Musings on...The Marvelous Ms. Mom
We all become our mothers eventually, if we are lucky
With Mother’s Day approaching I presented my children a card to sign. I put my mother’s card in front of them and made the distinction "This funny card is for my mother, she likes funny cards, just like me, hint hint” My son, always so intuitive asked, “Is that why you like funny cards, because of Grandma?” I answered “Probably, I get my sense of humor from both of your grandparents, but definitely Grandma. The sound I remember most from my childhood is laughter.” My son replied, “That’s nice” and I began to ponder. That short conversation made me think about how our parents, and for the sake of this article, days from Mother's Day, what my mother imprinted on me.
My son is correct; it is very nice to have laughter as your primary memory, and particularly my mother’s laugh. My parents both have wonderful sense of humor that covers the whole range-they are equally amused by the low and high-brow, but my mom is a great laugher and very easily amused. She was our best audience, more than happy to appreciate the silly performances my brother and I presented her. She laughed right along with us at our movies, cartoons, and commercials. If we thought it was funny, so did she. She has a giggle; a guffaw and an outrageous belly laugh that ascends into a high-pitched cough when she cannot breathe between the snickers.
I definitely inherited her love of laughter. I consider laughter my favorite emotion, and I do realize it is not actually an emotive, but a response to an emotive. I can laugh all day at almost anything. During the pandemic, I was furloughed while my husband worked from home. After years of working opposite schedules, we were in each other’s space all day, every day. My husband said that while he was on his innumerable Zoom meetings, he could hear me in other rooms, laughing aloud at whatever I was watching or reading. He said it amused him, because he didn’t realize how I could spend hours laughing. He thought that my new career should be as a sitcom audience member, getting paid to laugh. It is not a bad idea; if you have any connections, let a sister know. I am an embarrassment to my children. I enjoyed the cartoon movies we would see together too much. They insist that I laughed louder and longer than the children, the actual intended audience. I get it from my mother, once I get laughing, it's not only the first chuckle, but then there’s the rebound laugh from reliving the moment. We essentially begin laughing at how much that made us laugh. The ability to easily access joy is a great legacy.
My mother had a trio of tables in our living room. The living room for you millennials is the room in a house that you never actually lived in-you only visited for special occasions, such as Christmas and when company visited. These tables were the bane of my existence. The main structure of the table was wood, the bottom level was inlaid with a mirrored panel, the top was clear glass. As confusing as it is to explain, it was more difficult to clean, which was my job. She would send me off with THREE different cleaners, each part requiring a specific process. The wood cleaner would smudge the glass and the mirror. The glass cleaner would destroy the wood (which I always suspected of being a falsehood-it was made from a tree that stood in a forest, but it couldn’t take Windex?) The wood was cleaned with a soft cloth, the mirror with newspaper, the glass with a separate cloth from the wood. I’m getting mad just typing this right now. I hated cleaning those tables so much I didn’t own wood furniture for a decade after leaving home.
Even greater than my ire for the tables, there were the towels, also my responsibility. They had to be folded and placed in the linen closet to exacting specifications. They were folded in half vertically, then folded in half horizontally, then stacked neatly upon each other, arranged by color. The key was all the corners and edges had to line up perfectly to get the beautiful stack she decreed. I can’t tell you how many times she inspected my work (on the tables and the towels) and made me begin the process again. I’m not going to say that I felt a kinship to Christina from that infamous scene from Mommy Dearest, but...I really felt her obsessiveness bordered on psychotic. Of course, that was only an internal conversation, you did not vocalize such things back then.
Nevertheless, her exactitude and excellence bore into my personal DNA. I didn’t realize that I had become a Towel Terror until I married a man that thinks folding and rolling are the same thing. Although my husband willingly helps with laundry, I have spent the last 20 years refolding his futile attempts of replenishing the linen closet and drawers. C’est la vie; if you’ve been married long enough, you eventually realize who’s better at each thing. Folding is my gold medal sport. I did have a small moment of retribution on my mom’s last visit. She was nice enough to fold laundry. When I pulled the towels from the basket, I noticed the corners and edges were moderately askew. I took the offensive towels to her room and asked “Is this the way we do towels now?” “Is this how you taught me?” She asked “Was I really that bad?” “Yes, Lady, you were a general in an army no one signed up for”. We laughed at the absurdity of it all, but what I took from my mother’s militant stand on her home and property is to honor your possessions by taking care of them. The cost of an item is not relevant: she even put wood protectant on the silly cutting board shaped like a turkey that I made her in woodshop. Value what you have and the work that it took to attain nice things. I admit to my own brand of obsessively merchandising my closet, pantry and shelves. It does bring me joy to see neat stacks and organized piles. I hear her voice as I pick up my clothes and hang them properly, everything that you own has value because you are valuable.
My mother is a great cheerleader, almost obnoxiously so. She is an aspirational up-leveler. Whatever our interests, my mother made us believe that we could achieve the Olympic equivalent status. When I took French as an elective, she told me I could study at the Sorbonne. When I wanted to play piano, she told me I could go to Julliard and be a concert pianist. When I played softball, she said I could go to the state championship. My coach (nor my talent) agreed with her, but when I watch the television show The Goldbergs, I recognize my mother in the supreme smother Beverly. My mother is guilty of a few of those embellished sweaters, but they also share the same intensely rose-colored mom goggles when looking at their children. I am very sure that she told my brother that he could get an Atari scholarship before such things even existed. As a child, her aspirational optimism seemed a little cringey. I thought to myself, "Look Lady, I just want to be normal, I just want to play softball”, but such love and unabashed adoration from her was the gift of confidence. I like to say that her words were our wings. Sometimes we were Icarus-prone, but we still caught some pretty good height. Even when we failed, we couldn’t fall far, we just bounced off the cushion of adjectives and superlatives that she had placed around us and moved on to the next sport/craft/hobby.
My mother was a teacher for 40 years. She taught most of city and she remembers many of her students by name decades later. I was known as “Ms. Woolfolk’s daughter” and her students loved her. When I go to my class reunions or connect on social, her former students, my classmates, inquire about her first. I heard her speak of them; she was so proud of their accomplishments. She thought they were funny and silly and sometimes exasperating, but she always had love in her voice regarding them. She was concerned when she knew someone hadn’t eaten breakfast or was having issues at home. After 40 years, my mother retired. She said that the system, the students, even she had changed. She thought it was time to go when she couldn’t be herself in the classroom anymore. Sit down girl, four decades is a good run in any industry.
Post-pandemic I took a job that within two months, I realized was not a good fit. The company and the culture were wonderful, the money was good, and I did the job well, but inwardly I knew this was not my life. I needed every day to be different, I needed more of a challenge, I needed to be on a constant learning curve. I was not fit to sit in a gray cubicle day after day. I tried very hard and fought with myself for weeks: I was good at this job, the money was good, I wasn’t a quitter, but I remembered my mother and how she sat at the dinner table late into the night grading papers. She laughed at their witty essay answers, she fussed if they moved too fast, missing an easy question. She took so much joy in her career. I thought of what I was presenting to my children. I knew they could see and feel that I wasn’t in love with my work. I would never encourage them to work at something they hated just for the money, so why would I let them watch me die on the vine? I knew my mother was right about when it was time to take your exit. If I couldn’t be myself, I had to go. So, with an It’s not you it’s me tone, I gave my notice. If you’re going to do something for 40 years, or in my case, even 4 months, you have to show up as your best self.
My mother is an aesthete. She was always concerned with our sensory environment. She spoke in colors and textures. When she talked about ideas, she would reference different eras and faraway places. Once, my next door neighbor wanted to braid my hair. My mother instructed that she wanted it simple in the style of Cleopatra. Are you kidding me, I was seven, but our neighbor didn’t know either. This was pre-pre-internet, pre-Google, so she gave us another reference: Peppermint Patty. You want my hair like a round mint patty covered in chocolate? Still not making sense, she drew us barbarians a picture of a bob.
This is the way she spoke to me as she introduced me to interior design and fashion, not in formal education, but just always talking about her loves and ideas for our home and how we lived. She was obsessive in her details and seemed to find inspiration all around her. There was a very lengthy discussion of the fabric for reupholstering the living room recliners. The final choice was a tactile tweed with a thread of teal running through it. I now know it was Chanel-esque. That thread coordinated with the oversized teal pots on the fireplace hearth, that held cattails. That idea came from a field of cattails we passed on the way from school one day. My brother and I ridiculed her mercilessly-we thought a décor item called ‘cattails’ was the silliest word imaginable, and one day we got in so much trouble for having a sword fight in the family room with her precious cattails. There was NO laughter that day.
My ability to understand and collect inspiration began in our family room, on the coffee table. In our house, there was Jet, Ebony, Essence and Vogue. Tell me you’re melanated without telling me your melanated... The first 3 magazines are prerequisites, the subscription is sent in at the mortgage signing after you check the box “African-American”. Vogue was the outlier, but my mother was an outlier. She had (and still has) great cosmopolitan style. She was an explorer of the finer things in life, and I was riding shotgun. The 3 sisters (Jet, Ebony and Essence) were about our culture, and Vogue was about the world.
Through those pages, I saw women living wonderfully colorful and elegant lives. They taught me about hairstyles, nail polish, how to build a career, along with cultural events and social touchstones. For me, beauty and culture came in the form of words and pictures from those glossy pages. She even gave me my own subscriptions to Teen, Seventeen and Young Miss. I still think in headlines and short snippets, full of alliteration. When I was a teen, I would tear pages from fashion editorials by Richard Avedon, Peter Lindbergh and Irving Penn, taping them to the wall directly opposite my bed. I named it my Wall of Beauty and anything that spoke to my artistic and sensitive soul went there. I would drift off to sleep with those stylized images on my brain. No posters of teen idols like New Edition or Michael Jackson for me, I preferred Naomi and Christy, wearing Chanel and Versace, shot by Annie Liebowitz. I collected articles by thought leaders like Andre Leon Talley and Susan L. Taylor and although I didn’t have the maturity to understand all of their adult speak, I was entranced by their use of language and world view.
I’m still a collector of monthly ideas and inspiration. I have more magazine subscriptions than I have days in the month to read them, but I consider them my modern day encyclopedias. I stack them around the house like decor, I carry them in my purse just in case there’s a down moment to catch up on the world. I can directly pinpoint that predilection to my mother, watching her observe and absorb her immediate world and morphing it into décor and fashion.
The laughter that permeated my childhood was silenced by divorce in my first year in college. The peel of laughter was replaced with the shattering of glass, as it seemed my life crashed full stop, then it featured the muffled arguments, and the forced pleasantries parents try in front of their children. Divorce is rough and if there were books to help you through, they were not on the bookshelves in the early 90s and therapy was not the available resource as it is today. After the emotional split, there came the sordid subject of money and splitting of assets.
My mother had a great career, but my father had the more profitable one. I watched my mother rebuild herself from the inside out. Before there were girl bosses, there were independent Avon and Mary Key consultants, and my mother chose the latter, and she was great at it. She took her love of beauty and makeup and went to work. She built a team of like-minded and many similarly situated women and together they built their own little dynamic empires. She channeled her love and decor and made creative gift baskets of her products and sold her butt off. I saw firsthand what a focused and empowered woman looked like.
In 2009, at the impetus of the Great Recession, I lost my job with a well-known pharmaceutical company. My manager was fired on a Wednesday, and he fired us Friday. Two-thirds of our family income disappeared. Initially I was hopeful, I had never had a problem getting a job and my resume sported all the big corporate names I was assured were linchpins to a life of financial success. I had done everything the world told me to do, but they were wrong. When the economic ground shifts, the old rules no longer apply. Days and weeks became months of unemployment and the safety nets we saw in the COVID pandemic were nonexistent in this 2009. We were very much on our own. I went through a month of functional depression, I watched a lot of Law & Order, then I dug deep and kicked myself in the pants. What do you have? What are you good at? I asked myself.
I had a closet full of work clothes and no job to wear them. I had been an early adopter of Ebay and became a very proficient shopper. Maybe I should try to sell something, I thought. I went to the library (!!!!) and found the book “Ebay for Dummies”. (The Dummy books were ingenious for the time). This was only 14 years ago, but it feels prehistoric. Not everyone had internet access at home, phones didn’t have great cameras and Paypal was groundbreaking commerce. There were no groups or courses to take, it was like the wild west of learning, literally tumbleweeds. But I figured it out. I cleared my closet, then my children’s closets, then the garage, then I cleaned friends closets and sold their clothes on commission. My mentor even gifted me bags of clothes to sell to help me (teach a man to fish...) Then I ventured out to my favorite vintage stores and Goodwills. I knew clothing, I knew labels (thanks Vogue, Essence and Ebony) and I began flipping clothes. I had a side hustle before they were sexy. Little, by little, I grew, and the money helped us stay afloat. One day, I received in the mail a certificate from Ebay. An actual paper certificate. I was a Top Seller. At the time, that meant my monthly sales exceeded $1,000. That was a very big deal then-this is before Instagram, paid ads, Shopify, Reddit, Pinterest or any apps to help you push product. It was just you and your Ebay store. That certificate was proof that I inherited my mother’s resilience and scrappiness. The ability to wipe yourself off after a stumble and figure out a way to keep it moving. The tenacity to figure out your own personal USP, put your head down and forge a trail on unwieldy and unfamiliar territory. That certificate from Ebay was my pink Cadillac.
My dad told me once that I had my mother’s work ethic and self-motivation. He said that he had never known anyone that was as hard working as my mother. He obviously knew her first, and in many ways better than me. I take it as a supreme compliment that he sees me as her mirror image.
My daughter laughs at me all the time, exasperated by my “extraness” just as I was with my mother. I told her that many of the things we argue about, she will eventually embrace. She doesn’t believe me, but I know it’s true, because I didn’t believe it either. Oscar Wilde offered this in the Importance of Being Earnest “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.” As much as I generally enjoy Oscar’s wit, gleaning the best parts of your mother is not a tragedy, it’s actually a triumph.
What is the favorite trait or quality you inherited from your mother?