Stories My Mother Never Told

I don’t remember my parents telling many “fun” stories about their childhoods. Or maybe it’s just that the less than fun stories are what stuck in my head. There’s dad talking about how his sister’s Christmas cat decided to relieve itself all over his presents under the tree one year. There’s mom talking about the two dresses she had during high school, or coming home from first grade and getting slapped for saying “Hello.” Her Italian-speaking mother thought she was cursing.

So I was delightfully surprised to run across yearbooks on Ancestry.com and get to know my mother in her junior and senior high school personas. I may never remember her reading except for newspapers and when she read to my brother and me, but she loved reading and golf! (The golf I do recall, simply because it seemed in the 1960s so out of character for a poor immigrant kid whose father was literally paid in pennies so it would seem like more to have even known about the game.) And this woman who never once do I remember pursuing exercise just for the sake of exercise belonged to the hiking club. Who knew?

In the photos, she still has that somewhat shy smile I usually associate with the class outsiders. Yet, she was the secretary of her homeroom at old Rockford High. But the biggest surprise was that I inherited, according to the yearbook characterization, her view of the world and how to interact in it—“a cheery smile and pleasant word to all.”

The lesson I most learned from my parents was two-fold. Life isn’t always the way we wish it would be, but our approach to it can make whatever it is better or worse. They tended to choose better—their lot was better than what their parents faced. They wanted ours—my brother’s and mine—to be better yet. My parents, for all the bad times and good in their own lives, managed to raise survivors—children able to cope with the world they found and do things within their power to make it the world they wanted. Not a bad epitaph for two Depression-raised outsiders.