Ladies of a Certain Age ~ for those invisible powerful, dynamic, vital women

I often think of a woman who died February 2, 1964, almost 50 years ago.  She was 46. I was 16.  Her name was Rose and I am her first-born.

This is not a woman who greeted me when I came home from school with warm cookies and milk, nor praised me for my academic grades, or was proud when I organized neighborhood kids for a circus and circus parade at age 8.  It took me 60 years or so to stop wanting or needing her approval.  Only recently, do I feel I have a good understanding of my mother.

In talking to many of “us,” I have learned that I am not the only one who thinks of her mother often.  It doesn’t seem to matter whether our mothers are alive or dead.  It seems many of us are still trying to understand the woman who brought us into this world.

Here is a little bit about my story.  I hope in some way it helps you with your efforts to understand your mom.

“Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm, wrinkles the soul.”  Samuel Lillman

What do I say about my mother, Rose?

I would love to say that we had a close loving relationship; but, that simply was not the case.  I think, in part, because we got off to a very bad start.   I never sought the comfort of my mother’s arms or lap.

Having a baby in the late 1940s, and what seemed far from home and family, must have been awful.  There was no husband-coached childbirth then, not common talk about having a baby, nor childbirth classes.

My mother was born at home, December 20, 1917, in Pueblo, Colorado.  I don’t know who delivered her.  I do know from my Aunt Kate, 10 years older than my mom, that her grandmother was fetched from her home across the alley because the birth was not going easy.  Mom’s mother, my grandmother, Elizabeth, was age 20.

As hard as my mother’s birth might have been, my grandmother Elizabeth was at home with her mother, a mid-wife and maybe others.

My mother, although a fourth generation American, was still tainted by the stigmas of her Italian immigrant heritage, and was in the big city of Denver alone in the sterile environment of St. Joseph’s hospital, with little or no knowledge of the intricacies of childbirth, and drugged.  The labor was hard and long.  The baby, me, was born breach with forceps, and came into the world screaming at the top of my lungs, with a red face and matching red hair. My mother always said I was 9 pounds, but, actually, I was a little over 8 pounds, just like my babies.   My mother almost died. I almost died.  My mother was given the Last Rites by the Catholic Church and I was baptized and given the Last Rites.

I believe it must have been an act of God that I did not have Cerebral Palsy or a complete non-functioning brain.

My mother had rheumatic fever when she was 19 that left her with a damaged heart. She thought she got it from a library book.

I thought for many decades that my birth caused my mother’s heart condition. “Matricide” is the worse murder Alfred Hitchcock wrote in his movie “Psycho. “ I thought I had committed that crime by being born.   When I was in my 40s, my Aunt Jean, mom’s sister, told me mom had “racing heart episodes” before I was conceived and my Aunt Kay, dad’s sister, said mom should have never been allowed to have a natural birth with her heart condition.  She blamed it on mom’s doctor.   Sister Jan was born by C-section with a different doctor.

As a young child, I think my exuberance, precociousness and natural curiosity was just too much for my sick, lonely mother who was married to a large man, who was often physically violent to her and to me.

She had few friends other than the ladies she played bridge with, those in her church’s Alter and Rosary Society (she ironed vestments and alter cloths when it was her turn) and only one of our neighbors.  She did not participate in my Brownie Troop activities like other girls’ mothers did.

Mom adored my sister Jan, who is almost four years younger than me.  Sadly, Jan tells me she has few memories of Mom.  When Jan was about 6-months old, I had scarlet fever and the family was quarantined.  The doctor came to our house and gave me and Jan a shot of the new miracle drug, penicillin. Mom was most upset that her baby had to have a shot with such a long needle.  She never stated how thankful she might have been that that shot probably saved me from rheumatic fever, a far more serious condition that scarlet fever often develops into, and a disease that caused her heart condition and shortened her life. John Kennedy died on my sister’s 13^th birthday.  I was the first kid home that day.  My mother told me, “I can hardly wait for Jan to come home so that we can cry together.”

She wrote her mother frequently, occasionally talked “long distance” with her, and the same was true with her sister Jean.  Occasionally, her mother’s sister Josephine, who lived in North Denver, would come to our house and we would go there once in a while as well as to the home of one of her father’s sisters, Rose, who also lived in North Denver, the Italian-side of town then.

Mom did not drive until I was in the fifth or sixth grade.

As a girl she played basketball and wrote.  After graduation she attended “business school” to take shorthand and typing. In Pueblo, she worked for Colorado Fuel and Iron (CFI – like her grandfather, her father, and many uncles and cousins) and Crews Begs Department Store.  In Denver, before my birth, she worked for Jonas Brothers Furs.

She was beautiful and smart. She had auburn hair and hazel eyes, the same color as her father’s, as mine, as one of my daughter’s and granddaughter’s.  In grade school the teachers had her skip a grade and she was put in the same class as her older brother. Mom traveled far more than her parents, who never even saw a good portion of Colorado, their home state.  Mom traveled to Chicago with Dad in 1953 and to the west coast for a family vacation when I was 10 or 11. She never flew. (My children and I have been to many foreign countries.  My grandchildren have flow as babes.) Mom met my father when he has stationed at the Army Air Force Depot in Pueblo during World War II.

My mother did give me sunsets. She would stand by the large picture window in our blond-brick ranch home in Denver and say to me, “Mr. Jonas used to say to me ‘Come here Rose and watch the sunset.’”  They were truly spectacular because we could see the sun setting over Longs Peak from that window.

My mother told me about “Jack Frost” and how he comes and paints leaves beautiful colors in the fall.

My love of color and fashion came from her.  I stopped smoking at age 19 because she and dad worked so hard to fund orthodontia for me so that I would have beautiful teeth and my teeth had already started turning brown.

Besides stopping most days to admire the sun setting, my mother also gave me my writing ability, budget consciousness, and the understanding about nutritious food.  My mother would hear that a certain thing cost a seemingly small amount each month, but then she would multiply it by 12 months to show that the thing wasn’t so cheap after all.  (I do the same thing even today).  She served nutritious food each day and did not allow us to have pop or fried foods.

After her death, I missed her tasty cooking tremendously.  I also missed just knowing my mother was home.  One day shortly after her death, as I came home from school I noticed her car was in the garage and was delighted she was there.  Then it hit me that mom wasn’t home after all because she had died and I had inherited her 1954 Chevy. I wanted my mother to help me plan my wedding and to be at my college graduations.  In the early morning after my first child, whose middle name is Rose, was born, I dreamt I saw my mother and grandmother, Georgia, in the nursery.  “Look Rose.  Here is her baby,” Grandma said as she led Mom to my baby’s crib.

Somehow today I can see my mother beneath all the layers of prescription drugs she took for her heart condition, her depression and the mores put on her by society of the twentieth century.

Sometimes I think my mother believed at some level her first-born baby, me, took away all her hopes and enthusiasm for life because giving birth to me was just too much for her heart.  She didn’t realize that this babe, me, was the child that would carry on her hopes and dreams — “And, when I die, there will be one child in the world to carry on, to carry on” (Blood, Sweat and Tears.)