It’s hard to believe that shortly after this wedding photo was taken, this beautiful creature (my mother), ran out of her apartment in the middle of a weekday, in a panic. She blazed down the street to a drug store to buy a pack of cigarettes and then ended up at the home of an older neighbor who was having a gathering with her friends. They comforted the new bride saying, “Oh honey, you’ll adjust”… or so the story was told by my mother, Virginia.
I love this story because it helped me understand some of my own angst after leaving college. A close friend and I often talk about this “scene” that was my mother’s in the early 60’s. Not only does it remind us of Edvard Munch’s painting, “The Scream”, but it helps us to relate to our own struggle with identity and what it means to be a woman in this era. My mother was a beautiful, happy bride, but she was a also a thinker.
Virginia Keller studied philosophy and theology in college and she was ahead of her time. She rejected a handsome, athletic suitor from her hometown when he proposed to her while she was in college. She had other plans. She met and loved my father, but decided to separate from him to go to graduate school in Chicago and she lived in Lincoln Park in an apartment way before it was “hip”. Instead of walking down the aisle by herself, she walked to the alter, hand in hand with her groom.
My mother never had a chance to finish her studies. After a year or two, she missed my father, but men were not allowed to live in the dorms with women students. Men, on the other hand, were completely free to bring their wives to live at school with them. So my mother made a choice. And that choice sacrificed a bit of who she was – no, a lot of who she was. She loved my dad and she made the commitment, but then was reduced to running down the street for a pack of smokes while my father was at work.
My mother has told me that she began to feel better when she started taking classes again and while working at a local church’s early childhood program. But she claims that it was motherhood that brought her the most joy. “I never even thought I wanted children,” she has said, “but once you guys came along I was on cloud nine.”
Lucky for us, we had her for a mother and we also inherited her philosophical side (the good and the bad). When I was about 7 or 8 I remember sitting on her lap in a total panic. I asked her, “Mom am I here, am I here?!”
She said, “Of course you’re here.” I replied, “But how do you KNOW I’m here?” I felt completely alone.
She continued to comfort me, “Because I see you, and feel you, and love you.”
This didn’t calm me so much, senses just didn’t seem like “proof” enough. She just sat there reassuring me until I got hungry or something.
Now I know that whether I’m “here” or not, that beautiful woman’s face, hands, warmth are always there looking back at me and reminding me that you don’t have to run out your door for a pack of cigarettes when you have an existential crisis. You just remember the woman that reminds you of who you are. And in return, you should remember that before that woman was a wife and mother, she had dreams of her own.