Matriarch Tales #9: Grace Elizabeth Part 3 – by Saga
These tales are the stories I remember about my maternal
ancestors: my great-grandmother, grandmother, aunts and mother. The stories may
or may not be accurate; family stories seldom are. But they have influenced me,
often without my knowing. I set them
down here to remember and to honor these unsung women. To refer to blogs about
other generations of the matriarchs, please go to https://consortiumofseven.blogspot.com/p/c7-posts.html
and scroll down to Wednesday’s list.
Grace, looking at her George
It’s an interesting exercise to write one’s matriarchal
tales. I highly recommend it for the mysteries it reveals (though answers are
hard to come by when they are all no longer with us), the threads one discovers
from one generation to another, the odd details that come up in memories, and
the opportunities for forgiveness that present themselves.
At this point in my mother’s life story, she is only 41, so
we have 54 more years to go. It’s quite a saga (and yes, that was deliberate). Here are the bits and pieces that come to me
as I look back on her middle years. Like
many women, she was living through menopause and adolescent children at the same
time. And talk about multi-tasking! She
worked full time, had an active social life with my father and her women
friends, cooked a full meal every day so that the family sat down together
seven days a week, and was helpful in many ways to our friends. She was also sharp-tongued, critical of me
and not exactly generous with praise, disappointed in my looks, and often angry
at the sexism she endured in the business world.
It is no wonder to me now that she was reluctant or unable
to praise my looks; we looked so much alike that strangers always thought she
was my sister. She had never learned to
like herself or her appearance, though she certainly attended to her
professional wardrobe and “look” very carefully. But to tell me I was pretty or
attractive would have meant that she thought the same of herself.
Her anger was
understandable to me even in my adolescence. She was often at a low boil in
reaction to the sexism in her professional life and at the fact that my father
was not a steady provider for the family. I remember her rage when she tried to teach me to understand
percentages. I had absorbed the notion that girls could not understand math –
and she was a skilled and insightful statistician. She eventually gave up and
my father explained it all to me in about two sentences. That did not go down well.
While she was attending to how well my brother and I were
doing in school, who our friends were, what we were reading and where we were
going, she seldom sat down to rest. She made all of the curtains and draperies
for our home, painted walls and woodwork, wallpapered several rooms, recovered
chair cushions for the dining room, and learned to reupholster furniture to
save money. When my friend lost weight,
she altered his trousers until she had to advise him to buy new ones because,
as she said, he had “one pocket all the way across his fanny.” When the same friend turned up around dinner
time most nights of the week, she had already cooked enough to include him. Only
recently did I learn that his family didn’t have enough food. I think my mother
knew as much and happily fed him despite her constant worry about having enough
money for necessities.
When my boyfriend’s father left his family suddenly and his
mother was taken out of state for medical care, it was my mother and father who
watched over my boyfriend and his brother. She made sure they had groceries,
did their laundry, and more.
Grace had a special bond with Jan, the daughter of her
lifelong friend Betty. Jan was a little rebellious,
which means she was a normal teenager who questioned parental authority. She was a talented visual artist, and
pretty. I described her as Elizabeth
Taylor with big brown eyes. I was none
of those things, and I had a bond with Betty because she understood my big
imagination, my love of performing, and my sensitivity (which irritated my
mother no end). They often joked that they should have traded daughters. Betty
and been my mother’s friend since they were 5 and 6 years old, and they had
shared secrets, triumphs, sorrows and the minutiae of daily life. We spent many
weekends with Betty and her family in Kokomo, Indiana. I remember my mother baking
cobblers from fresh fruit that Betty and her husband grew and the adults
talking and laughing late into the night.
With her friend Betty
In the late fifties, my mother took a part time job at the
winter holidays for two or three years, wrapping gifts for customers at a
department store. She never complained about it and, in fact, took delight in
creating pretty packages. It must have been exhausting, but it seems to have
been a way to satisfy her need to create, as watercolor painting would do in
her eighties and nineties.
My mother was invested in her work (she wouldn’t have called
it a career, but that’s what it was) and came home with stories from the
office, which she sometimes told through gritted teeth. She was paid far less
than a man in a similar job, never promoted the ways she should have been, and
her opinions were denigrated until a man repeated them, in which case they were
deemed brilliant. Her immediate boss recognized her abilities and common sense
and advocated for her to replace him when he retired. He told her that she would
have been his replacement, but she wore “the wrong kind of pants”.
Long before
the women’s movement, which arrived in our midwestern city in the late sixties
and early seventies, she was a vocal feminist, though discreet about where she
vented her frustration and to whom. “Never
underestimate the power of a woman,” she would say often. It was almost a
mantra for her. That and, “Always trust
a woman’s intuition.”
Like her mother, Grace was psychic, which may have
contributed to her frequent anxiety. In any case, I never heard her criticize
or belittle another person’s intuition. She was also tied to the natural world. She grew flowers with
enthusiasm and knew the names of most flowers and trees. She pointed out the
beauty of nature at every opportunity and taught my brother and me to stop and
notice the beauty around us.
In about 1960, Bertha Rachel could no longer live alone in
her big boarding house and the family came together to make some decisions. The solution was that we would move into a
larger house with a “mother-in-law” suite of sorts and my uncle Bartlett would
contribute financially to make that possible. I knew it was difficult for my mother,
though I don’t remember her complaining much.
She would often roll her eyes at something my grandmother said at the
dinner table, but there was remarkably little tension.
Until one day when someone called my father on business. He
was a manufacturer’s representative and worked from home. My grandmother
answered the phone in his office for some reason and told the caller, “He’s not
here; he’s probably out drinking. He has a drinking problem.” Bertha’s animosity toward him, and her
dementia, became more and more evident. One day she leaned over the stair
railing on the second floor and dropped a suitcase, clearly intent on hitting
him from above. Fortunately, she missed, but only barely.
My mother was delighted when I married at twenty, having encouraged me to marry my high school boyfriend because, as she put it, “You’re not much to look at and you probably can’t catch another boy.” This was in direct contradiction to her frequent statement that “Men are like streetcars; another one will always come along.” When our two sons came along, she seemed to be a little baffled about how to be a grandmother. I knew then that she had very little contact with her own grandmothers. She had a particular bond with our firstborn and came to realize that grandmothers could just enjoy the role and didn’t have to worry about doing it all correctly. In her later years, she formed a deep bond with my younger son as well.
Oh how my mother loved her husband George. They were at odds
about money and the lack thereof, but always affectionate. She hated
television, she said, but what really irritated her was that he would become
engrossed in the TV and ignore her, or at least not hear her clearly as she
talked from another room. They were devoted to one another in their own ways.
Their 25th wedding anniversary in 1965 was a big celebration with a
party in their new apartment.
George and Grace on their 25th Anniversary
(Their children and children-in-law are in the photo behind them.)
Early one Saturday morning in 1968, my mother called. “I think you’d
better come,” she said, “there is an emergency.” My father had wakened her,
saying, “Gracie, it hurts,” and fallen dead before her. He was 51 years old. She reacted to the
shock with instant and forceful practicality. She called his doctor, then the mortuary. She organized the funeral, donated his clothes to charity the day after he was buried, and went back to work. Her doctor prescribed “something
to take the edge off”, so she didn’t grieve overtly for a long time. But the grief was
there nevertheless, and she was devastated.
Her sister, Alice, was not only a comfort to my mother, but an example of how to be a widow as well. My mother made a new life for herself despite her sorrow. It was a long time until the sparkle in her big blue eyes returned.
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