If you love your mother, read this
Acouple of mothers are trying to assemble a passel of Pittsburghers to tell stories about their mothers, or about being one, but I’ve just scanned their website and don’t see my mom’s take on motherhood anywhere.
Joan Curran O’Neill died at 88, 10 years ago this month, and none of her four children ever doubted for a nanosecond that she loved us. But almost all the quotes on the site “What Would Your Mother Say?” are so relentlessly positive, they would be unfamiliar to me, my sibs and a lot of other kids who grew up in the 1960s.
Take “Well, I couldn’t have done it better myself,” an alleged mommyism, according to the website.
“For a smart kid,” my mom would more likely say, “you sure are stupid.”
Maybe that’s not Hallmark material, but it got the job done, back in the days before self-esteem became all the rage.
Natalie Gillespie, a mother of three in O’Hara, and Stephanie Jankowski, a mother of three in Leechburg, are putting this event together. It’s an echo of shows that ran each Mother’s Day weekend in Pittsburgh from 2015 to 2017, and this one “is shaping up to be an evening that’s as joyous and messy and moving as motherhood itself,” Mrs. Gillespie promised.
Anyone who is a mom, was raised by one or has a tale that’s mom-related is invited to write something — if they keep it under five minutes.
“I’m a lifelong Pittsburgher who grew up listening to my Nan-Nan’s stories as we made ravioli. (My job was to close the pasta pockets with a fork),” Mrs. Gillespie wrote. “My other grandmother, Googie — my older brother got to name all the grandparents — was always writing. Stories run in my blood.”
The first auditions will be Jan. 25 and 26, at the Hilton Garden Inn off Market Square. There will be culling, and maybe a second round of auditions, but a dozen or so storytellers will be selected for a show at the Carnegie Library of Homestead Music Hall on May 8, two nights before Mother’s Day.
Here’s hoping they gather stories that span generations. The contrasting motherly styles — and childhood memories — of baby boomers, Generation X, millennials and Generation Z could make this night like a Thanksgiving throwdown to the nth power.
It has become something of a cliche that the commonplace parenting of yesteryear, such as letting young children walk to school or the playground alone, can now get parents arrested. Abby W. Schachter, of Regent Square, wrote a book a couple of years ago, “No Child Left Alone,” about moms and dads being criminalized “for raising independent, self-assured children.”
And as early as 1992, Nancy E. Curry, a professor in the child development and child care program at the University of Pittsburgh, was warning against the overuse of phrases such as “good job.” That, she said, was thrown around “for anything, almost for breathing.” The late Curry, who grew up as the middle sister among five girls, said that siblings were good for “knocking some of those conceited spots off you.”
Kids can detect phoniness a smile away, and the best moms tell their kids straightaway what’s expected of them. Five years ago, when the Post-Gazette asked four women over 100 to give motherly advice, all they wanted to do was talk about their own parents.
“All that I am and I ever hope to be I owe to my mother and father,” Dolores Redwood said a few weeks after she turned 100 on Jan. 19, 2015.
Who doesn’t have a good mom story? If I were up on stage, I could share the parable of The Family Dime. My mom had lived through the Depression and was as tight as Tupperware, so that dime stayed in our family for years. We’d call home from a phone booth after the Saturday afternoon double features were done, let it ring twice, hang up, retrieve the dime and hand it back to Mom when the Rambler station wagon pulled up to retrieve us kids.
That went like clockwork until the day my next-door neighbor Hughie blew the dime on a Creamsicle. Then four grade-school boys got their first experience with hitchhiking — but maybe I should save the rest of that story for the audition.
Surely there are plenty out there who can top my tale. My mom would tell you the same, if only because kids shouldn’t get big heads.
For more information, go to whatwouldyourmothersay.com, email wwymspittsburgh@gmail.com or call 412-256-8288.