SW: What my mother taught me
Suki Wessling
suki@santacruzparent.com
05/09/09
I haven't written much about my mother, except to
criticize her choice of shampoo! I'm not from a sappy, sentimental sort of family, so writing goopy Mother's Day pieces doesn't come naturally to me.
But writing about things I've learned is something I love to do, and very many of the things I've learned were from my mother.
My parents married right at the cusp of the sixties, but we had a classic fifties-style family. We had the house, the kids, the dogs, the dad who went to work, the mom who stayed home. We lived in a medium-sized Midwestern town, and we went to public school. Whenever I'm at a writing conference and I see classes in memoir writing, I wonder, What would I write about? Normality was all around us.
But within normality you have your particular life. My mother was not like other mothers I knew. June Cleaver was less her model than, hm, I can't think of any television character that caught her way of tackling things. I guess I'd sum it up by saying that my mother never sat still, literally or figuratively. When we complained about the cold house in the winter, she'd just shrug and say, "If you'd get DOING something you'd feel fine."
She was always doing. She had five kids, was a piano teacher, and as we got older, went back to college and eventually got a PhD. She definitely rolled with the times. When food coops became all the rage, I remember my mother cutting enormous blocks of cheese into each family's chunk. When guitar mass was in style, my mother got hippie shirts, learned the play the guitar, and sang with her friends. Seven people in a house already makes an instant party, but I remember, especially in the summertime, my mother's friends (all equally as creative and energetic as she) and their kids coming to our house.
We grew enormous quantities of food on our five acres, and my mom "put it all by" as the crops came in. We had jarred peaches, tomatoes, and pickles, frozen corn and strawberries, and potatoes stored in the root cellar. (At this point my mother would be sure to tell you about my phobia for potato eyes. I've gotten over it, I swear!)
Based on her split heritage -- Italian and Pennsylvania Dutch -- my mother cooked fabulous and adventurous meals. I think we were the first family I remember trying to make Chinese stir-fry at home. We got the Betty Crock International Cookbook and discovered Mexican food before we'd experienced anything more adventurous than Taco Bell.
So many of the things I do today with my family I learned by following my mother around. I don't remember her formally teaching me much. When we seemed ready, she just assigned us all tasks to help out with what she was doing. When I got to Home Ec class in junior high, it amazed me that other people didn't know how to cut shortening into flour, or use a sewing machine.
I can't say I'm GOOD at everything she taught me, but I can find my way around most of the womanly arts.
And then my mother did something completely different. As we were all growing independent, she went back to college, got a master's in music and a PhD in history. Once we were all out of the house, she got a job at Stanford and my parents up and moved to Berkeley. Their kids were all terribly attached to that house that our dad and mom had built, but she took the move without, as far as I know, a tear shed.
"It's just stuff," is something I remember her saying often enough.
Since I've been an adult, my mother has made other career changes, along with taking on the new role as Nana. She enjoys her grandchildren, but she is as unsentimental a granny as she was a mommy. I remember when her first grandchild was born and people asked her, "Aren't you proud?" and she'd answer, "What did I have to do with it? I haven't got a reason to be proud!"
Not proud, perhaps, but always supportive of her daughters and daughters-in-law, helpful with the grandchildren, and now providing them with a different house on a different piece of land, but again, the gardens, the food, teaching the kids to make bread and pies, to harvest peas, to make strawberry jam. I bet she doesn't think she does that much for her grandchildren, but I am sure that one of my son's lasting memories of her will be the time that she helped him make strawberry jam to use as party favors when he had his friends to the farm for his seventh birthday. And my daughter treasures the times that she spends with Nana alone, insisting that I not even come in with her if I'm dropping her off.
"But I want to come in," I tell her. "I like to talk to Nana, too!"
There's always something new I can learn, from sewing a flat seam to keeping up with the latest HTML standards.
Thanks, Mom!
