This American Life - 159: Mother’s Day

Broadcast on: 12 May 2000

This American life, I'm out of glass. There's a story by Tilly Olson, in which a mother of five stands at an ironing board, contemplating a note from a teacher, asking her to come and discuss her oldest daughter. She's a youngster who needs help, the note says, and whom I'm deeply interested in helping. The mother moles this over. Should she go in? What is there even to say about her daughter's life? Here's Tilly Olson reading. "Even if I came, what good would it do? You think because I'm her mother, I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key? She's lived for 19 years. There's all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me." And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I'll start and there will be an interruption, and I'll have to gather it all together again, or I'll become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been, and what cannot be helped. And then, as she stands for ironing, she reviews her daughter's life, point by point. From the baby she was, through all sorts of troubles and mistakes, a working mother trying to be there for her children, trying and learning as she goes, making it up as she goes. Until, at the end, she finally comes to this beautiful passage, this almost encyclopedic list of everything which can happen with one's children. "I will never total it all. I'll never come in to say she was a child seldom smiled at. Her father left me before she was a year old. I had to work her first six years when there was work, or I sent her home and to his relatives. She was dark and thin and foreign looking in a world where the prestige went to blondness and curly hair and dimples. She was slow, where glibness was prized.

She was a child of anxious, not proud love. We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth. I was a young mother. I was a distracted mother. There were the other children pushing up demanding. Her younger sister seemed to be all that she was not. There were years she did not let me touch her. She kept too much in herself. Her life was such that she had to keep too much in herself. My wisdom came too late. She is a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear. Let her be so all that is in her will not bloom, but in how many does it. There is still enough left to live by only help her to know, help make it so there is cause for her to know that she is more than this dress on the ironing board helpless before the iron. Being a parent is an improvisation and things go wrong. As in any daily undertaking, things go wrong. And in the end, so many mothers feel unappreciated. Mothers are taken for granted. This is, as you might expect, a mother. In fact, it's my mother, Shirley Glass. She is a psychologist in Baltimore. Mom, I was wondering if you've noticed that every year since we started this American life four and a half years ago, we've done a Father's Day show, but we've never done a Mother's Day show. Actually, I never noticed it until you pointed it out to me. I guess I've become accustomed to ignoring those kind of slights. Why have a generic answer for that? You do. Yeah, why you've done Father's Day shows and you haven't done a Mother's Day show is because mothers are taken for granted. Like, how do you mean? Well, for example, I knew somebody who told me about the summer that he was at camp and his mother wrote to him every single day and his father wrote to him once. And he kept the letter that his father sent for the rest of his life because it meant so much. And he didn't keep any of the letters that his mother sent.

Well, is that because it was so surprising that his father would be emotionally expressive, whereas his mother was always emotionally expressive? Exactly. The child is so secure with the mother that he doesn't need to hold on to a souvenir or a symbol that she cares about him. That's what I just said, that we take the Mother's for granted.

Well, obviously, some mothers believe that mothers are taken for granted. Today on our program, we try to right this terrible wrong in our small little way here on the radio with stories for Mother's Day from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International. You're listening to this American Life's Mother's Day show. Our program today in three acts, act one, she said, she said, in which Alex Bloomberg conducts an investigation, perhaps the first ever with people who compulsively imitate their mother's voices in everyday conversation,

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