Category: The Fifties

Pinky Blinders

Today’s writing prompt: “You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?“

Mine is:

“For me, the Fifties will forever be symbolized by Jayne Mansfield and her pink, heart-shaped pool.”

That is an image I have long carried of the Fifties. Beautiful, buxom, platinum haired Jayne Mansfield hoisted in the arms of her weightlifter husband Mickey Hargitay at the edge of her Beverly Hills swimming pool.

What is it about that image that sticks with me? For me, it was everything that was wrong with the Fifties. The garish and overt sexualization of women’s bodies. The plasticity and pretentiousness of the bottle bleached blonde. The artifice. The illusion of endless summer.

As a child you don’t know what is real and what isn’t. You learn what the accepted reality is from the adults around you and what – according to them – is supposed to matter.

Children have no choice but to accept and mirror this version of reality and it becomes their own. Until it doesn’t. The choice of opting in or out that comes with adulthood.

Even as a child, I remember being appalled by the behavior of a lot of the adults around me. Especially at our frequent house parties. The adults drank too much. Many smoked – a stupid, filthy habit I eventually adopted for many years and then finally discarded.

They laughed too loud. There was a constant low level of tension and forced frisson at these parties. Adults trying really, really hard to have a good time.

The disconnect between what many of these people said and what they did was evident to me. Way too much flirting and laughter in corners between men and women who were married to other people in the room.

I have come to understand how traumatized that entire post World war Two generation must have been. Sure, the Allies had been victorious over the evil forces of Nazism. Sufficiently to declare victory, disband the active war effort and move everyone back into a semblance of normal living.

Turns out that was easier said than done. Women used to making their own money and living independently were forced back into the domestic arena to make room in the workforce for the returning menfolk.

Possibly worse as an expectation, these displaced women were supposed to be happy about it. Doing their bit for the boys and country and all that.

Little wonder that the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield became popular. They were part of the post-war myth that life was not only better after the war, but bigger and better than it had ever been. These women and all the pretenders were symbols of all the freedom and glory the war effort won them.

It was bound to buckle. No society can live disconnected from the dictates of reality indefinitely. Enter the Sixties and what soon seemed to be constant social upheaval on every front: civil rights, the anti-Vietnam War protests, the rise of feminism, Baby Boomers starting to come of age. New rulebooks being written.

I see myself and my life goals as having been marinated in the stew of the Fifties. As an adult, I still tote around my little bag of values from the influences of that early upbringing.

The Protestant work ethic. The focus on external symbols of success. An expectation of affluence. A certain generational narcissism about our “uniqueness” that came with being part of the largest cohort of babies born in one period in the history of the world.

Today Boomers are vilified by many. Our focus on accumulating wealth and security worked well for us as a generation. To the point it seems that we have unintentionally scanted the generations coming behind us.

How in the name of heaven did a simple single family dwelling get to be so ridiculously expensive? Everywhere. I’ve yet to find a logical economic explanation.

While my autobiography would open with a description of that superplastic vision of hyper-happy and beautiful young and rich people like Jayne and Mickey, it was evident that fantastical image and lifestyle was bound to be time-limited.

It was a pablum period. No grit in the corn meal. No starch in the shorts. Just fun and glitz and partying and happy. Always happy. Perpetual adolescence.

The generation that lived it up in the Fifties eventually came back to a place of reckoning in the decades that followed. More settled and mature. Yet some of the Fifties core values are worth hanging on to.

A fierce sense of justice and atonement emerged from the detritus of war. An inherent world-wide sense of the fragility of peace and human life. The focus on stability to ensure the healthy growth of the upcoming generation. Medical and technological advances galore.

For those of us shaped within the confines of that decade, many of the images endure and maybe some of the values, too. Our crowd is leaving the planet and will have left its mark on the world as every generation inevitably does.

I recently read there are now more millennials in Canada than there are “baby boomers.” The great cull has begun. Soon, the pluses and minuses scored by our generation will be consigned to the history books.

And when it is, I have a strong suggestion for the image that best represents us for the cover.

About That Book I’m Writing

[If I published this post before, it is high time to post it again. I have two weeks from today until I reach the one year anniversary of publishing a daily blog post. I needed to remind myself why i started.]

I was born in the Fifties to a professional business family in a small East Coast Canadian town. I have been trying to sort out the logic behind my arrival and existence on this planet ever since.

If you want to know the narrative arc of my memoir, it is that. Making sense of where I came from and to what end.

I experienced zero to minimal stability in my childhood. There were pluses, of course, but also abuses and dereliction of parental duty – by times insignificant and at others, life-altering. Okay, I’ll say it: life threatening.

My mother fervently hoped that the pluses she tried to inject into our young lives would outweigh the abuses. She later managed the pain of our fragmented backstory by adroitly deflecting criticism and accountability by acting as if no abuses had happened.

And if abuses did happen to me as a child, she asserted, it was not her fault. I had somehow brought them upon myself. I was an aberration and accident of birth maybe. It takes a particular parental personality to react in that way upon hearing about bad things that happened on their watch.

As a “teenanger,” I was full of rage at my mother for her attempt to abandon us with a serious suicide attempt. (I note the typo in teenanger, but I’ll leave it as it fits.) I was also furious with her for what I truly believed then were unjust grievances she had against my Dad. I was fully onside with his point of view.

As a young teen, he used to bend my ear by the hour with detailed evidence of how horrid and evil my mother was. I once screamed at Mom that she was deliberately blocking Dad’s path to happiness.

You see, she put up roadblocks in his affair with a local floozy by refusing to sign divorce papers. The floozy was determined to not only bed him but wed him.

Apparently, she had made a couple of failed attempts with other lawyers in town. No doubt she thought the third time was a charm, but that didn’t work out for her either. So sad.

Much later it occurred to me that it probably wasn’t appropriate that my father shared my mother’s psychiatric diagnosis with 12-year-old me. I remember him handing me a single sheet of paper with a brief paragraph summing up my mother’s deficiencies.

What I remember from that shrink’s written summary is that “the patient” did not seem “to be able to clearly distinguish between right and wrong.” 

Mom’s suicide attempt when I was 11 years old rent the family neatly in half. Me and Dad were on one side of the divide. My two younger sisters and Mom were on the other.

It should be no surprise that our sense of “family” today (both parents are deceased) is shaky to non-existent. My mother and I never fully healed the rift between us until she died.

We were restrained and civil to each other in public. In private, we were two lions circling and sizing each other up for the next attack.

I eventually learned there wasn’t anything all that special about our family or our circumstances in my childhood. We were certainly not as “special” and “gifted” as my mother wanted us to believe.

Our way of life was different from my peers, for certain, and vaguely bohemian to be kind. Code for chaotic. Mom reveled in her outrageousness and little social rebellions in our tiny little town. She actively curried our sense of being intellectuals and adventurers.

I often reflect on how similar but different my story is to many of my contemporaries.

Dad may have been screwing around but so were many others. “Boys will be boys, after all!” Mom got through her days by consuming a cornucopia of pills chased down with a generous helping of vodka.

But that wasn’t unusual. Lots of ladies from the Fifties sought emotional deliverance from “Mother’s little helpers.”

We were all raised in a society awash in the post-coital ecstasy of the post-war Fifties having climaxed by summarily screwing Hitler and his evil Nazis.

Thank God we were able to. The world deserved to celebrate that victory. But as often happens at unchecked adolescent celebrations, the world went rather to hell with it all. The Sixties fixed that.

So off I sail into my daily writing labors today on yet another unknown adventure. Destination set but how exactly to get there is uncertain. The goal is the eventual delivery of a manuscript that is worthy of becoming a printed book. I’m primed for adventure, stormy seas, and lots of hard work and soul searching. That’s essentially been my life.

As former US President Franklin D. Roosevelt put it: “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.” I believe I am more than qualified for my mariner’s ticket.

I truly believe I can master the roughest of seas these days. I have proven it.

Sick Stuff

When I was around 5 or 6 years old, I lived in the Sears catalog. I pored through it regularly and marveled at all the stuff on offer.

I remember landing on a pretty little red dress. I still recall it vividly. It was a sheer red fabric dotted with tiny and perfectly symmetrical polka dots. It had a standup collar and short sleeves. There was a long, ribbon-like belt that tied in the back.

I lusted after that dress. Which at six years old was about all I could do. You “normal” people out there might read that and say: “Why didn’t you show it to your parents and ask them to buy it for you?” You would only ask that question if you had a “normal” upbringing. Which I did not.

I now understand the function that clunky Sears catalog played. It was an escape hatch. It was a safe place to hide from the violence and unpredictability between my parents. It helped me imagine a better life than what I was living. One where I had pretty little dresses to wear that would be cleaned, pressed, hung up in my closet and always there. Waiting for me.

The reality I lived in was that there was shit in my ballet costume. I will explain. The parents introduced my sister and I to the normal rites of passage for little girls back in the day. Ballet was one of the biggies. After a year of playing around with ballet moves in a gym at the Y, we would apply all the moves we learned at our annual end of the year recital. Boy did we get excited> excited

In preparation, Mom would take us to a local seamstress to have ballet costumes made. We were measured up and down and across and around. The seamstress would nod sagely and promise my mother a fixed pickup date. I saw the fabrics that would be used to make my ballet costume.

It was to be created out of a stretchy satin fabric and constructed like a bathing suit in a teal-like shade. Green-y-blue (or blue-y green) with alternating layers of green and blue tulle acting as the attached skirt, or tutu.

The straps were a dark green satin ribbon. At the hip, two green leaf shaped appliques were meant to accentuate that a leaf was what I was supposed to be. I nearly fainted it was so beautiful.

Being in a different dance number, my sister had a pretty little white number. It was embellished in blue sequins in two straight lines down either side of her front. White satin straps on her costume. She was a snowflake. That hasn’t changed.

Mom took great pride in spraying our little black ballet slippers silver. I wasn’t ever sure why she did that. Our black slippers seemed fine and the silver an unnecessarily gauche touch. I doubt I was so analytical back then but merely saw the silver slippers as “odd.”

As time went on and the marriage and my parents’ mental health deteriorated, our home environment similarly declined. In around this time period, a new baby sister entered the picture.

She was cute and entertaining. Couldn’t speak right to save her life. As she was learning to speak, my middle sister and I would coach her on the proper pronunciation of words. To no avail. The words would come out garbled. We thought there might be something wrong with her.

One day I started looking for my beautiful ballet dresses to dress up the baby sister. Clothes were not usually hung up or put away in our house. So I headed to the closet, opened the door and started digging through the clothes on the floor. Then I spied it. The strap or tutu or some part of it caught my eye and I pulled it out.

And my nose wrinkled. My beautiful blue-green teal ballet costume reeked. When I looked in the crotch, I saw why. Dried shit. I nearly cried.

I can’t remember now exactly how I responded. Heartsick. Confused. Aghast. How could this happen to something so beautiful? Why was my costume ruined and not someone else’s? Why weren’t my clothes put away? I had no answers.

Turns out that potty training was another victim of my parents’ neglect and addictions. The routine parents put children through to teach them how and when to use a toilet was overlooked for my sister. For quite a long time. It would appear the use of diapers was missing, too. I assume she is potty trained by now. Except her mouth retained the same problem. I only know that, at the time and in memory, I was devastated.

I know how that experience and many others manifested in me as an adult. I am a bit paranoid and hysterical about my “stuff.” I think my relationship to stuff has morphed into an addiction. In an ineffective attempt to control what I have and how much I have and keep it safe, I have gone all together too far the other way.

Amazon replaced the Sears catalog. The wound is so deep I often can’t just buy one quality item, but must buy two or three “just in case.” I am determined that no one will destroy or take my property away from me again, by God! And if they do, I have a replacement. Right here! Somewhere!

That’s turned out to be some pretty dysfunctional and irrational thinking. It hasn’t served me well. Too much stuff. They are only distractions and obstacles to what I rally want. And worse, when I am stressed, my instinct is to shop. Buy something pretty. Make the bad thing go away. Show that I am not as broke as I fear. Spend money! That’ll fix it. Sheesh.

I am on the brink of offloading much of what I accumulated to make me feel safe. Those are the keys words here. Feeling safe. That is a state of mind. It has been hard won for me.

For someone with a trauma history like mine, it was a distorted coping mechanism I am trying to stare down. I don’t feel alone with it. It is a chronic condition for many and the marketing gurus tap into and exploit that vulnerabilty. And are they ever good at that.

I must get good at ignoring them. I also have some work to do to remind myself that “stuff” is not security. Even if you have a million dollars in the bank, if the core wounds aren’t healed, the money won’t matter. I am slowly starting to get that.

But it’s tough. My trauma training started early in life. When it is all you have known in your formative years, it is hard to change tracks. But I must. As I have changed and abandoned other dysfunctional and addictive coping mechanisms – booze, cigarettes, sex, collections.

This road to “perfection” is very long and tiresome. Maybe death is the big graduation party. Who knows? I only know that I have to recommit regularly to deliberately follow a path of peace, harmony and healing.

As my Newfoundland friends are wont to say, life’s a hard pull.

Mouths of Babes

I remember I liked going to church to hear “Jesus stories.” Jesus sounded like a nice man. And I liked that he seemed to get children. Or he didn’t want to see them suffer. Something like that.

Our elderly neighbor dear Reverend Oakley was always kind and approving of us kids, especially after we came home from Sunday School. I figured he was probably a good friend of that Jesus guy, too. Nice men tend to hang out with nice men.

Rev. Oakley was a war veteran and had a wooden leg. He let us knock our little fists on it and showed us the lower part. Rev. Oakley must have been very brave when he was a soldier.

I remember I loved singing in Sunday School. A favorite was Jesus Loves Me.

So I didn’t quite get my mother’s reaction when one Sunday after church, my sister and I pitched into an enthusiastic rendition of Jesus Loves Me for Rev. Oakley’s exclusive entertainment.

‘Jesus loves me, This I know, ‘Cause Old Oakley told me so” … We went on, “Little ones to him belong, They are weak and he is strong, “YEESSSS, Jesus loves me. YEESSSS, Jesus loves me, YEESSSS, Jesus loves me and then sotto voce and reverentially, of course, “Old Oakley told me so.”

It may have been my Uncle Scott’s fault.

He was a lovely man with a dry wit and frequently took it upon himself to teach us nursery rhymes.

A favorite went like this:

“Spider, spider on the wall, Have you got no brains at all? Can’t you see that wall is plastered. Get off that wall you stupid …… spider.”

Mom would “tsk, tsk” and my father would growl faintly and disapprovingly under his breath. My sister and I could not have been more proud than when we are finally able – word for word – to recite the whole spider poem that Uncle Scott had taught us. Uncle Scott was the best.

I long for the days of innocent wordplay. They seem unlikely to come again. Back then, there seemed to be respect for words and their power. To inform, to entertain, to amuse, or to confound. They were still largely innocent. At least they were to us kids who took such delight. in learning and reciting them. Which is silly to say, of course, because we were the innocents. We weren’t old enough to realize words could be weapons.

Memorizing poems used to be a thing in school. My mother used to recite countless poems verbatim. Such were the mandatories of her education. The Highwayman. The Charge of the Light Brigade. Others whose names have now escaped my memory.

For fun as teenagers, a bunch of us would sit around the living room with Ogden Nash books and read one or more of his poems at a time. Each poem was more humorous and delightful than the next.

Sounds archaic, doesn’t it? Today teenagers sit together anywhere and converse via texts. Language has been stripped down to its’ barest of bare bones. Which is a kind of code for decimation.

Perhaps that is why I cleave to my tale-telling posts. To defend the honor of words. To protect them from oblivion. To gently reminisce about Old Reverend Oakley and dear Uncle Scott.

Thankfully in holding up words, I am not alone in this undertaking. What will the world ever do if all the writers are gone?

Traction

Traction and where to reliably find it nowadays is much on my mind. In a world awash in information, blog posts, videos, video reels, and ad infinitum, how do we make the best and most informed choices now? Everyone has an opinion. they swear is the right one to follow. Everyone presents as an expert on something.

What should we read? What to listen to? What sources can we trust? Where do we find time to do anything, above and beyond what HAS to be done daily? How do we identify our gifts and what we are passionate enough about to invest our lives in? Even worse, how do we decide what is real and reliable?

This is not an exclusive problem for us in society today. But the complexity has definitely been ramped up. Ease of access to seemingly endless options on the internet seems to create illusions and false impressions. If everyone is led to believe they can (and should) become a millionaire before they are 30, it is frustrating and could be soul-crushing if you don’t reach that target milestone. It has the potential to imbue young people with a feeling of dissatisfaction about missing the boat. Widespread FOMO.

“Fear of missing out” is a real issue for many younger people and even mid-career professionals. They are putting off marriage and house buying and baby-making in greater numbers than their parents and grandparents. There is a burgeoning revival of all things retro. There is increasing comfort in looking backward rather than looking forward. Not because life is perceived to have been so great in the past, but because it is now so difficult to imagine what can be relied on in the future.

Teenage suicide is occurring at an alarmingly high level. Teenagers! Once marked by largely carefree days under their parents’ wing, it was expected to be a time devoted to seeding dreams, testing out love and sexuality, and taking part in the normal rites of passage in the childhood to adulthood transition. That so many precious young people are opting to get off the merry-go-round of life before it even starts should be an alarming wake-up call that our values are wildly out of whack.

I often wonder how character is being built in young people today. Our great-grandparents cut their teeth on life’s harshest realities. The need to survive trumped most other considerations. Our ancestors knew that if the cows weren’t milked, the eggs collected or the fields tilled, they weren’t eating. Back-breaking work to be sure but also the satisfaction of knowing that your fate largely rested in your own hands and on your own efforts.

In smaller, rural societies, everyone knew everyone else. There was a sense of belonging and community. And not online communities. But real communities with real people who baked real apple pies and built things with their own hands and met up in a sanctuary every week, for social reasons as much as for spiritual ones. I would argue the two are inextricably connected anyway.

I would argue that our social policies need to recapture the most positive elements of those times. Humans need each other. Somehow that message is being lost in the wake of new technological promise, widespread social fragmentation, and the breakdown of social cohesion.

Young people need to be protected and nurtured until they are strong enough to grow and survive on their own. They need a base on which to build and find the traction they need to propel them forward into their lives. Mass killings and rising suicide rates are dark proof that young people are being widely failed in that regard.

The pendulum of extremes in most eras eventually swings back to a more balanced and reasonable life-enhancing way of doing life. In today’s wildly fragmented environment, it is hard to see how a newly emerging society will find time to gestate and emerge with so many options to choose from. Social cohesion has largely evaporated.

Yet time and space for self-reflection and inner exploration are badly needed on a wide scale. That need makes sense of the abundant and divergent offerings of healing retreats and therapies. We all know we need help.

The availability of healing options is more a band-aid than a cure. Our society needs to move back to putting individuals at the center of our society again. Survival instincts must kick in as people feel the essence of what makes them human being eroded.

It may be time for a resurgence of the famous line that became a war cry for humanity in the 1976 movie Network. “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” Maybe when that war cry is expressed by enough people across society again, there could be a genuine shift towards leading a more collectively saner and equanimous life.

Just Come Back

Mental illness – to somewhat understate it – is a controversial concept.

I accept there are biological conditions that throw the brain and body seriously out of whack. I accept that anxiety and depression are real. I know. I spent a lot of my life there.

But looking back, the source of my mental distress was completely traceable. I was carrying around so much emotional pain that it squeezed out everything in me that was valuable. I didn’t have engaged parents. For their part, as long as I “appeared” to be doing well, their job was done.

And while dragging my pain around, I still had to create a life. First, I had to scramble to learn enough to get a job. Later it was imperative to make a living. I had babies to raise.

If I ever had a clear vision of what I wanted in life, I wasn’t sure what it was. My mother had soured me on marriage. I would say she was pathologically afraid of marriage given how hers had worked out. Worked out being a euphemism for disastrous long-lasting personal consequences. For Mom and for her children.

For Mom and many of her peers in the Fifites, marriage was a trap that heavily benefitted men. For women then – especially the bright and ambitious – it was often a prison. Conforming to the social expectations of the day, marriage often not only eroded a woman’s self-worth but subjugated her own dreams and needs in service to her husband and family.

Selfishness was akin to murder, rape, and incest for Fifties housewives.

The tragedy of women’s repressed dreams was explored in the movie Revolutionary Road. Starring Leo Dicaprio and Kate Winslet, they play a nice, young couple living in a Connecticut suburb during the mid-1950s. Kate hates where they have landed in life. The lingering memories of the adventurous and freewheeling life they once lived and planned to again is lost. She pushes Leo to move to Paris while they still have time. Plans are well underway when he gets a promotion and pay raise. Paris gets shelved.

Moving to Paris is a prison break for Kate’s character. They struggle in their marriage to come to terms with the disconnect between them in their hopes and dreams. For Leo’s character, it was good enough for his Dad – a career long company man – so it is good enough for him. As was common for men in that decade, his avenues for relief and distraction were far greater and readily available than for her.

By times, the scenes in Revolutionary Road play on the nerves like fingernails scratching on a blackboard. The low-key struggle of the cookie-cutter lives of Fifties suburbia suffocated so many. The show achingly shows the emotional roller-coaster and internal torture Winslet goes through. She effectively goes mad.

And her type of insanity was a normal response to a tortuous situation from which she had no acceptable avenue for escape. She was not the first trapped woman who had to fight for her freedom and sanity. She was also not the first victim who didn’t make it out.

As people are regularly pushed to their boundaries of pain tolerance, life is deemed not only miserable but devoid of value. The message they must hear is to hold on. Find something bigger outside yourself to believe in. Never give up.

“It’s alright to go insane. Just come back.”

Poor Bird

Missed my 3X Weekly Writers Group ZOOM meeting yesterday. I was wrung out. I slept poorly the night before. Woke up at 4 AM on Sunday morning. Sat down in front of the computer to make myself sleepy again. Got sleepy. Fell asleep and didn’t wake up until after the noon hour. Our group meeting starts at noon.

The bloody domino effect. I had been awash in nervous tension all week around a decision I needed someone to make in my favor so I could travel. The decision was not made in my favor. In fact, no decision was made at all. In any case, that nil decision completely upended my plans for this week, travel and otherwise

I am not 100% certain how to rebalance myself but it does seem like a “learning opportunity.” (Thank you, Oprah, for that emotional exit strategy.) I started by letting go of the outcome over which I had no control anyway. That was easier said than done. And it appears my psyche didn’t get the memo. Otherwise, I would not have been up in the middle of the night fretting and fitful.

So it goes. Now I have a brand new set of tasks ahead of me this week as I try to recover what I lost in losing out on the travel plans. So there’s that. Lots of busy work ahead.

After this is posted today, I have a 15-minute consult scheduled with KN Literary Services. I need help. They want money. Seems like a marriage made in heaven. KN Literary Services is the brainchild of author/publisher Kelly Notaras. Her book title is pure marketing genius. The Book You Were Born to Write. There is not a budding writer in the world who hasn’t frequently wondered if, and how, to scratch their book writing itch. Notaras nails it.

As a bona fide twenty-year veteran of the New York “big house” book publishing scene, Notaras is now embedded in what appears to be a mutually fruitful collaboration with the Hay House publishing company. My current focus is on writing a book proposal to submit to the Hay House Writer’s Community publishing contest (Deadline: May 5 or June 5, 2023) depending on the power of the procrastination phantasms. (I was looking in Merriam-Webster for an alliterative synonym for demons. Phantasms is way better than phantoms in this context, don’t you agree?)

I had already put off this consult with KN Literary Services twice. I feared I was not focused enough on what I wanted to write about to have that conversation. I feel I am clearer now but I expect they will tell me. I write a series of scenes dutifully each day, then save them to my computer in a file called “SCENES.” The so-called narrative “arc” of my memoir is building. Salty-sweet, let’s call it.

It is about the struggle of getting from where I was sprung to where I am now. A place of peace. That was the most implausible of dreams in my youth, but here we are. There is a whole literature devoted to society’s tendency to “blame the victim.” What I didn’t expect was to experience blame from a parent for violations that happened to me on my parents’ watch. My mother (my primary antagonist) had a number of memorable sayings. One I remember that is germane to this discussion: “It’s a poor bird that shits in its own nest.”

Maybe in writing this memoir, my mother was right. Come to think of it, Poor Bird isn’t a bad working title. At the very least, I can thank my mother for that.

One by One by One

At a staggering rate, I get at least one like a day on my blog posts. I am a humble writer so that is all the encouragement I really need. I have a modest number of followers.  (Hello, dear reader.) Were Mom still alive, I might have surmised that single daily “like” came from her. Not that she was a consistent fan of my writing. Quite the opposite. Mom recognized early on that I could string words together but she balked at what I wrote about. Usually some uncomfortable memory from my childhood in which she was a key protagonist/antagonist.

It felt like her public shows of support for me were more designed to keep me (and her) from looking bad in front of friends, neighbors, and colleagues. She was thoughtful that way. I came to believe her over-the-top displays of support had the same undertones as “methinks the lady doth protest too much.” Acknowledging to herself, as she must have, that she wasn’t there for much of my childhood. Her expressions of support in young adulthood were no doubt relief, as much as motherly pride.

In university, I once received an amount of money in the form of the curiously named Anonymous Donor Scholarship. I was convinced my mother was behind it. I could only speculate about her possible motives. Boost that girl’s resume/prospects. Buttress the child’s/mother’s deficiencies. “But,” she would assert. “I never interfere.” 

I was well-coached as a child in the absolute “necessity” of repressing my truth or feelings, especially about “bad things.” Not only was I discouraged from standing up for myself, but I was also coached into playing along with the hypocritical societal sleight-of-hand that we lived in. All “to keep the peace” and “keep up appearances.” “Because it could hurt someone.” And “someone” usually meant the perpetrator.

My mother had odd ideas and choices in who she was driven to protect and a perplexing empathy for the underdogs she championed. It was clear that her own children did not merit the same degree of protection as an arms-length transgressor. How could she have been? They were HER children, after all. Invincible and special. They didn’t need protection. They were independent and self-reliant little girls. From a very early age.

Mom may not have been all that different from her parenting peers. The “keep the peace at all costs” message targeted girls and women – with the crystal clear sub-text – “… even if it kills you.”  In the Fifties, many women did just that. Poet Sylvia Plath’s unhappy ending at the open door of a gas oven is one of the decades’ more prominent victims. But in other ways, Mom was her own special creation.

All of this subterfuge and narrative shaping falls under the general category that we had drummed into us in the “Fabulous Fifties:” “Don’t spill the beans.” I won’t divulge more just yet. I have recently pledged to keep most of my emerging stories close to my chest until they “is” fully-growed. But flawed Fifties child that I am, I am happy to report that my memoir will be full of beans. Lots and lots and lots of beans.

Feelings Check

Occasionally, I like to trot out and test-drive the emotional impact of my writing on real people. I’ve had a range of reactions. Sometimes the reader is amused, aghast, or apoplectic (Well, not really the third one but the alliteration was too tempting to pass up).

Does the writing elicit the response I was going for? Laughter. Tears. Outrage. Or does it elicit another type of response? Confusion. Disinterest. Boredom. I would die of mortification if my writing caused someone to die of boredom. Honest to God, my worst fear. Or one of them anyway. I would never recover.

That said, I have shared snippets of my intended book right here in this blog. The Ladies Lunch piece? Remember that. A cousin was good enough to write to let me know that the scene rang true to its time and place. She also said my words were “vibrant.” I liked that. Another dear author friend told me that another blog post I wrote elicited “two titters” out of a possible three. That is, it made him laugh. If you understood this guy’s sense of humor, you’d know what high praise that is for my post.

And then there is the person with whom I shared some of the darker issues that will be explored in my memoir. She almost reflexively advised me that “she worries” I will be at risk in the family of deepening old wounds or aggravating new ones. I’m not disagreeing with her. But what I know for sure is that keeping the truth and deeply scarring emotional wounds hidden is much more damaging and dangerous than hurting the perpetrators’ feelings.

That particular response, unsurprisingly, came from someone in the very society I struggled so hard to escape. It spoke volumes about the collective worldview we were raised in. “Be nice.” “Don’t tell.””Never say shit even if you have a mouthful.” I’ll say more about that worldview later. Much more.

Ladies Lunch

The memoir progresses. This vignette shines a light on the hypocrisy-ridden social class into which Mom had married. In a small, mid-century Maritimes town, she could be a shocking, therefore, slightly suspicious character. Yet fitting into Fredericton society was my mother’s highest ambition. But she was determined to do it her way. The path that country-born little girl chose to achieve that ambition, which she eventually did, was fraught and not without considerable collateral damage. Mom’s strategy in navigating those social strictures could be clever if alienating – both for her and for her family. In a bigger city, she might have been featured in a woman’s magazine as a rising feminist. But this was the Fifties and the widescale feminist movement was many years away. Mom had to make do.

“Once she had married a lawyer, Mom became a de facto member of the local “lawyers’ wives” club. These women’s only social connection was what their husbands did for a living. In the Fifties, that was considered enough.

The lady wives all arrived shortly before lunchtime toting their contribution to the potluck in Pyrex casserole dishes. The crisp cotton knee-length dresses they wore were usually set off by a dainty string of pearls. Their huge diamond wedding rings were on full display. Lunch would be set up on a buffet side table and then each lady served themselves before sitting down.

I imagined a Jello aspic with ham and marshmallows as part of the menu. After lunch, several of the wives, who lived to play cards, would stay to smoke and wile away the rest of the afternoon playing bridge. Aside from the aspic, gossip was the real main course.

One day, the discussion moved front and center to the outrageous and indiscreet affairs of Edith A. who was one of their own. She was married to powerful local lawyer Francis A. who was generally regarded as a not-nice guy. There was considerable sympathy for her deplorable marriage as he was not only not nice but not terribly attractive. It seems Edith sought comfort outside her marriage to balance Francis’ emotional – and it was said – sexual inadequacy. The ladies cooed and clucked at length about “that Edith” and her indiscretions. “A disgrace,” they all said, nodding in agreement “Her poor children. Putting them through all that. And so publicly.”

Mom and Edith were once close friends. That is until Edith slept with my father some years later and the friendship became difficult to sustain. But at this lunch, Mom was still on friendly terms with her.   Mom felt a rush of protectiveness and outrage over the ladies’ savaging her dear friend, Edith. After listening quietly for a time, Mom piped up and directed a question to one of the other lawyer’s wives. “Ann,” she asked innocently. “How many times a week do you and Pat have sex?”

There was a collective intake of breath at the table. The lawyers’ wives were clearly aghast and embarrassed. Picking up on their shock and disapproval, Mom looked innocently around the table with a perplexed look on her face: “I’m so sorry. Did I say something wrong? Everyone was talking so freely about Edith’s sex life, I thought there wouldn’t be anything wrong with discussing our own.”

Mom neither smoked nor played bridge. However, I guessed that wasn’t the only reason she didn’t stay after lunch to smoke and play cards with the other lawyers’ wives. Or perhaps it was because her ham and marshmallow aspic wasn’t quite up to snuff. Hard to say.