Thank You Mom, by Martha Thomases – @MDWorld

November 1, 2014 Martha Thomases 0 Comments

My mother would have turned 90 on Sunday, if she had lived.  Instead, she’s been gone for more than 34 years.  I’ve lived more of my life without her than with her.

Okay, that’s not entirely true.  My mother is always alive in my head.  In my dreams, she tells me I’m eating too much.  Because she told me always to buy anything I could wear in a size 6 (and she couldn’t know about the ensuing vanity size inflation in women’s clothes), she has cost me money and closet space.

Sometimes her words threaten to come out of my mouth.  Even though I remember how hurtful it was to hear her say the same things to me, sometimes I want to tell my son to have children already, or get a job.  I don’t even believe these things, but feel I should say them out of loyalty and allegiance to  her.  For the most part, I am able to fool these impulses by saying them to my cat.  The cat reacts about as positively as I did when they were said to me.

So my mother was a human, with failings and insecurities.  That’s not what I want to talk about.  I want to talk about the ways she set an example and inspired me.

Ada Lasser grew up in one of the only Jewish families in Jamestown, New York.  Her father was a CPA, one of the first the state, and he opened the branch for a New York city firm owned by his wife’s family.  My grandparents were Republican in the small-town, upstate New York way, the kind you might see in an Andy Hardy movie.

 

Ada wanted to fit in, to be one of the blonde Swedish girls in her class, to celebrate Christmas and be like everybody else.  At the same time, she wanted to go to New York and be Dorothy Parker, writing for The New Yorker  and being the wittiest woman at the table.  She moved to New York after college, but she never wrote for publication.  Instead, she married my father, had two children, and ended up in Youngstown, Ohio.

My dad was always a Democrat, but my mom stayed true to her upbringing, voting for Nixon in 1960.  It was the civil rights movement and then the war in Viet Nam that changed her.  Not only did she change her political party, but she changed her life.

My mom marched and wrote letters to the newspapers and her Congressmen.  She became active in the American Civil Liberties Union, eventually becoming president of the local chapter.  She helped young men avoid the army by helping them become conscientious objectors.  It’s difficult to describe how radical these actions were in Youngstown at that time.  People thought she was a Communist and a traitor.

Not all of the things she did were overtly political.  She volunteered at the local old age home every single week.  She worked in her garden and had a bridge club.  She subscribed to Mad magazine.

In other words, she really lived her life, good and bad.  She read the newspaper (getting a subscription to The New York Times in Ohio, which was very exotic in those pre-Internet times) and watched the news.  She paid attention and made up her own mind.

From her, I learned the same.  I know there are those who read my columns and think I’m some sort of knee-jerk liberal, but that is either because I don’t express myself properly or they can’t think outside of their own boxes (or maybe both, or maybe something else entirely).  My world view, like yours, is shaped by what I see, the stories I hear from people different from myself, and a plethora of media.

Mom and I had our share of epic disagreements, hurt each others’ feelings and pissed each other off.  That’s what goes on between mothers and daughters (and mothers and sons, and fathers and daughters, and fathers and sons).  Still, when people talk about “family values,” they don’t usually mean a healthy skepticism of authority figures, or a feeling of kinship with outsiders.  Those are things I learned from my mom.

With her gone, I probably developed a closer relationship with my father, for which I’m grateful.  I have three fantastic step-sisters and a gaggle of great nieces and nephews, none of which I would have had if my mother (and their father) had made it through the summer of 1980.

Life is like that.  We get what we get.  I know some people say that everything happens for a reason.  I don’t agree.  I think everything happens.  All we can do is make the best of it.

Media Goddess Martha Thomases has, in her lifetime, actually worn a size 2.  She regrets that not only can she not say that anymore, but that her mother didn’t live to see it.