Paper Mothers

During the two decades of my childhood, the glass ceiling was cracking and being shattered, and mothers suffering economic distress found it easier to become working parents.  It took a while for the daycare and educational industry to fill the void, and many of us missed out on learning not only the domestic arts, but on what it takes to be a family.  Our model was a latchkey, an empty house, a frozen dinner, and arguing with siblings over who got to pick the next TV show.

My folks tried to make good choices, but their childhoods had been so different from ours, they didn't understand the challenges and couldn't foresee the results.  Some of their parental decrees were slingstones at the Goliath of the junk food and television marketing industries; for years at a time, we wouldn't own a TV after the old one broke down, and one infamous weekend we switched over completely to a "health food" diet.  In those days this meant granola for breakfast, carob chips in our cookies, and no soda pop in the house.  I was forced to spend my allowance on bags of candy at the drug store, half of which would be consumed on the walk home.  Our parents meant well, but they had no idea what they were up against.

I was born at the tail end of the Baby Boom; on some charts I'm even a member of the Baby Bust.  Schools closed behind me, and Home Economics classes were phased out of the curriculum as I passed through.  One year in middle school I struggled (and failed) to sew a shirt and had to be shown how to dry dishes by hand.  It was with great surprise I discovered (four years later when I had to make my own choir performance dress) that my mother knew how to sew.

Many sacrifices were made so that young women my age would have the opportunities our mothers and grandmothers did not.  A generation of us did gain the whole business world but we lost our domestic souls, and when I started to seek what had been lost to me, there was no one to teach me about family life except the paper mothers.

I became an avid reader the Christmas my mother gave me Little House on the Prairie, when I was eight years old.  This series about a pioneer family who worked hard and always stayed together was my first family training manual.  Later, my mother passed on three books from her own childhood:  Little Women, Pollyanna, and The Secret Garden.  It was a good thing we didn't have TV that year, as it turns out, or I might never have opened the covers of these derelict and almost forgotten treasures.  These falling-apart books by long-dead female authors (Louisa May Alcott, Eleanor H. Porter, and Frances H. Burnett, respectively) opened further this world of family love, even when the heroines are orphans.  From the faded ink on their age-stained pages I learned that loss and loneliness aren't triumphant over the desire to love and be loved; that a good attitude and sheer determination to forge ahead regardless of the emotion du jour is the rocket fuel I need to get off the ground and keep moving forward.

The exercise of will over emotion:  this was my first burn.