Hi. Before we get back to the usual content, I wanted to share something with you all.
Today would have been my mother’s 92nd birthday. She died at 73, so I can’t even imagine what she would be like now. Maybe that’s partly because she was such a different person from me.
A reminiscence of a person who has been gone for nearly 20 years doesn’t feel very future-ready, but I think there’s a learning for all of us embedded in here.
We need people in our lives who are very different from us — not just in personality, like my mother and I, but in all of the elements that make us human. Imagining how she would cope with a microphone in a council meeting or a town hall helped send me in search of ways for people who would have never gone near that mic to have their voices heard, truly heard, by public agencies. She avoided new technology as though it would bite her, but I learned from understanding her point of view that we could make it easier for people like her, and a whole ton of others, to get their point across without asking them to do something terrifying like public speaking.
At the end of this month, I will conduct a Learning Lab on Digital Public Engagement at the National Planning Conference, and hopefully roll out my new book on Online Public Engagement at the same time.
And in a strange way, Mom deserves the credit for that.
This article was written about five years ago, which is why it opens with April and hyacinths.
It is almost April, and I have three hyacinth stems on my desk. They have an amazingly strong but delicate scent. Sweet, verging on maybe too sweet, but tinged with a freshness that my mind translates as a green- vermilion. Heavy blossoms on delicate water filled stems. These are in the house because they had fallen over under their own weight, the only time I can bring myself to cut them.
Hyacinths always connect me to my mother. They were her favorite flower. They even smell a little like what I remember of Mom, who always used soft floral perfumes.
I have written a lot about my dad. Not much about my mom. Why?
Typically, I would say that's because dad intersected my professional life, albeit tangentially, more than my mom did. Dad had the factory that gave me the metaphors of a small business owner fighting with an ancient boiler in the middle of a brutal Cleveland February night. Dad's 1970s factory gave me the sickening realization of externalities when I learned that the chemicals in the bad paint batches they had dumped over the side of the gorge led to poisons in the river -- and probably poisoned himself. And Dad’s long struggle to face his father’s skimming of the books, to fight for and ultimately lose the family company, to try and fail and fail again and again to find a new economic place in the world (while four people depended on him), has reverberated through my life, my own world view and my vulnerabilities and fears, more than 20 years after he was gone.
But what about mom?
Mom was always a little more of a mystery to me. Dad showed his emotions. We knew when he was depressed, happy, hurt, especially in his older years. Mom, despite being so uniformly sweet and loving that I can't think of another word anyone has ever used to describe her, was far more the stoic in her quiet way than the Yankee man she married. Maybe that was Appalachian persistence at work, maybe that was simply a huge amount of introversion.
When I was an adult with my own children, I stayed with her one time when I was in Cleveland for a conference. The conference had a party downtown one night, and I didn't start the 20 minute drive to Bedford until close to midnight. At some point I realized I should probably call her to let her know I was on my way.
"Oh, good, I was worried," she said.
Worried about what? I travel all the time. This is a normal part of my life. I'm an adult, for Christ's sake.
I didn't say those things, but either some pause or an indication of bewilderment on my end must have followed. Then she said:
"I always worry. "
I had spent most of my evenings doing community theater, covering events for the paper, being away from home since I was 15. I had never been chaperoned anywhere. I had gone to college a thousand miles away, connected only by an occasional land line call. I had been married for well over a decade at that point, a traveling professional almost as long. I even had my own kids to worry about by this time.
It was the first time I realized that she worried about me.
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Mom told us stories about her childhood outside Portsmouth all the time-- the turkeys that would drown looking up, the tent revivals with the crazy preachers, the German Shepherd that would herd her father back home when he wandered off. Her father had a massive stroke while working in a brick yard — the only work he could get to support a half-dozen kids after he was blacklisted for being part of the labor organizing effort.
I knew the names of her brothers and sisters and nephews, particularly the ones who died before my brothers and I were born. After she died, I found the ribbons she had save from both her mother’s (1959) and her father’s (1942) funerals. I still have them.
But we only occasionally saw the living family, even though most lived nearby. She seldom talked on the phone, except to her one brother on disability who called regularly and had no one else. When he called, we mostly heard silence from her as she listened to...who knows what he actually had to say.
My brothers and I barely knew her family. I have not talked to any of them since she died over nearly two decades ago.
She moved north to Cleveland with her mother after she graduated from high school, following, and probably depending, on her brothers and nephews. She only went back to Portsmouth for a couple of funerals, and then never went south of Columbus for decades. Nearly 40 years later, I moved to Cincinnati and asked her and dad to drive the 2.5 hours along the river to Portsmouth with me. It was so important to me to see the places that I had heard about, that I left a toddler and a baby with my overworked husband to pursue the new mothers incredible extravagance of a weekend away.
We found the site of her home, her school, her parents’ graves. She commented on how the graves looked just like she remembered from long before.
She never asked or talked about going again. Even after I worked on a plan for the downtown she had once known, and bought her an afghan knit with pictures of the places that must have impressed her as a child. She had no interest.
Why?
Maybe becaus she married late for her peer group, and married a Yankee, she thought she had to come pretty close to cutting ties. Maybe she liked telling the stories and reminiscing, but in her guts she had no illusions about the difficult Appalachian life she had escaped. Maybe she simply believed that you don’t speak ill of the dead.
My mother was as loving and devoted as you can imagine. I truly don’t think you will find better. But it’s a shock to realize decades later that you never really learned who she was, what she dreamed of, what she was actually worrying about. I honestly don’t know whether she ever wanted to be something other than a wife and mother, and I honestly don’t know whether she thought she should or not. She never discouraged me from taking a path that didn’t look like hers.
So what’s the point? Perhaps the point is that we don’t know anyone else’s story anywhere near as well as we might think we do. Perhaps the point is that a gentle, non-ambitious, intensely private person can have an impact without ever realizing they have, and we should drop the leftover teenager tendency to dismiss the person who is quiet and hangs back.
Maybe the point is that we learn more from people who are different from us than from peope who are like us, even when we don’t understand their difference.
Or maybe it’s just that Mom was, and is somewhere, and she merits remembering. And she is still teaching by her example. Not because of any Big Thing that she did. But because she was.