Mrs. L

So I decided to try to remember the mothering models from my own childhood, as I keep thinking about the way all the mothers I know are perceived by all the children I know, and why, and how this will change as the children grow up. With really small children, I think most adults are sort of lumped together in the category of "adults," with some seeming nicer and some seeming stricter and some of no interest whatsoever. But as kids get older they are increasingly aware of parents, their own and other people's. I remember being around eleven or twelve and starting to assess the mothers of my friends, the mothers in particular, as unfortunately many of the dads were just shadowy figures who showed up for the big play and stood awkwardly at the back of the gym in their suits and expensive shoes.

And I remember the way some kids talked about their moms, too. I had a friend who was embarrassed by hers, and I knew this, even then. I had a classmate whose leaned on her too much for companionship, and I knew this too. And on one summer weekend right around this time I learned that one mother of my acquaintance was a drunk, a scary, mean one who passed as a regular mom at school pick-ups and other occasions, and I think this really hit home the notion that there was a whole range of mothers out there, and that I was extraordinarily lucky in mine.

I do feel a little perturbed when I think about some of the mothers I idealized at this time. They tended to be quite unlike mine, much as some of my friends around this time were quite unlike me. There was one in particular; I'll call her Mrs. L. She was young--she was probably just over 30 when I met her, if that, which is unfathomable to me now. She was blonde and pretty, like my mom, but flirty and trendy, unlike mine. Her husband, too, was extremely young, and both parents were sporty and outdoorsy in a golf and skiing kind of way mine were not. In fact, those are the qualities that were valued in this household: physical attractiveness, youth, sportsmanship, skiing prowess. There was no practicing the piano, or participation in the town library reading competition. Come to think of it, I am pretty sure neither the mom nor the dad had gone to college, and education was not a particular value either.

I thought Mrs. L was glamorous and gorgeous and fun. I can unwind a whole scene from a winter Saturday morning before we all went skiing when she opened a giant can of Spaghettios with an electric can opener and blithely spooned it into colored bowls for her four children and me, while wearing pale pink ski pants, her hair like the Barbie heads her daughter had upstairs: white blonde and styled in a flip. In what was hardly a coincidence, neither Spaghettios nor Barbies were found in my household, so a mom who looked like one, serving the other, for breakfast, before skiing, must have seemed like an alien creature to me. In fact, in my reel of this memory my mouth is a little bit open, in shock and awe, I suspect, as I watch Mrs. L flit about in her pretty kitchen.

Anyway. I am no Mrs. L. I am my mother's daughter, like her in some ways, unlike her in others, but formed in her household, under her care, exposed to her values and ideas. I wonder if Lily and Annika will have Mrs. L's and who they will be, and what they will see in them that they don't see in me, and--I guess ultimately what all this wondering is about--what kind of mothers they will be themselves, some day, if they choose to be mothers. And what I--and the work of these days of raising them--will have to do with it.