More than 40 years after she was featured on the front page of the Lubbock Avalanche Journal for graduating from college in mid-life, my mom passed away at age 85.
There are several copies of the front-page, above-the-fold newspaper clipping of my mom in the family photo albums. She is pictured on our front porch on 55th Street with my oldest sister, who was also graduating from college, and my second-oldest sister, who was graduating from high school. They all look young and blonde.
I was 13 at the time, and had not the foggiest idea how challenging it must have been to cook, clean, chauffeur my younger and sister and me to our piano and dance lessons, keep tabs on a teenager and be on a parallel college track with the oldest child — who spent considerably more time socializing than my mother, with the predictable academic results; it was Mom who graduated with honors.
I remember that several of my friends’ mothers assumed that Mom planned to teach school, because that and nursing were still what women went back to school for in the late 1960s. She had no such plans. She went back to being a full-time mom, volunteer, wife, and friend for a few years, then got a job as a secretary for a justice of the peace to help pay our college expenses. It was mostly learning for the pleasure of learning that drew Mom back to college — that and my college professor dad's assurances that she could do the work and balance classes with raising four kids.
Not long ago, after cancer and Alzheimer’s had taken their toll on her short-term memory, I asked her why she went back to college. She looked straight at me and said, "I wanted to finish my degree," in an uncharacteristically assertive voice.
Mom was a perfectionist, and she attacked classes the same way she waxed floors, scrubbed stubborn stains, and stayed up late at night sewing dresses for all of us. She was intense, worried and somewhat insecure and spent many a late evening parsing the “new math” and trying to overcome her inhibitions enough to tackle conversational Spanish. One assignment for a class (psychology maybe?) called for her to have a serious conversation with her adolescent daughter, which was me. I was completely uncooperative. I seem to remember my oldest sister filling in as a faux adolescent, and somehow Mom got the assignment done.
She was a mother who baked cookies, served as room mother, taught Sunday School and volunteered to be a Girl Scout leader, so when a class or examination caused her to miss a school event, she was wracked with guilt (no doubt exacerbated by my high-drama temper tantrums in grade school). Fifteen years ago, she and I took a trip to Paris together, and in between the metro rides and museum visits, she asked me if it still bothered me that she had missed one of my fifth-grade programs. Good Lord no, I told her, then I felt guilty for making her feel guilty all those years. (Fifth grade was the year she sewed me a very groovy one-piece pants suit with a frilly blouse, which my teacher, a conservative Southern Baptist not quite ready for women wearing pants, informed me was inappropriate at Bayless Elementary. I never quite forgave the teacher for that; even I had a clue how hard that pattern was for my mother to piece out and make into a Seventeen magazine-worthy outfit.)
Mom was not only protective of us and but also of other people's children. She loved a good joke as much as anyone — in fact, that's probably what attracted her to my dad — but she was visibly upset when a television program in the 1990s aired a sketch making fun of President Clinton’s daughter Chelsea, who was an adolescent. Never mind that she was a mostly lifelong Republican and didn't vote for Chelsea's dad; she knew exactly how difficult it was to be a 13-year-old girl; she raised four of them.
She loved to read aloud to us when we were little, and as kids we joked about being held captive in the Chevrolet Impala while Mom read the newspaper aloud to Dad on family vacations. She always reminded us that she took expression lessons from the same woman who taught actress Jean Harlow. In fact, her Swedish parents and grandparents enrolled her in dance, piano, and who knows what else; and her stepmother permed her hair in tight curls after she married my widowed grandfather. I suppose they had in mind a Swedish, Kansas City version of Shirley Temple, who was her exact same age. The truth was, she was never comfortable performing — or even calling up people on the phone — but there was a little part of her, evident in that fine reading voice, that liked having center stage, usually ceded to my very extraverted, entertaining dad.
Shirley Temple died the same week Mom passed in late January. The obituaries lauded Temple's career as a child actress, ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia and spokeswoman for breast cancer awareness. My mom's career was much more low-key but no less important. She toiled away at college as an adult and set an example for her daughters in a time when many girls never finished college. She was generous with her time, never a gossip, and guilt-ridden in the way that only Swedes are guilt-ridden, with less reason than anyone I ever knew. She loved us with all her being, and it makes it no less amazing to me to know that is what mothers are supposed to do. She did it really well.
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