We beam when our parents are proud of us.
But a child can brim with pride for a parent as well.
My mother supported Hillary Clinton, and I could understand and respect that. Mom was 81 and very fit in mind, body, and self. She had spent thirty years teaching both her six-graders--who later came to chat over coffee about getting their own children into her class--and her male, school administrators--who deluded themselves that female teachers still knew their place in their sleepy Connecticut town that the 60's and 70's appeared to have overlooked.
Nonna had gone to work at a munitions factory in 1941 and wanted my mother and aunt to go to college. That would have been unthinkable had my second-generation Italian-American grandfather not died a few months beforehand. Both sisters graduated tops of their classes.
Mom and Dad instilled their diligence in their four children. My three sisters went to Smith then HBS; Mount Holyoke then Wharton; and my mother's school for both undergraduate and graduate degrees.
So Mom backed Hillary even though I'd supported Obama all along. We argued politics when we weren't talking about her grandchildren or my Country CD of a love life.
Then Hill acted too well in New Hampshire and too low in South Carolina. Accurate though not right, it was Hilary's surrogate--Bill Clinton--who had actually aired the racist remarks.
Mom didn't tolerate it or fall for the cover. She phoned to tell me that she'd been growing more and more impressed with Obama (which I knew) and Bill's racism was the last straw: She's switched to Obama.
She asked me what was wrong when my voice cracked then. I steadied my breathing and just told her I loved her very, very much. She might have bridled at the reversal of roles should I have used the word "proud." Or her joy might have given way to affront at what could have sounded patronizing coming a child for whom politics wasn't just a hobby.
It was those New Deal Dems, punishing Team Hill's lack of decency to Obama, joining with myriad younger Connecticut Dems, who handed Obama his first primary upset. His Iowa Caucus upset couldn't be marginalized after turning the tide in the "Land of Steady Habits," nine days after his victory in South Carolina had been besmirched.
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After a year, I'd like now to share how I remembered my mother when we gathered at her funeral early in March last year:
There is a quiet time, just before great loss, when nothing should happen. But we are strange, surprising creatures and often grasp hold or sing our spirits to the sky.
We love and are loved. But we are forever cherished, as we cherish, once alone.
Thank you all for coming, my mom’s family and friends. Friends she saw during the week and friends she saw throughout a lifetime.
She was born in 1926, shortly before Bobby Shaftoe went to sea. She and my dad used to say, "We came from nothing, and built our lives." They built their lives with their four strong, bright, and loving hands. She was proud of the strong, bright, and loving people her grandchildren were becoming, or had already become.
She was a teacher. For many of us, she was that teacher... that teacher who believed in us before we became and before we believed.
There is a place of starlessness, soundless and breathless. I approach it—eyes raised, mouth open, tongue stuck—but must withdraw.
Let me speak of Anne-Thérèse.
My mom had a great laugh and sense of humor, but could not tell a joke. The timing, the mechanics, the punch-line-then-build-up... she just couldn’t tell a joke. But she was so funny by her deadpan delivery and she laughed so richly. A couple of years after she retired—she was 67—we were talking on the phone:
"I threw my neck out."
"Mom, are you all right?"
"I can barely move it."
"You have to go to the doctor, Ma. How did it happen?"
"I was watching a Chuck Norris or Steven Segal movie before I went to bed...
Then I was a ninja, dressed in black, slipping quietly through the palace. Bad ninjas came and, from the other end of the hall, one flung a throwing-star at me. So I wrenched my neck and head, but not my body, violently to one side to avoid it..."
I spoke with my mom and dad almost every day, sometimes two or three times a day. When I was 24, I’d gotten my life-threatening news. Mom had a scare a few years later, as did Dad.
So we talked. It wasn’t gallows humor and it wasn’t mere filial or paternal piety. We liked to talk to each other. We talked about politics and prices, the news and my job, our family and the future, and what we thought, advised, feared, or loved.
We talked. Then Dad died, and Mom and I talked. We talked because we liked each other. We talked because we loved each other.
I was re-reading Eliot, so Mom and I talked about it about a couple of weeks ago. Then I mailed her my copy of Eliot’s poems. I read "Ash Wednesday" to her over the phone. It includes these lines:
"Suffer us not to be separated."
"Teach us to care
and not to care."
"Teach us never to sit still."
"And let my cry come unto thee."