Women's History Month: Remembering My Mother

In honor of Women's History Month, I'm published this tribute to my mother that I wrote to read at her memorial service four years ago.

When I close my eyes and think of my mother, I remember her young, and pretty in a short dress. I remember that I wanted to be just like her. She was stubborn (mostly in a good way) and adventurous and lived out loud. When she was a young girl, she was called Perk, short for Percolator. Her Aunt Rae called her that, and it stuck. The name suited her because it described how lively and talkative she was.

I guess we all have snapshots in our mind of when we were little, and I have mine. I remember the two of us sleeping side by side in the twin beds in her childhood room at Oak Terrace. The night the Laurel in the Pines burnt down, sirens from every town for miles around blared all night. I was terrified of sirens. She reached across the aisle between the beds and held my hand until I feel asleep. I remember her reading me Peter Pan cuddled in her bed on David Drive in Beach Haven West. I remember her pretending to be mad at Peter the morning we came back soaked after he snuck me out for an early morning boat ride while she was still asleep.

My mother was the much younger second child of working parents. Her older brother went away to college when she was 7. While she was probably the world’s worst eater, and in fact survived much of her childhood on mustard sandwiches, she took great joy in writing her big brother to regale him with the list of delicacies being prepared by the housekeeper while he was eating college fare.

When she went away to Bryn Mawr, she told my grandmother she wanted to study business so she could help run the family’s department store. My grandmother, who was quite a trailblaizer in her time as a woman who was a partner in running a large business, told her NO you need to major in something NICE. So, she majored in history. She loved Bryn Mawr. She took us back with her many times through the colorful stories she told of her years there. It was a wonderful and exciting place for a very bright young woman from a small town on the Jersey shore. I read a passage on the Bryn Mawr website that gives an uncanny explanation of why she belonged at there. It reads: “Who went to Bryn Mawr? Women whose commitment to excellence and integrity distinguishes them in every field: women who have broken down barriers, expanded scientific knowledge, captivated audiences, enthralled readers, shaped national and international policy, advocated for the powerless, founded corporations around the world.” In short, women just like her. But to here her tell it, it wasn’t all so serious and noble. There were good times, and good friends. Many of whom she stayed in touch with for the rest of here life. Those were changing times. Imagine that those same young women who protested at Woolworth’s because of their refusal to integrate their lunch counter, were still required by Bryn Mawr rules to wear skirts to dinner in Merion Hall. So I guess you could change the world, as long as you did it in a skirt. Actually, one of the clearest images I have from the Bryn Mawr stories my mother told, was of the girls keeping a skirt hanging on the back of their door that they pulled on to go down to dinner.

After my mother graduated from Bryn Mawr, she traveled around Europe extensively. Living there for several years. She had an incredible ability to learn languages. She spoke French, and learned to speak German by ear. This was the precursor to a lifelong career teaching English as a second language to both children and adults. We used to joke that both of us would take on the accent of whomever we spoke to. She told me my grandfather did the same thing. Now, I see my own son and daughter do it. I guess it’s like she always said, “the apple never falls far from the tree.”

My mother was a wide and avid reader, and her reading list could trump Oprah any day. She and I passed books back and forth regularly. We read fiction and non-fiction. Together we probably cornered the market on books about the holocaust. Then we went on an unending streak about women in China. I’m reading a great book right now, and my first thought upon starting it was “I’ll have to give this to Mom when I finish it”.

When my mother discovered email in the nineties, she took to it like a fish to water. She used it to keep her children close to her. Even though we were in various parts of the world, she kept up with our lives via email. But her email wasn’t just little notes about what happened on a given day. She’d send articles, and we’d discuss them. We’d talk about politics. She adopted email as yet another tool in her quest against political wrongs and injustice. I have the terrible habit of never cleaning out my inbox. Perhaps, not so terrible in this case, because I kept so many of her emails. Here are some excerpts:

October 19, 2004
I’d read the article you mention and thought of Gigi. The most effective thing we can do now is VOTE. I hope Juli has registered. I can’t think of any election in my lifetime that has mattered so much. Did you read the New York Times Sunday magazine cover story on Bush by Ron Suskind? It was so frightening. M

July 1, 2005
“Once, when I was active in the Soviet Jewry movement, I phoned the chief prosecutor in Moscow and got through I might add. The then chairwoman was afraid to make the call for fear she’d get on their list and when they came they’d get her. I, on the other hand, had no fears at all. I said, if they come, it’ll already be too late. You gotta stop these people where they live, not where you live. Have we learned nothing? The idea in flooding the chief prosecutor with calls was in letting him know we were watching a particular trial and he wasn’t going to get away with it. By we, I mean the thousands of me calling in at the same time. Also on my call list that day was the Soviet Ambassador to the UN and the on to DC. We see where all that ended…”

October 22, 2004
“Ever wonder what it would’ve been like to have Gore as President? We’d either still have our surplus or at least, social security would’ve been fixed, maybe health benefits extended. We wouldn’t have gone to Iraq, we wouldn’t have a huge deficit. We wouldn’t have weakened protections for air and water. There would be press conferences we’d find boring. There’d be separation of church and state. I would view the possibility of a foreign vacation positively, maybe even France. I feel he’s the Grinch who stole my country.”

It wasn’t all politics. Sometimes it was just a few special words to let us know she loved us.

December 6, 2004
Happy Birthday!!! If you take a cutting from a forsythia in your yard today and put it in water in the house, you’ll have blooms for Christmas (an old German gardener’s custom).

If you take a look out your window today, you’ll see that the forsythia is blooming. My mother had already noticed…