Can we ever really know our parents?
It’s been 34 years since I lost my mother. Even longer — 51 years — since my dad died. In the interim, there have been countless times when I have wished I could ask, tell, or show them something. For starters, I wish my parents could see their perfect grandchildren all grown up and with almost adult children of their own.
I wish I could ask my father why he never told us he had a family before he married my mother and why I was not supposed to know that I had two half siblings from that marriage. By the time my half sister reached out to my brother and me, she was 82 years old and her brother — my half brother — had died.
I also want to know why my father never revealed that he had been born in Russia. His first two names were Michael Ivan — could they originally have been more Russian? What was the source of his shame about being an immigrant? If I had known, I could have asked.
I would like to tell my parents that I now understand how disappointed they were when I moved away after college. Watching my own grownup children and grandchildren from afar makes me understand why my parents were sad about my leaving.
I want to tell my mother that women don’t wear housedresses anymore. In fact, most women can’t afford to be at home keeping house these days. And those ridiculous girdles she wore? Heck, there hasn’t even been a slip in my underwear drawer in decades. And then there was the mirrored tray on her dresser, covered with elegant perfumes in fancy bottles that my father would bestow upon her, usually on Mother’s Day. Maybe people are still receiving perfume as gifts. Not I.
Most of all, I wonder what my parents would think about our lives today. They were young adults at a difficult time in American and world history — they lived through two world wars and an economic depression. Of course, each generation has its own challenges, but I’d like to know what words of wisdom my parents would offer to help me cope with today’s complicated world.
My father held a series of jobs that required us to move a lot when I was young. I was in three different schools in three different cities by the age of 9. That had to have been difficult for my mother, especially because she was close to her five siblings, who remained in the town where she grew up. My dad swept her away from them. How did she feel about that? She never complained, at least not to me.
I have wondered over the years if our children thought about how life was for their father and me when we were growing up. And then 10 years ago, our son Jeremy asked that my late husband Peter and I write the story of our lives before we became parents so that he and his brother and their children could know about us what we never knew about our parents.
Could our children picture me, I wondered, as a teenager at an Elvis Presley concert where I screamed and yelled with the rest of the audience when Elvis performed “Blue Suede
Shoes”? Could they imagine me singing in some ridiculous sorority production in college? Or even that I was in a sorority? Or how about their father, carrying golf clubs for his superiors as a private first class based on US soil during the Korean
War? (Lucky for him, the GI Bill paid for him to further his education.)
These are just a few of the details we each put in our 20 single-spaced typed pages. I wish I had such a record from my own parents.
When my kids were quite little, the milkman still left milk in a box on the front steps — but our children never knew until I wrote about it that a man named Joe came to my childhood neighborhood with a truck full of fresh produce a couple of times a week. He weighed and bagged, per my mother’s instructions, perfect fruits and veggies from his truck. I can see the brown bags lined up on our yellow Formica kitchen table waiting to be organized in our not-smart refrigerator.
I remember fondly the Saturdays when my mother and I, each wearing white gloves, took a bus downtown to shop. After dragging me through a boring lamp department or finishing some such errand, my mother would take me to the department store tearoom for a toasted tuna fish sandwich.
There are things I miss about the old days. When I am yelling at my sleek so-called smart TV, I wish for the big old box of my youth, the one with a dial and just a few channels. I miss doctors who came to our house when I was sick. I miss my conversations with my local bank teller when I was a young mother cashing checks every Friday on the way home from work. I miss making friends at American Express offices while cashing traveler’s checks when I traveled abroad on a shoestring one summer in my 20s.
Other things I recall fondly: learning to type in high school on a manual typewriter. An adding machine with a hand crank. Nickel-apiece candy bars, 35-cent movie matinees, elocution lessons, no seat belts, playing in the street after dinner, daydreaming at bus stops, faces not buried in phones.
I don’t miss winding up my Victrola to play “Peter and the Wolf,” my parents trying in vain to instill a love of classical music in me.
And now it’s my late husband Peter that I want to have at my side to tell and to ask. I want him to say more about escaping from Hitler’s Germany as a 6-year-old in 1936, and his tortuous journey from there through Holland and England before his parents were sponsored to come to the United States. I’d still like to know why it took him so long to commit to what turned out to be a 53-year marriage to me. So much unasked. And I want to tell him and my parents that one grandson kicked a football 54 yards in the first high school game of this season while his brother’s college soccer team won their first game 5-0 with him in the goal.
If I could just have 60 minutes with them to fill them in.