This post is about my mother, though not about Mother’s Day. While searching for a topic for a Mother’s Day post, I came across a photograph of my mother and me in an album my grandmother made for me many years ago. I’ve always liked this photo, because it shows my mother as a reader. She was an avid reader until Alzheimer’s stole her ability to retain what she read for more than a page or two.
Although the picture is undated, I know it was taken on July 4, 1956, when I was three months old. I know the date because there’s another photo of us in the same clothes also sitting on the grass that my mother labeled July 4, 1956. I don’t like that picture nearly as well, though I am featured more prominently in it.
On the back of the photograph of my mother and me reading that I like so well, my mother wrote: “Getting an early start on a college education—future Phi Beta Kappa.”
An accurate prediction. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Middlebury College twenty years later, in June 1976. But what my mother’s inscription tells me more than her skill as a seeress is the importance to her of education—her own and that of her children.
This time, as I read the inscription, I reflected on where my mother was in life in July 1956 when she wrote those words.
She was twenty-three years old, married for just over a year, with a baby born nine months and ten days after her wedding. Merely days before her marriage on June 25, 1955, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Oregon with a B.A. in English Literature. She was proud of her degree and her induction into Phi Beta Kappa, and she remained proud of these accomplishments throughout her life. I don’t know what happened to her Phi Beta Kappa key, but at some point in her life she received a Phi Beta Kappa letter opener, which I took from her desk along with other mementos from my parents’ home after they died.
Beyond wondering what became of her key, I wonder what became of the hopes she had for herself when she graduated from college and a year later when she wrote of her daughter becoming Phi Beta Kappa. What dreams for her future did she set aside when she married and became a mother?
I know later in life she aspired to be a writer, to write essays and spiritual devotions that would tell the story of her faith journey and inspire others. I know, because she wrote of this aspiration in her journals. And I know she did very little writing beyond her journals.
But I puzzle over how she evolved from the young college graduate, bride, and mother seen in this picture to the woman I knew who wanted to write but never found the time to do more than journal about scriptures she read. Did she ever think she could “have it all”—marriage, motherhood, and a writing life? I think not, because she cautioned me about not being able to have it all.
Nevertheless, she raised four children who all believed that education was important. All four of them obtained graduate degrees. What she didn’t reap in her own life, she reaped through her children. To that extent, her prediction and her dreams came true.
What do you wonder about your parents’ life aspirations?
I wonder what my mother might have accomplished if the Depression had not altered her college plans after only two years.
Sally, from what you’ve said, your mother was a real go-getter. Theresa