• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Charlie!” Mother calls my son from the group. “Will you pick some cherries for Grandma?”

“Sure,” says nine-year-old Charles.” He blushes and begins to pick cherries, eager to please his grandmother and happy to be singled out.

As he works, Mother points out the plumpest cherries to him and smooths his hair. “He'some,” she whispers and winks at me.

Now mothers ourselves, my sisters and I see her in a new light. We are beginning to understand her life as our mother, her enthusiasm and courage, her sacrifices. We are learning through her advice and care of our own children, and we dismiss what we once perceived as her injustices toward us. Indeed we agree that she acted in ways she believed to be best for us.

Telephoning long-distance, we say to each other, “How did Mom do it?” As we speak we remember our emotional, spirited, smart-mouthed selves, the six of us laughing, carrying on, playing at high volume the Beatles or Joan Baez in our suite at the opposite end of the hall from our parents’ bedroom.

There we experimented with makeup—purple eye shadow, midnight blue eyeliner we'd bought against orders at Woolworth's, or we read aloud to each other from the romance comics we'd smuggled in.

Among our unmade beds, clothes thrown everywhere, empty soda bottles spoiling our antique dressers, the youngest were eager guinea pigs for the oldest, who permed our hair to frizz and once bleached mine pumpkin-orange.

Sometimes we talked disparagingly about our mother. “She's so old-fashioned,” we'd say, “so fundy” we'd add, using a term we'd coined to describe the fundamentalist Christians at our church whom we judged to be hopelessly “out-of-it,” overly religious people; “in la-la land!” we'd laugh.

“We should take her shopping,” one of us would say.

“She's started to wear those ugly, loose, fundy dresses. And her hair!”

“Someone should talk her into coloring it.”

“Maybe she'd be less strict with us!”

“Less out-of-it!”

And sure enough, after much thought and, as she would emphasize, “prayer,” our mother, to please us, would submit to our ambitions, let us bring clothes we had picked out for her from the department store “home on approval.”

Then in the afternoons when the youngest were down for naps, she tried them on for us as we nodded, marveled and fussed over her, or stood back and shook our heads.

Sooner or later she let us cut her long graying hair and color it with Clairol. She let us apply makeup to her face, pluck her eyebrows—”Not too much! Your father will have a fit!”—and touch her long eyelashes with brown mascara.

Sooner or later she allowed Gena a two-piece bathing suit. “No bikinis!” she called as Gena headed out the door to buy it. “And I have to see you in it here, before you go out of this house!”

Mother let me keep not just one but two stray dogs, let Connie and Beth cut their waist-long hair, let Rena wear a strapless formal, Eva the pearls my father had given my mother for the prom.

“How did she put up with us?” we ask each other, having just endured, ourselves, some minor crisis with one of our own children. As we say it, we know that the fact of her patience, her silence, her worry, her willingness to listen, and most of all, her passionate engagement with us will be the quality we must now emulate.

And so, like her, we become fierce mothers, mothers who plot and gauge, who measure and consider, who call one another for advice, reporting on a book or an article we've read, some insight we've had, each of us offering experiences in order to help our sisters.

Like our mother, we believe ourselves to be wholly capable. We exude an earnest, youthful confidence, a satisfaction as we tell one another how well this or that turned out—the birthday party, the camping trip, the teacher's conference, the math tutor, the bedtime problems.

Our children are the heroes and heroines of our narratives. We defer to them, to their intelligence, judgment, their abilities to adapt or stand up for themselves, and as we defer to them, we take pride in our direction.

We do not forget to tell one another,