dress the part

I was in high school in the 80s when my mother wrote this.

This money order is not just a Christmas present. People your age need to dress appropriately. As your mother, I’m going to add some advice about spending this money–you’re probably going to get a lot of advice. Ignore everybody. Make yourself happy. This is a “Do yourself a favor” gift. Spend it all in one place, on one thing of 5 things–I’ll send more sedate amounts from time to time that I’ll expect you to be sensible about. Don’t be sensible. Have fun. BUY what makes you feel good. Ignore your grandmother. I spent years wearing clothes I hated, especially pants that didn’t fit. To get on in life you’ve got to dress whatever part you pick for yourself. But the part you pick must be entirely your choice, not forced by circumstances. I love you.

Thanks for the unicorn. He adorns my living room–the only Christmas thing there. A very famous philosopher/ psychologist said that “Adults need fantasy more than children” (because they’re so far away from their dreams). So you’re in exalted company.

Thank you. Have your own brand of fun. (Listen to me, I’m your mother.)

My mom rarely had money to spare. She either had no car or a terrible car, and her refrigerator usually contained lettuce, cheese, grapes, apples, and milk. She also kept potatoes, tomatoes, melba toast, and coffee.
For meals (when I visited) we went to my grandmother’s. With the money I bought boots even though I lived in Florida. I loved those wildly impractical boots.

my new boots

Now, of course, that unicorn I bought my mother is mine. Adults will always need unicorns.

So, anyway, do you dress the part you’ve picked for yourself?

A Writing Individual

I love NaNoWriMo and people who do things like this.

things of the future

My mother write this on October 11, 1989, three days before my birthday and thirty-five days before she passed away.

You may be 21 now, but don’t forget the things of your childhood–they keep you young forever. … The other things are just stuff, some old, some new, you might be able to use. … The gift is for the things of the future–may you have a long and productive and happy one.

What things of your childhood do you keep?

ideal mother

On December 28, 1984, my mother wrote:

I love you very much, Marta. It’s probably hard to believe sometimes–I know I’m difficult as a person, and nobody’s idea of “Mother”, but I never learned how to be anything but myself. I wish for you the same.

What is everyone’s idea of “Mother”?

leave home

us--last picture together

A few days after I left for my freshman year of college, my mother wrote me this story.

When I left home for the first time, I was 20, and it was 1964. The first Beatles record had come out that summer, and I took the Silver Meteor with my sister Susan up to D.C. She was a candidate for the FBI, and I went on after a few days up to Massachusetts. I left at misty dawn from Union Station, having to call myself a cab, and being cool about ordering cabs by that time. But I had such a heavy suitcase I couldn’t hand;e it, and porters were being phased out, contrary to my mother’s memories of Southern Hospitality on the Silver Meteor.

My original idea had been “early Hippie” in that I wanted to take off with my guitar and blue jeans. I was, however, a wimp, and my mother’s idea was suit, heels and stockings, with suitable dress for teas in Massachusetts. Mother won. My alternative, admittedly, was to run away on my own, and since I wouldn’t know how to go about that now, I certainly didn’t then. Anyway, from dawn to dark I rode that train. Past the sea, and the marshes of the New England coast. Actually, they came after New York City, which I went through, pulling into the underground station, echoing and dark and totally foreign, and then over the CIty on the elevated. I crossed the City over tenements, and the City lay under a yellow cloud, always in the distance.

I was scared and starving, and I didn’t know how to order sandwiches. They had vendors on the cars, passing up and down, calling their wares. You wouldn’t think getting a chicken salad sandwich would terrorize a twenty-year old girl.

It was raining in Boston, and dark, when I arrived. The conductor, or someone in a blue uniform, helped with my suitcase, with much to say. Think of a street character on Cagney and Lacy. Edie was right there, and I fell into (or onto, considering our relative heights) her arm and broke into loud tears. Edie was cool. She took me to a nice restaurant and fed me the amount of solid food a young person can comfortably put away, and then we went home.

Home was on the curve of a calm, reflecting river, willows on the bank, the turning autumn trees drifting into the wood smoke that hazes New England.
…
Anyway, as least I’ve made some positive motions towards getting somewhere. I decided that if you could make such heady decisions at 17, I had no reason to be a wimp at 42.

When was the first time you left home?

It’s your choice.

mom

In June of 1985 my mom wrote me this.

I have thought long and hard about a lot of things. Since you have never really asked me for anything, nor reproached me for anything, your requests have a great deal of weight with me.

I’ve always loved you as your mother, but let me say, I admire your person very much. You are becoming an individual I think people will take note of, and admire. These will also be those who do not like you, or admire you; and it is inevitable, if you are to be a true person, that will be true. The more true you are to yourself, the more there will be those jealous or not understanding. It’s a choice you make.

How true are you to yourself?

you know the unicorn is there

In April of 1989, seven months before she passed away, my mom wrote this.

You’ll probably call this weekend, but I wanted to ask you how your reading went. Talk about being on the spot!

To just say “I enjoyed your poetry” sounds rather insipid. I wish I were not your mother so I could write you a real letter about how I felt about what I read. Well, can’t do that, but I can explain it like this as a parent. As just an emotional response, which I happen to think is the only proper response to poetry, I want to keep my own images, What gave rise to the words is in your own brain and soul–as a parent, trying to get a glimpse of the person behind, underneath and through the visions one’s child appears to be, it was like: if you walk through the woods and you hear the following hoofbeats, but you can’t see the unicorn for the trees. And yet, you know he’s there. And one day you see a flash of white. And you know he’s there.

What is ever the proper response to reading anything?

you can judge

On my 19th birthday, my mom wrote me this.

I really appreciate your sending me the copies of your poems; I know that took some courage. I enjoyed them, as poems. As a mother, of course, I have to wonder about contentm but I work at not doing that. Parents are never the ones to ask if your work is any good, especially if they don’t know much about the art form you’re working in. What’s good in writing to me is the unique turn of phrase that also gives one that Aha! sense–the feeling of, “Of course, it’s just like that.” You do both. You have the knack of eliciting the visual response and feeling without belaboring the point with an unnecessary description.

Not that you’ll ever be satisfied with what you write, but you have to be your own best, and worstm critic. You’ll look back on what you wrote in college an be embarrassed by some things and pleased with others, if you’re honest with yourself.

What really discourages me in the creative fields, esp. art, is the judgment of the fashionable. “They” say it’s great, it’s art, or it stinks, but the real judgment going on is “it’s different”. Being different is not a criterion of quality.

I like your work altho it sometimes makes me feel uncomfortable. You have such a bald way of saying things–it’s not always pretty, but it does seem truthful. You can judge the integrity of your work.

How do you judge the integrity of your own work?

no apologies necessary

my mother--the photo used by the newspaper to announce her engagement to my father

When I was 18 years old, my mother wrote me this.

Something you said really struck me, and I wanted to reply to that. It was when you said you knew you’d been a lot of trouble. Well, yes, you’ve been a lot of trouble…a lot of pain and sorrow and just plain ain-in-the-ass. Point being, my dear, that that is what children are. No apologies necessary or expected. When one takes on the responsibility of children, then one takes on all kinds of pain. It’s ahrd to learn; hard to teach [life]. And, let’s face it, parents become all kinds of pain too. Isn’t that so? Are you really going to tell me that your parents aren’t sometimes the biggest pains of all?

Love calls for sacrifices of all kinds including (or especially) peace of mind. You can’t love without being concerned, even if it doesn’t always show. Indeed, I spend a lot of time trying not to be or show as much concern as I feel.

You were and are everything a child is supposed to be. Please don’t ever apologize for being what you are. If you did some things that made me disappointed or dislike you, well, can’t you reverse that and say the same thing of me (or your dad)?

I like you as a person, as much as I can ever know of you, that is. And you’re right, something you said once long ago (as far away as last summer?), that your dad and I trusted you and you didn’t want to abrogate that trust. You’re right, we do trust you. Not in the sense that we think you’re never going to make mistakes or do something we dislike, but in the sense that you’re ok as a person and we can let you go.

The gods know, life can sometimes be a terrible struggle, and sometimes you’re going to think you’re not going to make it. Sometimes you might even get irriatated when someone tells you how strong you are and how you’re going to be OK. As if the strong don’t suffer as much as the weak! Come 40, when you’ve got to look back and reconsider, I hope you can look back with less regret than I. But human beings being what we are, I doubt it. Your regrest will not be mine, but uniquely yours, and I can tell you now, no one will ever really understand the losses you feel. That isn’t what’s important–that someone else understand. It’s only important that you try to understand yourself. It’s then that you’ll come closest to understanding your parents, I think.

Do you understand your parents yet?

reading the past

Since I’ve decided to write my mother’s novel, ahem, I’m rereading her letters. Letters she saved from other people and letters she sent to me. The novel she started is, after all, veiled autobiography. My mother once wrote me,

A la M [the ex-boyfriend], I just decided to go ahead and write a novel, as I told you, and to hell with whether it’s a good book. The grammar and spelling will be correct, and I know how to write a clear statement. It will make me feel better, does make me feel better about a lot of things. It’s amazing how you have to fictionalize things that happened in real life because they don’t work on paper. So, if you ever get to read this tome, don’t take it for truth. There will be germs of truth there, of course. You’re not in this one, except for some personality traits or body language for my heroine.

I hope I know what I’m doing.