Tag: motherhood

Mother’s Day: Choices for Women

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

 I grew up in New England, in a state where birth control was illegal and the pill had not yet been invented.  My mother, my grandmothers, and my great grandmothers all accepted marriage and motherhood as their destiny. Not like many of our Catholic neighbors, though, they somehow managed to produce smaller families of two, three, or four. Birth control seemed to be highly correlated in my family with the departure of one spouse. My paternal grandparents divorced after four children, my maternal grandfather was killed in a motorcycle accident at age 36, leaving three children. My parents separated when their youngest child (me) was only three, and there was no child support.

My paternal grandfather got the children, promptly farming all four out, two to his mother, one to another family, one to an orphanage.  But my mother and maternal grandmother were on their own to provide for the children. Working outside the home became a resented necessity rather than a career, a vocation, a source of meaning and a chance to express their non-domestic gifts. From this distant perspective I understood my mother suggesting that I could be a teacher, a nurse, or a secretary until I got married. Post-Sputnik, I said, “I think I’ll be an engineer.”  My generation had choices. The pill, which came on the market in 1960. When I married in 1962, the main point of premarital counseling from my minister was that I should get on the pill.  It was an important part of ensuring those choices as we were able to exert some control over our fertility. 

There were also more role models and mentors.  I had one beloved childless aunt who introduced me to theater, music, and gardening, along with bemoaning her inability to produce children of her own. There were Eleanor Roosevelt and Betty Friedan and Bette Middler and Gloria Steinem and Valentina Tereshkova. There were teachers and professors who encouraged me, and a woman I never met who left her estate to my family congregation to provide scholarships, which paid my way through college.

 Our three carefully planned daughters took for granted that they were expected to go to college and would have options about work, career, marriage, children, choices that I and many of my generation had to fight for. All three have professional careers, and two of them have children. Their expectations were reinforced by a feminist Dad who supported their choices as he had supported mine.

And now the fifth generation is at that point, all in their twenties. Two are in relationships and contemplating marriage but not children.  One is married, teaching school, and hoping to become a mother. The youngest is still in college, plans to go to graduate school, would consider marriage but is not interested in having children.  

I tell this story because it is an amazing transformation in the 114 years between the birth of my grandmothers in 1890 and the birth of my youngest grandchild in 2004, a common story (with maybe fewer single parents!).  Mothers’ Day was created in 1908 when they were both young women in their childbearing years. Traditionally, it is celebrated with gifts and flowers and praise for the wonderful mother that one was, even if one wasn’t.

In our later years the care of aging parents becomes a responsibility for all, but mostly daughters. My sister looked after our beloved aunt and I took care of my mother even as she had taken care of her mother as a young adult.  My generation fo working women is somewhat more self-sufficient, both financially and otherwise, but we do turn to our daughters (and sometimes sons) to help us through the end times. That is something to celebrate on Mothers’ Day!

I am glad I was able to choose to do it all.  Every Mothers’ Day, if I remember, I send a thank you note to my daughters for teaching me how to be a mother. That holiday is now important to the mothers of my grandchildren, since the responsibilities of parenthood weigh lightly on me now.  They are happy that at age 83 I still live by myself (a widow of ten years) and manage my own affairs, rarely asking anything more than taking care of my cat when I am out of town.

I know that some of my generational cohort feel deprived of a right to grandchildren or even great-grandchildren. I am grateful for those beloved four young women growing into adulthood, but  lay no expectation on them to satisfy any desire I might have for continuing the line.  These are their lives, and challenging times and an uncertain future.  Perhaps it should be a holiday to celebrate all women, mothers and not mothers, mentors, role models, cheerleaders. workers. Community builders. And to celebrate their right to choose, and work as hard as we can to keep those choices open tor them.

Mothering and Letting Go

~ purplesage41 ~ 1 Comment

I know mothers who are deeply engaged in their children’s lives. I don’t mean mothers of young children or adolescents. I mean mothers of adults, children who have graduated from college, moved away from home, got married, and had children of their own.  I am happy for them and hope that there is much joy in their relationships. I love my daughters and granddaughters, but I am not that kind of mother, and I think the feeling is mutual.

The separation process is challenging for mothers and daughters. As daughter of a mother, mother of three daughters, and grandmother of four more, I have experienced it first and second-hand. My own mother lived to age 92, the last 25 after moving to the town where I lived and wanting to be more a part of my life than I was willing to accept.

It begins when an adolescent girl says in some way, I have my own vision of my future and it’s not the same as yours.  My mother, who was raised in a very post-Victorian world, thought that every woman should a) get married, have children, manage a household and expect a man to support her and b) acquire a marketable skill in case she needed to go back t work. Every girl of my generation heard the options: teacher, nurse, secretary.  When my mother offered those options to me at 15, I said, I think I will be an engineer. (Source: Sputnik had just leaped into space, and my father, from whom she had been separated for 13 years, was an engineer—although he had no involvement with our family. Eventually, I became an academic economist.) 

I wanted to marry and have children, but my focus was on a professional career, not a backup strategy. My mother was a social butterfly in high school, while I was a born academic who knocked the charts off standardized tests. I dated faithfully to appease my mother, but my heart wasn’t in it until I met my future husband in college. She also passed on the traditional belief that sons were more important because they carried on the family name and had to support their families, so it was especially important that they get an education, while it might be wasted by a woman.  Betty Friedan, where were you? (Fortunately, my brother was not academically inclined, and went to a technical high school instead. And I worked while in high school to save enough for two years of college, but scholarships took care of it anyway.)

That’s not an uncommon story of the women of my generation, the pre-boomers (I was born in 1941) and early boomers. It was easier for my daughters, who grew up with the expectation of careers and marriage and maybe children.

The other part of the story was conflicting values. My mother was understandably cautious, and not adventuresome. She didn’t get a driver’s license till she was 55, and flew on a plane for the first time in 1961 to visit her first grandchild. My sister and I were both counting the days to when we could leave our hometown and see the world. She was a Republican.  I always joked that she was so relieved that I came home from my first year of collage neither a Communist nor pregnant that she didn’t mind that I had become a Democrat. (Many years later she discovered that her social and political values were more Democratic than Republican.)

But in other ways I am my mother’s daughter. I have her sense of humor and passion for writing. I like to sing hymns around the house. I am a pretty good seamstress, a skill she taught me. I am a better, more adventurous cook than she would even consider being. I share her love but not her skill at growing plants.  She had a passion for politics which both of us inherited from her grandmother who marched for women’s suffrage in 1913. We both could play the piano by ear and loved cats, 

Before she arrived here in 1976, mother had lived with my brother and his wife, which did not work out well for anyone concerned. Over time, I managed to set boundaries that allowed us to peacefully coexist in my small Southern college town. The day she died, she confided to me that the last 25 years in this place 900 miles from home were the happiest years of her life. I worked hard to get her to let go of mothering me in order to enjoy what I have at age 82—the freedom  to restructure life after the intensive stage of mothering, to be myself again, to set my own schedule, to have a cordial and loving but non-invasive relationship with my daughters sons-in-law, and grandchildren but my own social life and my own friends, causes, and communities.

My daughters are almost there. The oldest had only one child, who is in a slow transition from college to finding her place in the world, but it is happening. My second daughter is married but has no children, although she is a much beloved aunt. I had a beloved aunt too, also without children, that my sister and I adored.  And my children had such an aunt too, although she did have two adopted sons. Perhaps at a certain age we need to cease being their mothers and become aunts instead!  My youngest daughter has three children and is still involved in their lives, but change is headed her way.  All my daughters have careers, adult friends, community activities, and supportive spouses.

I look back on my mother’s life, its challenges and disappointments, her identity defined primarily as a wife and mother and grandmother. I am grateful that I was born in the first generation of both-and instead of either-or, a professional career and a family. I am also grateful that I found a husband who clearly stated he did NOT want me to live vicariously through him (I said okay!). My life after parenting has been full of opportunities, challenges, and adventures. As a mother, I am grateful that my daughters could lead both/and lives, and that my granddaughters are all on track to do the same.