chapter six
Motherhood
“To her whose heart is my heart’s quiet home, To my first Love, my Mother, on whose knee I learnt love-lore that is not troublesome; Whose service is my special dignity,
And she my loadstar while I go and come…”
Christina Rossetti
A Little Motherly Advice
Margaret and I became friends in the halls of Williford Dorm the very first week of our freshman year. She fell in love with a boy named Lee that same autumn, and married him the summer after our college graduation. They have four children, three sons and one daughter, the youngest.
With four, Margaret has the most children of our group and she became a mother the earliest, at twenty-five. I was second to become a mom, at twenty-nine. The rest of our group wouldn’t have children until their thirties and early forties, so Margaret has always been our go-to girl for advice on all things motherhood.
I was tempted to follow Margaret’s lead into what I consider “big family” territory, in hopes of having a girl for baby number four, just as she had. My own mother encouraged me to go for it. We have always had a wonderful, close relationship and I know she wanted me to experience that singular bond with a daughter of my own.
When I was younger, the thought of not being able to mother a little girl, to share the treasures I had loved and saved from my own childhood— the Barbies, ballet costumes, and Little House on the Prairie books—sometimes made me feel a bit wistful. To those reading this who think I should have tried to raise my sons in a more progressive, gender-neutral fashion, believe me, I tried. I have the headless Barbies to prove it! (And the only chapter my boys ever let me read aloud from Little House in the Big Woods was the one about Pa shooting the bear.)
I was certainly not unfamiliar with the particular rites and passages of boys. I grew up with two older brothers, five and six years my senior, both of whom I adore and am very close with today. We still celebrate nearly all the big holidays together, and our children share a loving bond. My sons don’t even consider it a true holiday unless they can get together with their “cousins by the dozens” in both the Ashby and Paul clans…and the Fourth of July is simply a bore if Uncle Jeff and Uncle David don’t create some kind of memorable mayhem with their fireworks extravaganzas at the lake.
Growing up, the term “rowdy” didn’t begin to describe my brothers. They were always “rough-housing,” as my mom called it—yelling, wrestling, and throwing balls through windows. There were lots of concussions, casts, stitches, and teeth being knocked out in everything from sledding accidents (David) to being caught on a barbed wire fence (Jeff). My mom made no secret of the fact that she was over-the-moon grateful for me, her girl, and we were our own little team throughout my childhood.
I remember a woman with four rambunctious sons whom my brothers were friends with when we were growing up, when all the neighborhood kids spent endless summer days outside, playing sandlot baseball or riding bikes. “Poor Mrs. M.,” my mom would sigh, shaking her head, “all those boys and no daughter…” I grew up thinking that being a “poor Mrs. M.” was a fate worse than death, bringing you nothing but pity, piles of smelly laundry and bills for broken windows.
My mom grew up poor, with no money for extras like music or ballet lessons, so she enthusiastically signed me up for everything. She was my biggest fan at dance recitals and school musicals, always sending flowers backstage and bragging to people about my exceptional talent and grace. (“She was surely wearing her ‘mom goggles,’ ” I can just hear my son Robert saying dryly as I write this. And he would be utterly correct.)
“Before becoming a mother I had a hundred theories on how to bring up children. Now I have seven children and only one theory: love them, especially when they least deserve to be loved.”
Kate Samperi
Mom and I both love fashion and home décor, and are enjoying our fifth decade of joint shopping expeditions, just yesterday to TJ Maxx, where my mom, as usual, waved an outfit in front of me that “looks just like you!” Growing up, she would often tiptoe into my room early and whisper conspiratorially, “Let’s just call you in sick to school today and we’ll go shopping and out to lunch in Bowling Green—just the two of us!”
Now she denies this of course, saying it only happened once, or maybe twice, and that I exaggerate everything just like Grandma Julia. But how often we played hooky together doesn’t matter; what matters is the sweetness of those long days, those memories.
Like no one else in the world, my mom makes me feel truly seen and understood. In her presence, I feel loved. Isn’t that what most of us want? To be seen and grasped with so much love that we are interpreted only as our finest, worthiest selves?
Having been so close to my mother and my grandmother, I thought I needed a daughter in order to feel that same level of maternal connection and intimacy, but I was wrong. Like so many things in life, the gifts I received from motherhood were unexpected, and richer than anything I could have imagined or chosen for myself.
I thought I would miss getting to recreate my favorite girlhood memories, but instead I was given new experiences and traditions to savor. I thought I might miss creating dollhouses with a daughter, but I didn’t know how much more fun it could be to build forts. Barbies pale in comparison to superheroes. After all, you can transform yourself into a caped crusader with a well-placed towel and a safety pin.
The treehouse Rand and the boys built for their “Maniac Monkey” adventures has rotted and fallen down now, but the memories of three little boys whooping through the backyard, playing pirates and battling Darth Vader with light sabers, is still golden in my memory.
(But don’t get me started on Star Wars. Somehow I missed the phenomenon in the seventies and eighties, but not the second time around! My sons helped me tap into my inner sci-fi fan, and today my arcane knowledge of Star Wars trivia would impress George Lucas himself.)
My boys have brought me so much laughter and joy. Whether jumping off sand dunes, creating a slippery slide down the back hill or building elaborate Lego and Hot Wheels superhighways, their energy and enthusiasm always made the days sparkle with life, and I loved being part of their adventures as a young mom.
Antonio Cesar
Their baseball card collections and sports trophies are starting to collect dust, but perhaps they will be handed down one day, just as Rand and my brother Jeff have passed on their own special cards to our boys. (But I’m saving the doll Grandma brought me back from Ireland too, just in case.)
I only get to listen to our sons playing guitar together in the basement on holidays now, and like every other mother in history, I savor the music, feeling melancholy surprise at how fleeting and ephemeral their childhood was.
Over the years, I have shared many of the joys and worries of raising boys with my friend Margaret. I have always been grateful for the fact that her three sons are older than my own, so I can get free counsel on every mystifying detail about mothering boys from a smart woman who has been in the trenches.
As our children enter young adulthood, our conversations about them now are more about college majors, girlfriends, and job prospects than lost baby teeth, the playground bully or best Halloween costumes, but I still seek and value her opinions. The best advice she ever gave me? “Don’t overreact.” My sons would probably say I failed on that one, but I sure tried.
JoAnn Abdelwahabe
Margaret is smart and straightforward, and while we sometimes disagree, I usually find myself following her advice. She is both an inspired cook and excellent photographer, two talents that our group of friends enjoys on our reunion trips. I’m still making some of the recipes she sent me after our Colorado reunion more than fifteen years ago, my family’s favorites being her Baked Chicken and Orzo and Grilled Peanut Chicken. Margaret’s cooking, writing and artistic abilities all come together beautifully on her blog, “The Right Recipe,” in which she shares the creative joy of cooking for family and friends. Her love of good food and creating meaningful traditions around the table is rooted in her memories of big family dinners at the home of her southern grandmother, whom everyone called “Mur.”
I had met her grandmother once, on a drive through Mississippi, but it was only after reading Margaret’s lovely tribute that I truly understood the many similarities between this strong and graceful Southern matriarch and my own dear friend.
The Grace And Conviction of a Mississippi Matriarch
Margaret’s Story
To celebrate the first birthday of each child, grandchild, and great-grandchild, my grandmother would have his or her portrait framed in gold and hung along her staircase hallway. At the time of her death in 2002, at age ninety-three, there were portraits of her four children, nineteen grand-children, and forty-five great-grandchildren hanging on her walls. In the closet, she had stored five extra frames for the future but she would have needed many more. She now has sixty-six great-grandchildren.
The term matriarch comes to mind but she was so much more than that. A true steel magnolia, a strong and resilient woman who, if born in another place and time, would surely have been a force to reckon with in business, politics, philanthropy, education, or whatever she put her mind to. She was a woman from a small town in Mississippi who lived a life of grace and conviction, and she had a profound influence on her family, friends and community.
I am number four of the nineteen grandchildren of Catherine Cameron Wilkerson Bryan, known as “Kitty” to her friends and to her family as “Mur” (pronounced “Muh”). She had a beautiful southern drawl, the kind that turns “sister” into “sista” and “Margaret” into “Maugret.”
I was her favorite grandchild. Or so I thought. I have come to learn that most of us felt that we were her favorite. That was one of her gifts, I suppose. She made you feel special.
Mur was born in the Delta—Greenville, Mississippi, to be exact. She was the oldest of five and spent her early childhood living at Clifton Plantation, a cotton plantation farmed by sixty black families. This makes her a member of the last generation to experience that particular cultural upbringing. Her education began in a one-room schoolhouse in Winter-ville then continued in Greenville until her graduation in 1927.
She spoke of the year 1927 often, in great detail, as that was the year of The Flood, when the levee broke at Mound Landing just eight miles north of her house and the Mississippi River inundated Greenville. She told us stories about the water rising in the streets, how she had to hold onto tables and was rescued from the rooftop of a building and taken to Vicksburg by riverboat.
Her stories were dramatic but I’m afraid that I didn’t truly appreciate the scope of the disaster until years later when I read Rising Tide, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America by John M. Barry. Mur and her family evacuated to Memphis, Tennessee, and took refuge on the campus of Southwestern at Memphis, now Rhodes College, for four months. (Perhaps this is one reason why, twenty-seven years later, she would insist that my father attend Southwestern at Memphis when he really just wanted to go to Ole Miss with his friends.)
After a postponed graduation due to the flood, she enrolled in Mississippi State College for Women, also known as “The W,” where she majored in Spanish and Latin. At her funeral, my father told of the time that Mur and a few of her friends at “The W” were outraged to learn that Theodore Bilbo, the notoriously racist governor of Mississippi, was handing out the diplomas at their graduation. In protest, they refused to step up onto the stage to receive their diplomas from him, a very bold move at that time.
After college, Mur became a social worker and earned an advanced degree from Tulane University. She met my grandfather when she, on behalf of a needy family, was trading in some government issued oxen for a pair of mules, which were apparently more useful animals. My grandfather conducted the transaction and they married 100 days later at the courthouse after work.
I asked her once if she felt like she knew him well enough at that point and she said, “Oh, yes. We had dated twice a week for three months.” She was twenty-six years old and, according to Mur, her parents were surprised, as they thought she would never marry.
Mur was extremely active in her community, the small town of West Point, Mississippi. When she learned that people were traveling for miles to find school programs for their disabled children, she built The Catherine Bryan School for Special Children on the property next to her own home.
Mur was elected Mississippi Mother of the Year in 1970 and in a short autobiography she wrote for the occasion, she said, “My husband, my children and I worked hard to help ease the integration of the public schools. We believe in public school education and all of our grandchildren attend public school today.”
In 1980, when her beloved First Presbyterian Church voted to secede from the national Presbyterian Church (USA), because of some of the national church’s liberal social views (women ministers, for example), Mur was eighty years old. She could have joined the local Methodist Church, where many in her family were members. Instead she, along with twenty other parishioners, purchased a small house on Main Street, hired a female minister, invited black members, and founded their own place of worship. The church remains today, still small and still affiliated with the national Presbyterian Church.
My father, reflecting upon his mother and her ideals, calls her “an unre-constructed Democrat,” and adds, “Mother’s attachment to the Democrats came about, in part, because of her early career as a social worker during the Great Depression. It also emanated from her strong identity with the politics of her nineteenth-century agrarian forebearers. Neither of these points, however, really explains her liberal social views. I suppose they were simply an inherent trait.”
As I turn fifty and watch my children grow and move away, I find myself thinking about Mur’s role in our family, and how she was able to draw us together in such an important and meaningful way. Mur was big on traditions and we, as a family, had a lot of them. There were those first year portraits, of course, but there were many more.
We ate Sunday dinner at her house every week. We lined up oldest to youngest to go through the buffet line, which always included “Mur’s Rice,” a ham or turkey, various casseroles, maybe a Jell-O salad and either cornbread muffins or those soft, pull-apart rolls that come in a heat-andeat package.
On Valentine’s Day, she sent each of us a Valentine in the mail, just a small one, like the ones you buy in a box to give to your classmates in elementary school, and it was always signed, “Guess Who?” And each year, tucked inside your birthday card from Mur was a $15 or $25 check, depending on your age. When we married, our spouses also started receiving a birthday check.
Mur and my grandfather took their grandchildren, two by two, on a special trip. It was nothing fancy, maybe a trip to Hot Springs, Arkansas or to see Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. She also assigned each of her grandchildren something to collect. I collected paperweights, my cousins had spoons, music boxes, etc. Perhaps this was her way of having something special to do and talk about with each of us…or maybe it was just to make Christmas shopping for nineteen grandchildren easier!
Christmas, of course, had its own ritual celebrations and traditions. There was her annual “Cookie Party” a week before Christmas. She made slice-and-bake sugar cookies and topped some of them with red and green sprinkles and some with a single pecan half. I thought they were amazing— proving that you don’t have to be Martha Stewart to create special holiday memories. And on Christmas Eve, we all spent the night at her house so we could wake up together and see what Santa left, even though we all lived within a few minutes of one another.
She wasn’t an outwardly emotional person. My father says he never saw her cry. She commanded respect in a quiet way. I remember when I was staying with her in the summer of 1984 and I left several times to go visit my boyfriend, who lived a few hours’ drive away. I had a car and he didn’t.
One day at breakfast, Mur looked at me matter-of-factly and with absolutely no hint of disapproval said, “In my day, it was the boy’s responsibility to come visit the girl.” Of course, I was on the phone right away telling the boy to borrow a car and get down there because I couldn’t bear the thought that Mur might think poorly of us!
When my firstborn came along and Mur saw how frustrated I was that he cried constantly, she told me, “I wouldn’t give a nickel for a baby that didn’t fuss.” And oddly enough, that was the one thing said to me during that time that made me feel a little bit easier about the situation.
Mur died of old age. She had outlived all her younger siblings. She said to me once that all of her friends were dead. She didn’t say it in a depressed way, just as a fact, and it was true. The last time I saw her, it was obvious that her little body (she was just 5'2'') was tired, her skin almost translucent.
And although she couldn’t really speak well at that point, I could tell that she recognized me by the way she stared into my eyes. And I knew that if she had the strength, she could still explain who my second cousins twice removed are, and describe the color of the dress she wore to that fancy dinner in New York City thirty years earlier. I wasn’t overcome with sadness when she died two weeks later. You can’t argue with ninety-three.
I’ve often wondered if Mur’s sons- and daughters-in-law might have resented some of the obligations that come with being part of the tightly knit Bryan family. It would be understandable. But what I do know is that, as a child, there was great comfort in those traditions and routines. And even though I don’t see all my cousins and aunts and uncles as much as I would like now, I have never once lost the feeling that I have an awful lot of people in this world who love me and will always be there for me no matter what. And I believe much of that feeling comes from the environment that she created for us as children.
I once interviewed Mur for a college psychology project and I asked her to tell me what she liked most about herself. She struggled with this question, paused for quite a while and then said, “I like that I don’t interfere with my children’s lives.” She elaborated by saying that she would give her opinion if asked, but that she was never judgmental, even if she felt that a mistake was being made.
As a mother of four myself, I certainly know how hard that can be, but I am just now beginning to realize how important it is. So maybe that is one of the crucial ingredients in the recipe for a loving family. Led by the example set by my grandmother, I aspire to figure out the rest.
“There were two things about Mama.
One is she always expected the best out of me.
And the other is that then no matter what I did,
whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon
I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars.
Like I was that good.”
Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees
