Woman of the Year

If my mom were still alive, she’d be 100 years old this August. Born the same month and year that the women’s suffrage movement gave women the right to vote. As a child, I saw her as the happy homemaker of the 1950’s. As an older woman, looking back through the telescope of time, I see her as a product of her era, and much more complicated.

Evelyn was born the eldest child on a small farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Her mother, my Memaw, only went through the eighth grade and never learned to drive, but she raised a large family in a farmhouse full of love and a few mice. When my mom was thirteen, her last two sisters were born a little more than a year apart. With the final birth, Memaw got blood clots in her legs, and before blood thinners, was bedridden. One of Memaw’s cousins helped during the day, but before my mom went to school, her chores were to concoct a daily supply of homemade formula, and bath and dress the babies in front of the wood cook stove, the only heat in the home.

As much as she loved children, and had plenty of practice with babies, my mom was never able to have her own, so after she’d graduated from college and worked for General Electric for ten years in their appliance test kitchens, I was adopted.

One night while visiting Memaw’s farm, my cousin and I looked at my mom’s old yearbook from Virginia Tech and laughed at the dated hairdo’s of the 1940’s. Neither of us realized that what we held in our hands was V.P.I.’s first yearbook that included individual pictures of female students. Even though women had been admitted since 1921, most were expected to major in the newly formed department of home economics which my mother did.

During high school, I considered home ec a boring elective where you learned how to measure flour, make an egg sauce, or gather a skirt. Off to college in 1971, the year Gloria Steinem founded Ms. Magazine, I poo-pooed my mom’s major as a glorified certificate in professional housekeeping.

But after she died, I found a portfolio from a tailoring class that contained examples of every kind of pleat, dart, lapel, hem, and buttonhole imaginable. As a child, I never thought my mom creative or artistic although she made almost all my clothes except underwear. For cotton panties and undershirts, we went to J.C. Penny’s at the new shopping center. The department store downtown was for Girl Scout uniforms, Christmas presents, and window shopping for ideas for back-to-school outfits.

Then it was off to the fabric store to pick out material, notions, and a pattern if she needed one. While I was at school, my mom would clear off the salt and paper shakers, the floral arrangement, and the candle sticks that always adorned the dining room table, and lay out the fabric, carefully pinning the pattern on top to make sure the grain lines matched up with the arrows on the crinkly pieces of beige tissue paper.  

Every night until the garment was done, I fell asleep to the nick, nick, nick of her sewing machine on the other side of the wall in our teensy guest room. This is how she manufactured dresses, shorts, skirts, blouses, nightgowns, pajamas, tailored coats, even my first two-piece bathing suit. She made the blue and white stripped bedspread that covered my trundle bed along with blue and white stripped curtains trimmed with appliqued daisies. And whenever our old couch looked a bit tired, she gave it a new skin with a snazzy new slipcover and matching drapes. None of these projects looked homemade. They were the normal masterpieces I’d come to expect.

As I grew, we became a design team. I would draw a sketch of the satin pajamas I saw in an old Katherine Hepburn movie, and she would make them a reality. After watching Dr. Zhivago together, she made me a coat like Julie Christie’s with a satin lined hood trimmed with fox fur that I wore traipsing across Syracuse University’s frigid campus.

When I was a young woman with my first home, she made me a queen-sized quilt out of all the scraps she’d saved in the bottom drawer of the guest room dresser. I can look at it now and recognize the green calico I picked out for a blouse because the print contained figures that looked like leprechauns. I see the royal blue cotton she used for a blouse with a sailor suit collar that I wore for my buck-toothed, pig-tailed, fourth-grade picture. I see the lavender and turquoise kettle cloth of my favorite dress from high school, and the black and white madras she used to make me the halter-top sundress I wore for my Phi Beta Kappa induction in college. 

As my children grew, she again recovered the old couch and donated it to our new home. For Christmas she made matching nightgowns and bathrobes for my little girls and their dolls. When my little boy only wanted to wear camouflage, she made him multiple pairs of camo sweatpants and T-shirts.

I never thought my mom and I were alike. She tried to teach me how to sew, but whenever I sat down at her machine it tangled the bobbin or broke a needle as if it knew I were an interloper and not its master. I would gladly spend my extra pennies on an avocado, a food I didn’t know existed as a child. She still made meatloaf according to her Betty Crocker recipe.

We were from different blood. She was a brunette. I was a redhead. Different generations. I grew up a baby boomer and turned sixteen the summer of Woodstock. She grew up during the great Depression and came of age with WWII. My cultural mantra was do your own thing. Her motto (no one had yet heard of a mantra) was make do and serve others.

But looking back, we were both stay-at-home moms when our children were small. And both teachers after our kids went to middle school. Although I taught English and she taught life skills (the new term for home economics), our favorite students were both brand-new immigrants.

She liked to entertain, and so do I, but we both valued a few close friends as our confidants. I never thought her much of an intellectual, but she was a whiz at bridge, president of her garden club, and  valedictorian of her hometown high school.

I sit at my desk reminiscing about my mom, as summer draws to a close, and my mind’s eye fills with a scene from the year I went away to Girl Scout camp at Hidden Lake. I see my ponytail among the other fifth graders in my unit. We’re standing together as the sun dips behind the mountain, and the color guard takes down the flag and folds it into the tight triangle we all learned how to make for a merit badge. And as the evening damp settles on our shoulders, the whole camp of girls sings “Taps” in unison, the song my mom taught my brownie troop.

“Day is done, gone the sun,

From the lake, from the hills, from the sky.

All is well, safely rest, God is nigh.”

If in her hundredth year, my mom could look down from heaven, and see me writing this, I’d want her to read that we were never so far apart, and in this moment of celebrating women heroes, I miss you so!