Originally published in Oregon Quarterly
Spring 2006

To be the author of your life, you have to
keep writing the book.Today is my mother’s birthday. She would have been 81, but that number wouldn’t have meant much to her. She saw age as more a moving target than a fixed statistic, a number she was free to calculate and recalculate depending on circumstance. Early on, she added three years to her age to compensate for graduating from high school at fifteen. Later she subtracted four when she married a younger man. Every few years from then on, she felt compelled to recalibrate up or down as her children grew older and her sister grew younger. From her forties on -- whenever that was -- she defaulted to Jack Benny’s life-long assertion that he was 39. So had my mother lived, I am not sure which birthday we would all pretend she was celebrating today. All I know is that I wish she had been around to celebrate it.This was a woman who was, it seemed, genetically programmed to live a long and healthy life. Her mother died quietly in her own bed when she was almost 94. Nanny, as we called her, was self-sufficient and energetic. She was mobile, continent, sentient and had all her own teeth. Her biggest health complaint was dry eyes. One evening she told my aunt – the one who grew younger every few years -- that she would be “seeing Leonard in the morning.” Leonard was her husband, my grandfather, who had died sixteen years before. My aunt thought Nanny was finally losing it. As it turned out, Nanny was not senile, she was prescient. That night she died in her sleep, and the next morning I’m betting she did see Leonard. I imagine they met up in heaven (Nanny definitely went to heaven) and sat down together to eat their usual breakfast of a half cup of bran flakes submerged in orange juice.Nanny’s grandmother – this would be my mother’s great grandmother – was known to all as Old Oldie. Old Oldie had snow white hair down to her waist which she wore in two braided loops on top of her head. Family legend has it that she awoke before dawn each day, descended three flights of stairs to the kitchen and baked biscuits for breakfast. One morning, she didn’t. She had died quietly in her own bed of no particular illness. She was 102.My mother, on the other hand, died in a strange place, strange hands changing her diapers, strange hands moving her, back to front, side to side, strange hands feeding her spoons of pureed food. She died choking on her breakfast. She had forgotten how to swallow. She was, according to her birth certificate, 77 years old.But my mother’s life was not just shorter than it should have been; it was narrower too, a cramped life, a life that imploded on her. I’ve spent a considerable part of my own adult life trying to figure out hers, but I still struggle with the basics: What choices did she have? What choices did she make? How much or how little was she the author of her own life? If a mother’s life is a lesson to her daughter, what was my mother trying to teach me?She was part of that Depression Era -World War II generation of women, twenty years too young to take strength from Alice Paul, twenty years too old to model themselves after Gloria Steinem. It was the generation of women who were told, when it suited the country, that they could do anything: drive a truck, run factory equipment, bring in the harvest.My mother, who had studied clothes design at Pratt Institute, was hired as a draftswoman to design the wings of war planes. Every morning before she left her apartment, she used her sharp eye and her even hand to draw stocking seams on the backs of her bare legs. Eyebrow pencil worked best. All the women did it when they could no longer buy nylon stockings in the store. Nylon was needed for parachutes, for the boys. My mother had her own set of precision tools she brought to work in a small black leather case. She sat on a high stool in front of a big, slanted wooden table and did important work every day. She was good at it. She got bigger assignments. She was promoted several times until she became head of a twenty-person department. Then, in the fall of 1945, she was fired. The war was over. The men had come home. Thanks, gals, now get back where you belong.My mother listened: She quickly married a returning GI and settled in for the long haul. By the time Betty Freidan’s Feminine Mystique hit the bookstores, my mother was serving her second term as president of the local PTA and serving her family four-course home-cooked meals every night. She had two children, a tract house in the suburbs, a husband who doled out allowance to her every other Thursday night and what I now know, in retrospect, was the beginning of a drinking problem.I didn’t love my mother as much as I admired her. She was prettier and smarter than all the other kids’ mothers. She was different, too, worldlier. She played the piano; she painted still-lifes in oil on canvasses she stretched herself in the basement, hammering together her own frames at the hobby bench my father never used. She designed an entire wardrobe for my favorite doll, hand-sewing lines of snaps on all the enclosures, embroidering designs on the yokes of the dresses, finishing the inside seams. She designed and sewed all of my clothes, from Madras bermudas for summer camp to a spaghetti-strap, crimson brocade for the junior prom. She designed the costumes for school plays. She refinished furniture, wove baskets, tiled counters, rewired lamps. She was a Block Mother and a Girl Scout leader. She recorded books for the blind. She was busy all the time and unhappy most of it.I think she was too smart and too creative for her life. It chafed. She had energy. She had wit. She had style: the silk kerchief tied at the throat, the high heels she wore even to go food shopping , the straight skirts with kick pleats, the single eyebrow raised, a trick she perfected as a teenager after long hours in front of the mirror. She had beautiful eyebrows, high and arched, never plucked too thin. She had beautiful eyes, too, a clear, pale blue, with dark lashes that needed no mascara. When she raised a single eyebrow, she looked theatrical, sophisticated, European – and she knew it.During the war years, she had been an independent woman. When she wasn’t designing airplane parts, she was flirting with French soldiers at a hang-out on the lower west side of Manhattan called Pierre au Tunnel’s (the tunnel being the Holland). She spoke beautiful French. She learned to drink Pernod. She wore bright red lipstick and dabbed Crepe de Chine behind her ears. She had dreams starring herself and tall, dark, handsome men whose faces she couldn’t quite make out.But by the early 1960s, her hang-out was the A&P on Wantagh Avenue, and her spirit was dampened by a decade of suburban isolation. She cooked, she sewed, she changed the bed linen every Monday, clipped coupons and went food shopping every Wednesday, ironed on Thursdays, waxed the kitchen floor on Friday and polished the wedding silver once a month.For a while, a long while, she made efforts to hold on to who she was. Those were her most active days, my growing up years, when she taught herself to be a gourmet cook. She learned boeuf bourguignon and coq au vin from Julia Child. She perfected scampi, created a garlic-studded pork loin that I still dream about and occasionally spent all day pounding veal into paper thin scaloppini which she then wrapped around chopped proscuitto into individual rolls sewn closed with needle and thread before being braised in Marsala. She taught an adult education class in dressmaking. She finished the New York Times crossword puzzle every day.But no matter what she did, it was not enough to sustain her. Her restlessness showed in her short temper and her long silences, in the way she seemed to grow colder, more detached, less focused every year. I don’t know what her dreams were, and I am not sure she knew either, at least not in the way women of later generations have known that they wanted to be veterinarians or cops, wanted to live in San Francisco or train for the Olympics. She just wanted excitement, I think, and romance. She wanted to be Bette Davis. She wanted Paul Henreid to put two cigarettes between his lips, light them both and pass one to her. Instead, she found herself behind the wheel of a DeSoto waiting to pick up her husband at a Long Island train station, living in a split-level, standing in line for her “house money” twice a month. And so, slowly, over the years, she began to forget who she was. She stopped painting. She stopped playing the piano. The dressmaker’s dummy went down to the basement, and the sewing machine got picked up by a Salvation Army truck one day. She stopped doing projects. She stopped volunteering. Instead, she sat in the club chair by the picture window reading Sidney Sheldon novels, chain-smoking Tareytons and drinking vodka straight, no ice, all afternoon.She was living a life she chose by acquiescence rather than decision. She stayed because that’s what women of her generation did, because she didn’t know she had other choices, because she was selfless, because she was scared, because she was lazy. She stayed out of love. She stayed out of a failure of imagination.The truth is, I don’t know why she stayed.I left. I went to college. I came west. I started a career. I started a family. And then one day, many years later, when I was a mother three-times-over myself, my father called to say that my mother had been in a traffic accident and hadn’t stopped and didn’t remember when she got home that there had been an accident. He heard the details from a cop who knocked on the door of the house to serve my mother with a warrant. A few months later, my father came home in the late afternoon to find my mother sitting on the bed still in her nightgown holding a pair of socks in her hand. She couldn’t remember what they were for.By the time I saw my mother, she didn’t know who I was, and I hardly recognized her. She had always looked fifteen years younger than whatever age she was currently admitting to. She had always taken beautiful care of herself, her hair tinted and coiffed, her nails manicured and polished, her clothes understated and well-chosen. She loved coppery earth tones. When she came west to spend the last six months of her life with me, she was a thin, wrinkled old woman wearing a green polyester warm-up suit. She had rheumy eyes and bad breath.It’s too bad our lives are not like made-for-TV movies. In the movie made of the last six months of my mother’s life, we would have both been more lovable. She would have been sweet and addled, dreamy and silent. She would have patted my hand not knowing who I was but knowing that my hand needed patting. I would have cried a lot and hugged her and forgiven her for not being who I wanted her to be and understood, finally, wordlessly, who she was. But it didn’t work out that way.Four years after her death, I am still trying to understand her. I don’t know if there’s a link between her life and her disease, but there is one thing I am sure of: She began to lose her self long before the disease made it official. She let go of life, piece by piece, while she was still in the midst of living it. I wish I knew why. Maybe she was buffeted by history, encouraged to live big, then forced to live small. But she shared that experience with an entire generation of women. Were they all as unhappy as my mother? Maybe she chose the wrong spouse and stayed in the marriage for the wrong reasons. Maybe she had the ability to dream but not the ambition to make the dreams come true. Maybe she didn’t understand that to be the author of your own life, you have to keep on writing the book.I’ve inherited my mother’s paintings. Old Oldie, sitting at a kitchen table holding a bowl looks out over my writing room. There’s an Italian street scene hanging in the family room, a French guy in a beret holding a bottle of wine in the living room, Ponte Vecchio in the upstairs hallway, a domestic still life in the kitchen. I don’t understand my mother. But I do understand her paintings. They are confident, colorful and unafraid.