Tag: parenting

Beltane: Roots and Wings

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

Beltane (May 1st) is an ancient Celtic holiday, a celebration of fertility as spring gets underway.  It still bears echoes in May poles (a mating dance) and May flowers, but in its ancient Celtic time people were encouraged to couple in the fields as an invitation to plants and animals to be fruitful and multiply. As we multiply, we need to give our children sturdy roots, and when the time is right, bless their wings and let them fly away.  Children need both roots and wings—roots to make them feel safe and give them a “starter” identity, wings to fly to new places and ways of being in the world.

Seven years ago, I went to my 60th high school reunion in Torrington, Connecticut.  It was my first reunion ever. and one of few visits to my hometown after graduating from college and getting married. My sister, my mother and my brother were all living elsewhere.  In 1959, my mother’s the youngest child, I had spread my wings and fled Torrington into the richer soil of academia, first in Storrs at UConn, then in South Carolina as a Clemson professor. I wasn’t coming back.

Torrington is an old town full of dead factories and new housing developments.  My family on both sides has lived there for many generations. Aunts, uncles and cousins dotted the landscape.  I picked apples in my grandfather’s orchard and attended the annual family reunion with people I rarely saw at any other time..  I grew up in the church of my maternal ancestors and was married there. At the Congregational church we sang from the Pilgrim Hymnal and attended Pilgrim Fellowship in high school. We knew who we were, In a town that was heavily populated by Catholics—Polish, Irish, but mostly Italian, we were New England Yankees, Protestant, hard-working, private, frugal, often unimaginative, cautious. 

Torrington High School’s Class of 1959 reunion was a surprisingly pleasant; warm welcome, old familiar faces, catching up on everyone’s past.  I was assured that I was so smart and they knew I would do great things—me, Alan, and Carol, the three nerds at the top of the class.  Later that weekend I visited UConn with my college roommate to recall where my wings first landed me, Unlike Torrington, UConn had changed.  We sought out the few familiar landmarks–the skating pond, the Congregational church.  Our old dorm still bore the same name but had been updated, as did”The Jungle,” a group of men’s dorms where my future husband was living in 1959.

My mother gave me roots, but she didn’t think wings were such a good idea. I could go to the local branch of UConn, she said.  No, I said, I’m going to the main campus.  You can be a teacher, a nurse, or a secretary, she said.  I think I’ll be an engineer, I replied. (That was shortly after Sputnik.)  But being rooted in time and space among ancestors and hills, relatives and neighbors gave me the confidence to sprout wings. They eventually flew me to marriage and an adult life as an economics professor in faraway South Carolina. There I repotted myself and put down new roots, which in turn provided soil for my three daughters– home town, high school friends (they regularly attend reunions), second cousins and a grandmother who moved here ten years after I did.  They still enjoy visiting their hometown.  One daughter, two sons-in-law, and two granddaughters are Clemson grads and tiger fans. My oldest daughter moved away, saying she was too liberal to live in the South, but after adventures in Charlotte and Dallas she would up back in Clemson, working for Clemson as a graphic designer. Another daughter lives a few hours away in Aiken SC, while the third developed big wings that took her to many places before settling in New Jersey.

There are no Congregational churches in the area, so I became first a Lutheran and then a Unitarian Universalist, a faith community that shares a history and a liberal approach to religion with my ancestral faith. I learned how to respectfully hold onto and affirm my worldview while treating those of others with respect. I let my daughters choose their colleges (within some financial limits) and their majors—an economist and a physicist looking on in wonder as they grew into an artist, a musician, and a librarian/photographer.

I am grateful for my roots and my wings, and I am pleased that my daughters return to their roots while also spreading their wings.   I wish the same for every child.

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.