My Mom‘s Not Like All the Other Moms

I was quite young when I realized that my mom was not like other moms. While other children were getting spankings when they misbehaved, I was not. It was the fifties and everyone I knew was spanked - cousins, classmates, and kids on TV shows, but my mom read Baby and Child Care and took to heart everything Dr. Benjamin Spock preached. Apparently he was against spanking. My mom’s conviction was a big relief to me, and I was quite proud of her for sparing the rod even though I sometimes worried that things might go really badly for me if Dr. Spock was wrong and I turned out to be a spoiled brat. My aunts and uncles also worried about me.

One aunt tells of the time Mom asked her to baby sit and left the instructions that I was not to be told “no.” I was to be redirected or distracted! The aunt was dumbfounded, but my mom showed her the chapter in “the book” endorsing this line of thinking. My aunt acquiesced, but to this day she tells everyone at family gatherings that I was the niece who was never told “no.” She stares at me long past the comfortable point, perhaps trying to detect any long-term psychological damage. Likewise, my father used to tell about taking me along on bowling league night. I was in the terrible twos stage and started to act accordingly. When his fellow bowlers looked at him to do something, he said, “I don’t know what to do; I left the book at home.”

While other moms were in garden and sewing clubs, my mom was designing and building houses. She would find a vacant lot, sketch out a detailed floor plan, take it to an architect and then get my dad’s home building company to start to work. But she was the general contractor and she was the one dealing with the subcontractors on a daily basis. Not such an unusual thing today, but back then it was practically unheard of. She would often take me along to the job site where I would hear her argue with a painter or a plumber who was clearly not happy about taking orders from a woman. When the house was completed, we would move in, and she would begin decorating. While everyone else I knew had early American or traditional furniture, we always had contemporary furniture with Oriental accent pieces. She put Shoji screens instead of doors between some rooms and rock gardens in bathrooms.

And just about the time the decorating was complete, someone would want to buy the house, and we would start the process all over again. I lived in eight of her houses by the time I graduated from high school. The fifties were a time of conformity, and Mom was all for it unless she couldn’t make sense of it. Having grown up in a very religious household, she followed the tenets of her faith by attending church on Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night with my father, brother, and me in tow. This was not unusual in the fifties, and practically everyone I knew went to church regularly. But through the years she began questioning some of the cornerstones of the fundamental denomination.

When I was 12, all of my seventh grade classmates signed up for Dick Chaplin ballroom dancing classes. I wanted to join them, but our church preached that dancing was a sin. This baffled me, mainly because I couldn’t imagine all of my classmates rotting in hell (although I wasn’t allowed to say “hell”) for going to Dick Chaplin on Thursday nights to learn how to tango, waltz, and have punch and sugar cookies. Mom understood my logic and met with one of the church elders for an explanation. Remarkably, he agreed with her and gave his permission for me to join my classmates on the dance floor. But this incident must have started a chain reaction of questioning for my mom, because two years later our family started going to a less dogmatic church. She showed great courage to turn her back on the religion of her own mother and father and to risk losing the respect of family and the friendship of countless neighbors.

But my mom wasn’t like the other moms. When I left home for college, Mother, at age 50, began taking watercolor classes on a whim. She was really quite good, but she soon realized how much better her work looked matted and framed. The cost of framing was outrageous, in her view, so she started a framing business in the garage. She was her only customer, but she invested in state-of-the-art mat, glass and frame cutters, enormous pieces of equipment that took up the entire garage. She also bought yards and yards of framing material at close out prices and huge pieces of mats in beautiful colors.

Her passion for painting and framing waned only after she was diagnosed with macular degeneration in her 70’s. Over those twenty years, she painted hundreds of works and gave many away to friends and family. All framed, of course. Some of those paintings now hang in her room at a skilled nursing unit in our neighborhood. Mom is 92 and has Alzheimer’s. She doesn’t know who I am but she still knows the difference between primary and secondary colors, and she complains that the windows in her room don’t go all the way to the floor. See what I mean?