When you think of your mother, what images or memories come immediately to mind? For me, it’s a short, dark-haired woman in an apron, working in the service of her family: serving up goulash, sprinkling clothes (and then wrapping them in a plastic bag to refrigerate them before ironing), kneeling before the oven to clean it (with some vile ammonia mixture that once burned her lungs).
I also see her leaning out the window to yell at 5-year-old me for sucking my thumb. “How’d you know?” I asked, and she said, “The Blue Fairy told me.”
That dang Blue Fairy! She would always rat me out, but she also came into my room at night to paint stars on my ceiling after I’d fallen asleep — or so my mother said — so how could I hate her?
Another memory I have is of being about 4 years old, sitting on the staircase, and having my mother descend in white gown, heavily decorated with sequins. She was going to some formal event with my Army dad, and I was stunned at how beautiful she was out of an apron. “Here comes the bride,” I managed to get out, the only words of appreciation I could muster up. “Thank you,” she said.
I remember surprises about my mother, too: the time I came home late from a date, turned on the light in my room and found my mother sitting on my bed. She showed me some clothes she’d bought for me, and I said thank you, and then she went to bed. It was a mysterious incident for me: My mother didn’t often buy me clothes, and she certainly had never sat in the dark waiting to show them to me.
My mother had good ideas. She showed me how to make card houses, and little chests from matchboxes. She gave me her best jewelry box to bury my mini-turtle in, and she showed me how to keep a baby bird alive by feeding it raw hamburger. She read voraciously, absolutely loved books, and passed that love of literature on to me. She was also a good writer, though she never pursued it as a vocation or even avocation. (My father once said to me, in a kind of wondering way, “You got her job!”)
When I grew older, I began to wonder about certain aspects of my mother’s life, and I asked her about some of them. Her baby daughter who died at 8 months of age: I asked her about that when my own firstborn was 8 months old. “How did you go on?” I asked, and she said, “You just do.” The time she was sent away to live with childless relatives when she was 8 years old: It wasn’t uncommon during the Depression years for families to farm out children they couldn’t afford to feed. My mother’s relatives treasured her, gave her violin lessons, bought her a porcelain doll the likes of which she had never seen. But every day, she sat on the porch steps waiting for someone to come and take her home.
My mother died a year ago, and there are things I want to know that I’ll never be able to ask her. I am left to speculate, to imagine things. I suppose that’s true for many of us. But did you ever ask yourself, “What would it be like if I were to write my mother’s story, including her deepest feelings?”
Elizabeth Crane based her latest novel, The History of Great Things, on just that, trying to tell her mother’s story, and then she went further: she alternated the book with chapters of her mother telling her story. The result is fascinating, moving, funny and wise.
Crane will be speaking at the Hemingway Museum for Writing Matters, an author series I founded with the idea of presenting hand-picked authors to our wonderful, engaged, intelligent, and wildly attractive audiences.
As in all Writing Matters events, there will be flowers and wine and food (this time it’s MOM food!) and compilation CDs made by Val Camilletti to be given away. This is not your usual book signing, but rather a real evening out, based on the idea that … well, writing matters.
Writing Matters
Elizabeth Berg’s ongoing series of appearances by writers you may not know well but really should get better acquainted with continues this Saturday at the Hemingway Museum in the Oak Park Arts Center, 200 N. Oak Park Ave.
Saturday, April 23, 7 p.m.
Tickets $10 through brownpapertickets.com/Writing Matters or at the door