Too Late for Conversation with My Mother

It’s too late to have the type of conversation that I would have liked to have with my mother. And who knows if that would have possible anyway.

I have seen photos of my mother as a wistful little girl, as a laughing teenager posing with her girlfriends, and as a young mother overflowing with love for the two small children in her arms.

Maybe I could have used those photos as a basis for talking to her person to person. Or maybe not.

When prompted, Mom would agree to tell me some stories about her childhood. I got the impression that she grew up in a happy family. Not so well off financially. But not living in a tenement like my father’s family. Her parents owned their own house and for a while, before the Depression, owned some additional rental property.

Mom had a lot of respect for her father, whom we all called Papa. Like Tevya, in Fiddler on the Roof, Papa had fled with his family from a Russian shtetl because of the pogroms. His two older children, my Uncle Harry and Aunt Esther, were born in Russia, while Mom and her younger brother Sol were born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For some reason, maybe because of the paranoia of the McCarthy era, no one ever mentioned the fact that two of the children were born prior to the family’s immigration. In any case, I think that Harry and Esther probably arrived in the United States when they were still very small children.

I thought my mother was lucky to have not one but two brothers AND a sister. I had only my brother Paul. He would play with me sometimes. But not when his buddies were around. I had the impression that more siblings would have meant that I would always have playmates available.

Papa had also brought over his own father, who lived with the family and looked a lot like Count Tolstoy. Papa’s brothers came, too. One brother settled down in the nearby town of Roxbury. Another moved to New Hampshire. My mother grew up surrounded by lots of family.

Mom told me that she would have liked to teach kindergarten, but Papa didn’t believe that girls should study beyond high school. “You don’t need to be a nanny for someone else’s children,” he said. “You’ll have your own.”

Mom and her sister acquiesced to his decision, although both their brothers managed to work their way through Harvard and Harvard Law School. “We weren’t as smart as Sol and Harry,” Mom told me.

In later years, Mom did manage to get a job teaching Sunday School and worked as a teaching assistant in a Jewish Day School and seemed to enjoy the work a lot. Mostly, she was a housewife, although she didn’t particularly like to cook, bake, or clean.

It was nice to have her home waiting for me and my brother with glasses of milk and cookies when we came home from school. I’m sure she liked the fact that she could be there and listen to the news of our day. But I think she might have been happier if she had been able to combine motherhood with a part-time job.

When I was in high school, Mom did take a clerical job to help with the additional expenses of my brother’s college tuition. She exchanged her frumpy looking house-dresses for business clothes and started getting her hair done more often. She became friends with her co-workers and would tell me funny stories about her day at work. It seemed to broaden her horizons, made her more interested in what was going on in the world around her, and gave her a sense of pride that she could earn money, too.

It’s almost 8 years since Mom passed away. I miss talking to her. Sometimes, I feel an urge to pick up the phone and call her. It was mostly on the phone that we talked, after all, since she lived in Florida and I live in California.


I think of Mom especially on Friday nights when I light the candles, remembering all the Friday nights when we lit candles together while I was growing up.

I thought of Mom when my daughter Orli got married and when my grandson was born. She’d be pleased to see what a wonderful mother Orli is.

I’m glad that Mom did get the nachus, the pleasure and satisfaction, of seeing her children grow up to get married and become parents, themselves.

Who knows, maybe she can still see what is going on in our lives today. If so, I think she must be pleased to see that all five of her grandchildren (my three daughters, and my brother's son and daughter) have grown up to become independent and productive—traits that Mom valued highly.