I am both in awe and inspired by fellow Slicers.
I have been following Kim Johnson's memories of her Dad and
like a good writer, she has me remembering the wisdom
my Mom shared in her last days.
My mother's vision of perfection as a woman came not from her depression-era mother, who struggled to provide food and clothing, but from images plucked from magazines and movies of crisp aprons, gleaming kitchens, and immaculate children. It was an image that was hard to maintain when you lived in a tiny mobile home, but she embraced it as her mission.My own vision of success included a career-I-loved, relatively-healthy meals, and not-always-perfect, but happy children in a home that was just clean enough to be safe. While you could not eat off our floors, you could usually find a shirt! It too was an image that was hard to maintain!
During the last month of her life, a new school year started with all the stressors and challenges, my first two grandchildren arrived, three days apart, and my long-marriage dissolved into oblivion! My mother knew about the first two situations; I did not share the third.
"You know," she said in a weak voice, "mothers always seem to have a sense about the stress in their children's lives, which aren't always perfect."
I think about her words as I watch, from afar, a social-media-hyped-image-generation with incredible careers, fabulous families, and magnificent homes; certainly stressors, and clearly hard, nearly impossible to maintain even if you had a maid, a nanny, a landscaper, and a trust fund!
3 comments:
Anita - Your words ring so true. I grew up with those glossy magazine images too and thought that's what I should aspire to. But I didn't have children, live in a small one bedroom apartment, and still somehow I stopped trying to measure up to other people. I'm relatively happy in my small cocoon. And yes - my mom always knew when I or my sister were having difficulties. We didn't have to say a thing. She knew!
Anita, I just watched a film yesterday called Last Weekend. It touches on the fact that mothering is simply not easy. We raise our kids to lead their own lives which often leaves a mother behind wondering about her purpose in life. Your post has me to reflecting on the expectations we believe we need to meet and the image we think we can achieve in our lives. I am appalled at how much I have been influenced by the media's ideal body figures, but that's a long story. Anyway, I appreciate your honest post and how well you show this complex problem. I'm sorry about your marriage, and marvel at how a mother can always know when a child is suffering. Powerful post! Thanks for sharing.
I am so honored that you were inspired to write what you have long been planning to write. Now is clearly your time and you have captured moments in such vivid detail among the many things we are letting go in the house clean out are the Magazine clippings of these very things you describe as the image of success for that generation. The Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval no longer holds sway over this generation as it did of The Cleavers. I believe that you and I are and have been in very similar spots With overlapping experiences and traumas in our own lives. Right down to the marriage. I went through that too in 2006. I look forward to reading more of your posts and even more forward to the joy you feel in the clean out of the cobwebs of emotions that writing brings. I think we are both due for fresh coats of paint and new spaces in our lives and hearts. I’m holding my broom and dustpan - and my pen! And I see you are too, and that brings such a great feeling!
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