Not Such a Bad Mother

Monday I went to visit my parents and brought a couple of friends to shop for my mother’s art.  Between looking at art and going to lunch we sat on the front porch of my parent’s farmhouse, and as us southerners say, visited a while.  One friend who came up was my friend Hannah who had recently started selling Doncaster, just as my mother did when I was a kid.  As she and my mother discussed the “business” my mother told us all a story I had never heard.

When I was about ten and my sister Margaret was seven and our baby sister Janet was a new born my father came home and told my mother that a great store named Talbots was going to open a branch in the town next to us and that she should get a job there.  My mother always loved clothes and this seemed like a great fit for her.

As my mother told it, she had the first interview to be the store manager and was asked to come back for a second interview.  She had that one and was told that they needed to interview her one more time because it was between her and another woman.

The day of the third interview she dropped Margaret and me off at our club for swim team and tennis and all the things we did every summer day between 7:30 in the morning and 7:30 in the evening.  After my mother got home she got a call from the girl who was going to sit for Janet that she could not make it.  With not enough time to go back to the club and get me to sit, my mother put Janet in a wicker bassinet in the back of our forest green Chevrolet Impala station wagon and went to the interview leaving Janet in the unattended car with the windows open for air of course.

My mother said that the person interviewing her told her that if she got the job she would need to sell our house because as the manager of Talbots, it would become her home.  It was only then that it dawned on her that she had three unattended children, one in the car and that there was no way she could do this job.  She got up and left right then.  The next year my mother started selling Doncaster in our home where at least the unattended children had rooms to go play in.

Things certainly are different now.  Not only do mothers go to jail for leaving babies in cars alone (actually not a bad thing) but even seven and ten year olds do not spend their days unsupervised at clubs or else where.  But perhaps mothers of today have gone too far the other way.  Our children are driven everywhere on earth, parents watch every game and cheer for kids who barely can kick the ball.

My mother was good at taking care of herself.  She was always is great shape.  She took a rest almost every afternoon when she put her feet up and we were not allowed to come up to her room and bother her.  It is a lesson I should have learned long ago, to take care of myself first.

I look back and think that all three of us Carter girls turned out to be capable of lots of different things, from each of us starting our own businesses to being able to travel the world alone and not just places like Paris, but India, Indonesia and Africa.

It will take a generation before we know if we have screwed up our kids by doing too much for them.  I can’t wait to hear the stories my daughter will tell about her childhood and what kind of mother I turned out to be.