turned 21 years old, and they were married for over 50 years until death them did part.  

Even without the medical degree, my mother was an informal psychiatrist to her friends. Within five minutes of meeting you she would have extracted from a willing-You your life story and, if asked 20 years later to describe you, she could do so with an eye to all the emotionally-fraught details. She loved stories describing The Different, The Odd, The Coincidental, that story that demonstrated the vicissitudes of fate or of a seemingly insignificant decision to be made. I always thought her a very decisive person, but as I grew into my own skin I was able to observe her ability to continue her own push to evolve, adopting ways of thinking more modern than those she was born into. She was very curious about everything and everybody.

My young mother married at a time when women faced multitudes of institutionalized strategies to keep them in the home and out of the workplace that they had so happily and successfully embraced during WWII. (Don’t argue, it’s true that there were such strategies, and I don’t have time for your revisionist history.) She accepted the roles that were assumed to be hers when she married, but through her own powers of observation and her keen mind she found plenty to keep her engaged. What follows are some stories that she told me over the years. They have stuck with me for various reasons and they have certainly informed my own life.

Please enjoy.

Not At All Funny, But Very Telling

When my mother was in her late teens, many months before she met my father, she was dating a handsome, charismatic man named Bill whom she absolutely adored, she said. One day they were having a picnic on the grass when she saw Bill casually catch a fly and deliberately, one at a time, pluck off each of the fly’s wings, before dropping the now-wingless fly into the grass. She asked him why he had done that to the fly. He looked at her, smiled and shrugged. She refused to see him ever again.

The Trick to “Doing It All”, Before They Were Selling “Having It All”

In her early married days, my mother still worked part-time as a nurse. She described coming home to make my father supper (he was a typical American husband of the 1950s/1960s and never deviated one bit from his essential programming). Then, while she did the ironing, she would serve his poker buddies food and drink and then, when they’d tire of poker, she and my dad would go out dancing. Then she’d go to work early the next day. “Mom,” I asked as a young girl, learning my relationship lessons at her knee, “how did you do it all without falling over?” “Oh, I took
Speed!”, she answered, without any self-consciousness whatsoever.

Party Favours

Once I myself was married, it was easier for her to accept me as a sexually active being, and the For Your Married Ears Only (apparently) stories started coming out. One of my personal favorites involved a party in the early 1960s, in the very neighborhood in which I grew up. They had just moved there and when one is new in town, one casts a wide social net. It was thus that they found themselves at a raucous party down the road. The guests were playing a game called “Can You Top This?!” and in it, as one might infer, people take turns doing increasingly outrageous things. My parents made their exit when the hostess climbed up onto the coffee table and, to much applause, removed her diaphragm. 

Oh, No He Did NOT… Shut Your Mouth!

My mother did not tolerate fools easily (I learned at my mother’s knee, you see), but there were some things that one just took in stride. Her gynecologist, whose name I knew throughout my childhood, was her doctor as well as a personal friend, or so she considered him. One day she was in his office, getting dressed after her exam, when he dropped his trousers and asked her to give him a blow job. When she told me this lovely story, I expressed simple outrage with a click of my tongue and a shake of my head, but she laughed and told me, “But what woman hasn’t had that happen to her?!?” Well, that doesn’t mean that it becomes unremarkable – it NEVER becomes old, actually. Of course I have my own stories like this, as do most of my women friends; the outrage never wears thin, acceptance (blithe or otherwise) never gets closer. For the curious among you, my mother deflected his request with a lightly-toned, “Oh, ——, pull up your pants!”

“Mistress, PLEASE!”

I was 7 months pregnant with my son when I paid a visit, solo, to see my parents in Cincinnati. My visit coincided with Independence Day and we were invited to go to watch fireworks on a riverboat. My father didn’t come along, so it was just me and my mother. And about 50 other people. While sitting on the dock, watching the light display, my mother told me a lovely little story she had read, probably something of a joke, about a man and his mistress who were walking along the water and looking at a line of yachts. Stopping in front of one of the yachts, the man says to his mistress, “I’ve spent enough on you to buy this boat”. She replies, “You’ve spent enough in me to float it!” My mother loved the wordplay, and she was not judge-y at all regarding women who were “kept” as mistresses. On the contrary – she acknowledged the reality of such situations, saying, “That is the hardest money they will ever earn”.  

Next, we shall hear about one of my mother’s lifelong passions as well as her ability to make friends (with my future husband) and influence people. The story includes props!