IF YOU REALLY KNEW HER, YOU WOULD BE STUNNED

If you ever met my mother, the first thing you would be struck by is her outstanding beauty.  Although you might be tempted to keep this observation to yourself, it would be best if you did not.  She is deserving of praise even though it makes her uncomfortable and references to her attractiveness always do.

But if you say nothing, the temptation would then be to form judgments.

Based on her native refinement and the way she navigates a room with the casual grace of royalty, you might be inclined to believe she came from privilege; that she was groomed from birth with the high carriage and genteel protocols of affluence and that her beauty was merely the inheritance of pampered breeding.

And if you settled on these assumptions, you would be doing yourself, and her, a great disservice.

To believe that the ease with which her countenance greets the world has come as the result of a life sheltered from struggle and loss would be a mistake, not only because it is false but because it would limit your admiration to her physical beauty alone when what she truly deserves is your esteem for her magnificent character.

When they first meet her most people, particularly other women, are intimidated by her comeliness and because of this, many are reluctant to get to know her further.  It is human nature to close our minds
when we feel threatened and to keep at bay those people or situations that prompt us to look more deeply at ourselves or that challenge our insecurities to move toward a deeper place of self-acceptance.  

But if they took the time to get to know her, she would have eventually dispelled their false judgments and let them in on her history;  of the many illegitimacies that danced around her confidence from a very young age taunting her with the false perception that she will never be good enough.

She might have told them of the social disgrace endemic to being born in a welfare hospital in the early 1930's to a seventeen-year old mother and the abandonment that came six years later on the day her mother abruptly left to pursue a singing career in New York City, leaving her in the sole care of her father; a man too young and unprepared to cope with the sudden loss of one and the full inheritance of another.

My mother, grandmother and grandfather 1938

The story would continue as you'd hear her describe the day her father took her on what she believed was a Sunday drive only to deposit her at St. Mary's orphanage where she was calmly instructed by both he and a resident nun to get out of the car and go play with the other children in the yard.

She would have stoically restrained her tears and gone on to tell you how unprepared she was for this second abandonment by the father she adored as she stood in the doorway of a small playhouse and watched in quiet panic the tail lights of his car disappearing behind the closing gate at the bottom of the long drive.

All these many decades later recalling the dark wound of those fearful nights she can still hear the muted weeping of the others; their small bodies burrowed beneath the chaffing weave of institutional linens, longing for the scent of home and the softness of mother.

She would have gained your admiration as she told you that she survived this pitted longing by telling herself that she was different from the others because one day her father would return for her.  She would be reclaimed and remember how it felt to be loved.

But you would also learn that this would take years and that in the unforgiving time between forsaken and redeemed she was remanded into foster care in order to fill the fiscal and emotional loss in homes where happiness had fled in the wake of the Great Depression.

There she was met by indifference by resentment or by desperation; at one time required to wear the clothes, sleep in the bed and play with the dolls of a beloved daughter taken too soon in death.  Of course, she could never be an adequate replacement and having failed in her surrogacy, was punished all the more for her passive insolence.

She did not cradle dolls in those years, passed as she was from one bleak fireside to the next; she was much too busy cradling hope.

When she was twelve you would have heard that her father finally came back for her.  He took her to his home and to his new bride who, scarcely older than she, held a deep resentment for this pretty, budding adolescent and a hard jealousy for the close bond she had with her dad.

From the time she first arrived until the day of her high school graduation when she was told by her stepmother that she was to leave the house the following morning to go live with her estranged mother in New York City, she was battered by verbal derision.  Daily she was reminded how unworthy, unattractive, ignorant and unnecessary she was; that she was a burden and would never amount to anything.

Whatever chores she carried out were not done well enough and whatever comments she made were simply further proof of her inherent stupidity.  In spite of her father's love for her, he could not overcome his inability to handle conflict and come to her defense and so in her mind she remained not good enough.


The next two years she spent living in New York City grasping at the sordid hem of her mother's massive preoccupation.  Always the afterthought, she nevertheless remained attuned toward goodness and affection and would describe how she followed the decadent whirl of her mother's chaotic life as a cabaret singer with her one desire being only to be recognized and loved by the mother she hardly knew; a mother whose undeterred self-absorption allowed her to walk away in the middle of the day those many years before.

Claire on the job

A somewhat acceptable relationship between mother and daughter would come but never at it's fullest and not for several decades.

Jack and Diane

But she went onto  Cazenovia College, went on dates, fell in love with chemistry and music and, eventually, with a handsome, athletic English major at Dartmouth.  They were married within two years.

At this point in the telling, she might stop, preferring to demur behind the beauty that was her family and  her fifty-seven years of marriage to the only man she has ever truly loved and who returned that love with unquestioned devotion.  Together they proved that abandonment cannot exist within such sacred fidelity.

1960

She will go on to list the accomplishments of her four grown children and of the eleven grandchildren of whom she beyond proud.  What you will not hear about from her is the unconditional love she offered to all of them, of those sacrifices in the name of motherhood, which became the dressing for her deepest wounds.

Christmas 1970

Neither will she tell you that her interior design skills are legend and that every home the family occupied has been photographed and featured in top-selling magazines and architectural jounals.

And if you are out with her in public, she will not notice the perpetual glances and nods her way as she beguiles onlookers with her beauty and grace, but she will have a humbled response to any praise and be quick to reciprocate with a sincere and kind word of her own.

If you got to know her, soon you would know that she is a helpful neighbor, an extremely creative and talented designer, a generous friend, a devoted wife, humble beyond expectations and a committed mother who puts absolutely nothing before her love for her family.

Mom 2010

So to anyone who would meet my Mother and be prompted by envy to assume that because of her radiant appearance she must be shallow, conceited, indulgent or cocooned by the arrogant genetics of aristocracy and not worth getting to know, I suggest you take another look.

Because before you would stand a remarkable and beautiful woman of gracious forbearance, unqualified love and unfathomable courage; a woman who is and always has been far more than good enough.