Remembering Mom

Sunday, November 1 is All Saints Day, and at St. Mark’s and at all Episcopal, Roman Catholic, and many other Protestant churches, we remember and honor all those who have passed on from this Earthly life. Passed on into what we do not know, but I take comfort in the belief that this life isn’t all there is. I don’t pretend to know what’s coming; I’m pretty sure it doesn’t include St. Peter and pearly gates and angels with harps and halos. But I believe this conscious life is as much a phase as the gestation period we all spent in our mother’s womb.

Today I remember my mother, who died on October 29, 1961, 10 days after my 20th birthday and 24 days before what would have been her 50th birthday.

Beatrice Yardley Spicer Woodward was born November 22, 1911 and grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., the only child of Myrtus Randolph Spicer and Gertrude Brown Dooley Spicer. She attended high school in Brooklyn, the Packer Collegiate Institute, and Mount Holyoke College. My mother was an educated woman in a time when few women attended college. She majored in English Literature and minored in French. One of her college friends had a friend who had a brother, Benjamin Weston Woodward II, and he married my lovely mother and fathered my brother Ben and myself.

I don’t know whether my Mom and Dad had a happy marriage. I assumed so, but then what children experience is their norm until they grow enough to know that each family is different from their own in a variety of ways. My mother was, as many women were in the 50’s, a stay-at-home Mom. She said it was her choice, not my father’s demands or expectations, because she wanted to be there when her children came home from school. And she was. Near the end of first grade, I fell off a seesaw and broke my arm. My seesaw partner was in the down position when the recess bell rang, and she jumped off while I was in the air. The break was not bad, but the nurse called my mother, who didn’t drive. Someone drove me home, and as soon as I saw my mother, I finally cried. The arm didn’t hurt, but I was afraid of what the “sling” was that I was told my arm would be “put in”.

Mom was always there when I got home from school, and I'd jabber away at what happened, who did what, what the teacher said and did. My mother was always there.

Once Mom had viral pneumonia and was in bed for several days. I don’t remember anyone being worried; she was simply sick. Mom had surgery for varicose veins. Mom had all of her teeth pulled a few years later, and they waited until the gums healed before they fitted for dentures. I got so used to the way she looked toothless that when she had the dentures put in, she looked like she had way too much in her mouth! But no matter what, Mom continued to smoke her Kools, at least two packs a day. She coughed, she had bad breath, and I hated that she smoked.

Mom was a voracious reader; my parents belonged to the Book-of-the-Month club, and she read periodicals and newspapers from cover to cover. Mom did the Sunday New York Times Crossword puzzles every week while Sunday dinner was cooking—a roast beef, roast leg of lamb, pot roast, fried chicken. [In those days the Sunday Times puzzles were considerably more difficult than those now. I know, because I am still working my way through a book of 100 NY Times crosswords from years past, when Eugene Maleska and others were the editors. Will Shortz is a good editor, but the puzzles are easier. I can finish them now most every week, but if I’ve completed 5 of the 60 or so I’ve done in the book of 100, I’d be surprised.]

My mother and father were both political junkies, Mom even more than Dad, very right wing Republicans with a visceral hatred (it seemed to me) of Democrats in general and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in particular. Harry Truman fared just as badly, especially when he fired General Douglas MacArthur, who my parents thought sat on the right hand of God. Conversations around the dinner table, especially with dessert and coffee, centered on politics, and voices rose as Dad’s fist pounded the table. There was never any swearing in my familial home, save for “hell” and “damn”, and I heard plenty of those when the grownups discussed Democrats. The conservatism that my parents embraced cannot be compared to today’s conservatism. The religious right might have been conservatives then as well, but the issues were not at all religious in the 50’s and early 60’s.

My mother was home all day but we had a cleaning lady for years. Myrtle would hug me, smelling of furniture polish, when I told her I got an A on my spelling test, and she’d give me a nickel. Mom would eat lunch with Myrtle, but the meal was shared in the kitchen, not the dining room, where we always ate breakfast and dinner, and lunch on the weekends. Myrtle was a Negro. I think my Mom cared a lot for this woman who came weekly and cleaned our house and shared lunch.

Mom did laundry every Monday, and hung clothes on the line and put Dad’s trousers on pant stretchers. She ironed everything, and one of my visual memories is Mom standing at the ironing board, my brother sitting on the stove, and myself sitting on the kitchen table—the three of us talking about all manner of things while Dad puttered in his basement electronics retreat. My brother joined my mother and me maybe only once a week, often on a Saturday night, and both of us were so pleased—almost honored that he deigned to be with us.

Mom participated in, and perhaps chaired, the annual March of Dimes, which at that time was fighting polio. A neighbor on the street had a little boy with polio, and my mother, as many mothers in the late 40’s and early 50’s, had a terrible fear one of her children would contract polio. She was indefatigable in whatever effort she pursued. She joined a group called the Minute Women, and here is a Wikipedia introduction to that subject:

“The Minute Women of the U.S.A. was one of the largest of a number of militant anti-communist women's groups that were active during the 1950s and early 1960s. Such groups, which organized American suburban housewives into anti-communist study groups, political activism and letter-writing campaigns, were a bedrock of support for McCarthyism.

The primary concerns of the Minute Women and other similar groups were the exposure of communist subversion, the defense of constitutional limits, opposition to atheism, socialism and social welfare provisions such as the New Deal; and rejection of internationalism, particularly in the form of the United Nations. They campaigned to expose supposedly Communist individuals, focusing particularly on school and university administrators.”

Yes, this was my mother. She all but worshiped radio commentator Paul Harvey, and had her picture taken with him at a Minute Women convention in Cincinnati the year I was 11. That both my parents were proponents of Joseph McCarthy is a source of anguish for me, but hindsight is 20-20 and for my mother especially, the Communist threat was very real. How many times I’ve wished I’d had the opportunity to discuss politics with her as an adult!

My mother gave me mixed messages about being a woman. She told me that it was more important to educate my brother Ben than to educate me because I would get married and be taken care of. Ben had to be the breadwinner for a family. Yet I knew she greatly valued her education, and I remember her telling me how important it was for a woman to be educated for her children’s sake. I sensed that had she lived, she would have embraced Women’s Lib. After my grandparents, who lived with us for several years, passed away, my mother immersed herself in politics. We lived in a township in Western New York, and she was a committeewoman for the township. It was the equivalent of being on a city council, and she reveled in her new life with an energy we hadn’t seen in several years. Unfortunately, the damage to her physical health had been done.

My grandfather died in late 1954, which was a blow to both my mother and my grandmother. He had not been sick, and he and my mother had always been close. They would sit at the dinner table long after Grammie had retired to her crocheting (not very interested in politics was she), Dad had escaped to his basement retreat, and Ben and I had fled to our rooms for homework or relief from politics. My grandmother went downhill quickly, and by March ’55 was put in a nursing home. Since Mom didn’t drive, she took the bus to the nursing home downtown one day a week, and then on Sunday Dad or Ben or I drove her and picked her up. I believe that dealing with Grammie in the nursing home was the beginning of her long depression. When Ben left in ’57 to attend Cornell, Mom missed him terribly, and her depression deepened. Grammie finally gave up the ghost in late ’58. Mom was finally free! She was 47. Mom had hypertension and still she smoked at least two packs a day. She was thin, and she probably had emphysema. She coughed a lot and didn’t have a lot of physical energy.

Somewhere around my junior year in high school, I began to separate myself from my mother. I stopped telling her every single thing as I had for years. I also felt betrayed by her when I learned she had read a letter from my boyfriend (I had opened and read it and left it downstairs) and later I was awake when she came into my room one night and read part of my diary. The betrayal hurt me deeply. I confronted her with both of these incidents, and she admitted she was curious because I wasn’t talking with her as much as I used to.

I left home in early 1960, having graduated high school and dropped out of college after 3 months. I moved to Ithaca, where my boyfriend and brother were students at Cornell, and found a job at the University. After boyfriend left Cornell (without graduating) due to illness, we got married and lived in Buffalo, so we saw my parents regularly. The four of us played Bridge on into the night at times, and I saw my mother happy to have one child back in the fold. When my husband enlisted in the Army, I went back to my familial home because we couldn’t afford to keep up an apartment without his income. For three weeks in October, my mother and I began the process of finding one another again.

One of the friends I’d worked with in Ithaca was getting married on Saturday, October 28th that year, 1961, and I wanted to go. I came home from work on Friday, planning to pack and leave that evening. But Dad was cooking, not Mom, and he said she was sick and in bed. I found her in bed, smoking, having trouble finding her mouth with the cigarette. I should have been alarmed, but she said the doctor had been there (imagine—a doctor making house calls!) and I wasn’t to worry. But she said she’d appreciate it if I didn’t leave for Ithaca until Saturday morning. I, being a petulant, barely 20 year old, agreed, but wasn’t happy. Saturday when I got up, she wasn’t any better, but she said I should go, have a good time, Dad was there to watch over her.

I had a good stay with dear friends and enjoyed my friend’s wedding. Sunday, just before I left Ithaca at 6 p.m., I called and spoke to Dad, telling him I was leaving and to expect me around 9 or so. I asked after Mom, and he said she was better; she’d gotten up to go to the bathroom.

The drive was uneventful; I had done it several times. What I didn’t expect was that when I turned the corner into my street, there was a large black vehicle in front of my parents’ house. I recognized a hearse as I pulled into the driveway, and the look on my father’s face as I came in the door is one I will never forget. My mother was dead. I turned 20 on October 19th and on the 29th my mother was dead.

The older I get, the more I miss my mother. I miss her in retrospect—when I had my babies, when I was divorced the first time, when I married again, and when I divorced again. I miss her when I have big decisions to make. I miss her when I have so many questions I can’t ask her. What did she think and why about this or that? How could she believe this or that? What did she regret? What was she proud of? What had been her dreams?

Most of all, I recently realized that what I miss most of all is the knowing and feeling all my adult life that my mother loves me and that home is where my mother is. I have felt incomplete (and somewhat abandoned) for so many years. I don’t know how to be a mother to adult children. I do my best, which often isn’t good enough.

Mother, today I honor you, today I miss you so very much, and I credit you with so much of who I am. Thank you, and Mom, continue your peaceful rest. You deserve it.