There are traits we pass on to those we love. Yes, genetic gifts: eye color, birthmarks, dimples. But we also share a more ineffable inheritance: our stories, histories, and traditions. Barbara got my mother’s piercing blue eyes and I inherited her cheekbones—both characteristics we’ve come to cherish. She also passed on to Barbara and me her two great loves: cats and books.
When she met my dad, her companionship came with her beloved tuxedo cat Dewey, named after the Dewey decimal system (nerd alert!). Dewey was the head of a long line of cat loves in our family, and he was the one who taught Barbara and me that cats will not hesitate to slap a two-year-old who pulls their tail.
We have had many cats over the years:
Bernadette, also known as Bernie, who is nocturnal and meows wildly at night. When I was pregnant with Mila, I was so miserable because of my inability to take allergy medicine that she had to move in with my mother for the rest of my pregnancy. And then she didn’t want to leave.
Sprity, the cat Barbara and I adopted when we were five and named after our favorite soft drink.
Baxter, the furry gray cat who ate dry macaroni and hid sponges under beds.
Mardie, Barbara’s beautiful calico cat, named after Mardi Gras. She was hit by a car and then died when the vet tried unsuccessfully to save her by amputating a leg. Her loss broke my sister’s heart.
Cowboy, whom I adopted in first grade and named after the Dallas football team.
Ernie, our polydactyl stray, whom we found on the grounds of the governor’s mansion and named in honor of Ernest Hemingway and his six-toed cat.
Willard, whose name changed multiple times (other names included Willie and India). She died at the age of fourteen. We fed her steak at the White House as her last meal.
My mom inherited her cat addiction from her mom, Jenna, to whom cats seemed to be drawn—all animals, actually. Henry was my Grammee’s cat; he moved over from the neighbors’ house because he loved her so much.
My mother, lonely as an only child, loved to read about big families. She wanted to be Jo in Little Women. When we were growing up, she didn’t talk about her longing for a big family, about the fact that her prayer when her mom and dad tucked her in at night was for siblings; that when she blew out birthday candles or wished upon stars, she pictured babies’ faces.
Our mom told us often how thrilled she was when the doctor told her she would be having twins. “One for each of us to hold,” she said to our father. Until we were adults, she did not tell us how sad she was as a little girl without siblings. But we know now that she found solace in her friendships, cats, and books.
My mom’s current love affair is with a cat named Bob. But don’t let the simplicity of his name deceive you; their love is complicated and raw. She loves him fully, wholly. Bob showed up at our ranch, a barn cat who, when my mom cradled him in her arms, purred aggressively. For all you fellow cat aficionados out there, my mom says a sign of a loving cat is that he likes to be held like a baby.
My sister and I like to anthropomorphize our family’s cats. We ask each other, “What would they be like if they were humans?” and let our imaginations run wild. As kids, we dressed our cats in our T-shirts (yes, they loved it). As adults, we affectionately craft elaborate identities for them, including sordid affairs, dramatic accents, and intricate ulterior motives. For example, my cat Bernadette was an eighty-year-old woman from New Jersey who chain-smoked Marlboros.
My mom hates for us to talk about Bob, whom we see as a fabulous fashion designer, always wishing for humans to add more glitter and feathers to their drab wardrobes.
“You don’t know Bob the way I do,” our mother will say, her eyes narrowing.
“I know Bob thinks you shouldn’t wear those shoes with that dress,” I once replied.
I’m extremely allergic to cats. As a little girl, I would pet my cat Baxter and suck my thumb until my eyes swelled shut. As a correspondent I did a segment with a young cancer patient who wanted me to pet her barn cat, so I did. Then we had to do the interview in profile because my eye was so swollen it looked disfigured.
My mom passed her love of books and cats on to Barbara and me, but in many ways we are very different from her, and I think that has a lot to do with opportunity. I wonder sometimes what she might have done with her life if she’d been born a generation later.
One Christmas break early in my marriage, Henry, Barbara, and I went to visit my parents. The whole time we were there, the three of us were fielding work calls and emails. We were staring at our phones most of the day.
At one point, my mother turned to my father and said, “How did we raise such workaholics?” She said it with some measure of pride, fascination, and horror.
When I was growing up, my father was home from work at five or five-thirty every evening. We had dinner as a family every night. We didn’t even have a computer until I was in fifth or sixth grade. Even then, we had one only in order to play games like Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? There were very few distractions during family time. We had uninterrupted conversations, and during meals the phone on the wall went unanswered.
In 1990, my grandmother gave the commencement address at Wellesley College. It later appeared on a list as one of the top fifty speeches of the century. She said: “For several years you’ve had impressed upon you the importance to your career of dedication and hard work, and, of course, that’s true. But as important as your obligations as a doctor, lawyer or business leader will be, you are a human being first, and those human connections with spouses—with children, with friends—are the most important investments you will ever make.
“At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a child, a friend or a parent. . . .
“[I]f you have children—they must come first. You must read to your children, hug your children, and you must love your children. Your success as a family . . . our success as a society depends not on what happens in the White House, but on what happens inside your house.”
Because of that speech, many people thought of her as antifeminist. In fact, her entire life she was a strong advocate for women. Her own favorite grandparent, her mother’s mother, Lulu Dell Flickinger Robinson, went on a road trip in 1939 through North America with three women friends. Next to a story about J. Edgar Hoover in The Indianapolis Star was a headline about the trip: “Mexico Lures Four Widowed Grandmothers.” My great-great-grandmother is quoted as saying, “We believe life begins at sixty.”
Looking at my mother, I believe it. She worked for many years as a teacher, a wonderful one. She became a tireless advocate for literacy education and for public libraries. Thanks to her, I’ve always had my nose in a book. As a girl I adored Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
My mother taught E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web to her third grade class, and she read it to Barbara and me as we snuggled close to her. I still remember some of the lines from that beautiful book: “The early summer days on a farm are the happiest and fairest days of the year. Lilacs bloom and make the air sweet, and then fade. Apple blossoms come with the lilacs, and the bees visit among the apple trees. The days grow warm and soft. School ends, and children have time to play and to fish for trouts in the brook.”
I read those same sentences to my girls this year as they leaned against me, taking in every word. As they realized Charlotte was old, they grew worried, but then Poppy said, with certainty, “It’s okay. Spiders don’t die.”
I had to break the news to her that everything dies.
She looked stricken, then asked a question for which I was unprepared: “Even tacos?”
“No, honey!” I said, trying not to laugh. “Tacos have a big place in our home, but they are not alive.”
For her family and her generation, my mother’s achievements were extraordinary. And yet she once shocked me by saying that she was disappointed her father never pushed her to explore a career. If you were a young woman in 1950s Midland, Texas, you were not expected to work outside the home. The only careers potentially available to you were as a nurse or teacher—both noble professions, of course, but such a small fraction of the roles available to men. My mom told me she did not question those standards until many years later as she watched Barbara and me thrive in our careers. She wondered what she might have been capable of if she’d had more of a push, if more had been expected of her back then.
How strange, I thought. Here I was wishing I felt less pressure from the world while she wished she’d had more.
Her faint regret made me think about what Barbara and I learned from our parents about what path to take. I cast my mind back to the moment when Barbara and I were applying to colleges. As an excellent student, Barbara had her pick. I had far fewer options. One day, though, I believed I had found the answer. In one of the many brochures that my sister had stacked neatly on her desk, full of images of smiling kids in Ivy League T-shirts, I read that Stanford has a special twin policy. If one twin is accepted, the other is automatically accepted as well. Barbara’s impressive record would outweigh my mediocre one. She had incredible SAT scores. I had . . . very credible SAT scores, but that no longer mattered! I was going to Stanford!
I snatched up the brochure and ran through the governor’s mansion, flapping the glossy pages, saying, “I’ve got it! I can ride Barbara’s coattails to Stanford! They have a twin policy!”
My father caught me mid-flap. “No,” he said. “You will absolutely not hurt Barbara’s chances at that school or any other school.”
Chagrined, I returned to my room. Barbara would go to Yale. I would attend UT Austin. We found our own ways through college and young adulthood.
What did our father want for us? In that moment when he nixed my Stanford scheme, he made it clear. He wanted the same thing his dad had wanted for him: to chart his own course. That had been my grandfather’s advice to my darling Mila, too, when she was a newborn, her first summer on earth: “To thine own self be true.”
When it comes to my daughters, I would be delighted if they followed in their aunt Barbara’s footsteps and became Ivy League graduates. But I would also burst with pride if they turned out like their beautiful, kind Grammee, their houses full of books, cats, and love.