Mother's Day
May. 9th, 2004 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drscottMother's Day. So I spent an hour talking to her on the phone, and as usual she spoke 90% of the time, which percentage has been rising steadily over the years. She's now 74 and not quite as sharp as she used to be, but still active and alert.
My mother grew up in a tiny village near Kansas City. Her father died when she was 8, leaving the family destitute during the Great Depression. When she went to high school, WWII had just begun, and she was unhappy to discover that the town high school kids looked down on her as a rural kid with no connections. Still she became a cheerleader and did well academically. Married to a serviceman who was shortly thereafter killed in the war, she then worked as a secretary and took classes at a local college as time allowed. Later on she met and married my father, then they moved to Southern California so he could work in the aircraft plants there. Dad began to drink and gamble away his paycheck, and the strain continued until he re-entered the Army for the Korean War and my future family moved back to Kansas City. Dad returned, I was born, and a few years later Dad went crazy and had to be committed. I will always remember going up to Iowa to visit him at the VA psychiatric hospital, and watching Autumn Leaves (a relatively unknown weeper with Joan Crawford as a lonely typist who falls for the handsome Cliff Robertson only to discover he's dangerously insane) with her at the motel.
She managed to keep everything together, working as a secretary to keep us alive, and by the time she met and married another guy (my stepfather), we were relatively middle-class. When he died of a stroke a few years after that, she kept on going, continuing to work unitl early retirement.
The thrill of getting a new piece of clothing (something she never had as a child) has never worn off, and she still can't pass up the sales racks. She's always loved to dance and flirt, though there hasn't been much opportunity for that in recent years, and she loves casinos (which I can't stand.) She likes my partner Mike and they seem to have more fun together than we do -- as son I quickly fall into a learned self-censorship, while Mike gets to be wicked. :-)
So here's the little bird in her element:
My mother grew up in a tiny village near Kansas City. Her father died when she was 8, leaving the family destitute during the Great Depression. When she went to high school, WWII had just begun, and she was unhappy to discover that the town high school kids looked down on her as a rural kid with no connections. Still she became a cheerleader and did well academically. Married to a serviceman who was shortly thereafter killed in the war, she then worked as a secretary and took classes at a local college as time allowed. Later on she met and married my father, then they moved to Southern California so he could work in the aircraft plants there. Dad began to drink and gamble away his paycheck, and the strain continued until he re-entered the Army for the Korean War and my future family moved back to Kansas City. Dad returned, I was born, and a few years later Dad went crazy and had to be committed. I will always remember going up to Iowa to visit him at the VA psychiatric hospital, and watching Autumn Leaves (a relatively unknown weeper with Joan Crawford as a lonely typist who falls for the handsome Cliff Robertson only to discover he's dangerously insane) with her at the motel.
She managed to keep everything together, working as a secretary to keep us alive, and by the time she met and married another guy (my stepfather), we were relatively middle-class. When he died of a stroke a few years after that, she kept on going, continuing to work unitl early retirement.
The thrill of getting a new piece of clothing (something she never had as a child) has never worn off, and she still can't pass up the sales racks. She's always loved to dance and flirt, though there hasn't been much opportunity for that in recent years, and she loves casinos (which I can't stand.) She likes my partner Mike and they seem to have more fun together than we do -- as son I quickly fall into a learned self-censorship, while Mike gets to be wicked. :-)
So here's the little bird in her element:
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Wonderful post
Date: 2004-05-10 10:28 pm (UTC)BTW,your mother looks great. My Mom is 71 and still going strong.
I think I'll post about her in my journal momentarily.
Re: Wonderful post
Date: 2004-05-10 10:48 pm (UTC)