& {sometimes} WHY

My mother, Wilma Jean (Porter) Clark graduated high school in 1945 and moved from her parents’ farm in Dayton, PA, to New Kensington, about an hour’s drive away. There she got a job in the secretarial pool at the Wear-Ever Aluminum plant, a subsidiary of ALCOA—the Aluminum Company of America, which manufactured cookware

Mom’s employer started a “Miss Wear-Ever” beauty pageant, and each department chose an entrant to compete against other women at the plant. Mom’s boss chose her out of all the young women in the secretarial pool. This was, of course, long she’d met my dad.

Truth told, I never thought much about my mom’s looks when I was growing up. She was just mom. But when I got to be about college-age, I remember watching old family movies and thinking that mother of mine was quite a dish. I do remember her always worrying about her weight, but the woman I saw was just curvy in all the right spots.

Anyway, mom always lacked self-confidence, and this recognition by her boss gave her a real boost. She went home to Dayton, PA, the following weekend to visit her folks and couldn’t wait to tell them. But the reaction she got wasn’t what she’d hoped for. Her parents laughed at her, and her brother called her “Miss Pots & Pans.”

Monday, back at work, she told her boss she wouldn’t compete in the pageant. He pleaded with her, but still she said no. When she told this story to our family years later, she always ended it with, “And I could have won, too. I was lots prettier than the girl who did.”

This is my favorite story about my mom, even though it’s full of sadness. It says so much about who she was at heart: a pretty lady who lacked self-confidence because the family she grew up in never really saw her, physically or emotionally.

What it means to be invisible

Mom’s family was poor and worked a farm owned by my grandmother’s parents. After giving birth to one son who could become a farmhand, my grandmother had three daughters in a row before two more sons. My mother was the third daughter, and I don’t think her parents were too happy about it. The other children were spaced a few years apart, but mom came just 17 months after her sister Sara.

Mom said her mother called her “that thing” when she was growing up and seldom paid any mind to her at all except to give her work to do. Mom had no toys until a couple aunts got together, bought her a doll and sewed a wardrobe of clothes for it.

When mom was 9, grandma hired her out as an after-school housekeeper to one of those aunts and pocketed the money she earned. Mom remembered her aunt had male visitors coming and going whenever her uncle wasn’t home. Mom even nursed that aunt through what she didn’t know then was an abortion because the child she carried wasn’t her husband’s.

Why would my grandmother have let my mother be in an environment where all that was going on?

The crooked path to WHY

Decades later, when mom was in her 70s, I shared with dad and her a disturbing dream of molestation by one of my uncles. I couldn’t remember anything like that happening to me, and I asked them if they knew of anything. Dad immediately said no, but mom was quiet and stared into space. I asked again, “What about you, mom? Do you remember anything like that?”

“I…um…uh,” she stuttered. “It didn’t happen to you. It happened to me.”

Turns out her older brother had molested her around the time she was 8 until age 10 (he was 14-16). All those years she’d held that in. Even dad didn’t know.

Why would my grandmother not realize what was happening?

But now I wonder, maybe grandma sent mom to her aunt’s after school to keep her brother away from her.

I just don’t know.

I’ve wondered all kinds of scenarios through the years, and it’s taken me decades to be comfortable with the fact that I’ll never know the whole truth of any of it. I do regret the strife it caused between mom and I. I so wanted her to stand up for herself, and she so wanted not to remember what my dream had unearthed..

I once wrote her a poem based on this photo:

Susan, Two Months

Wilma, 29 years, holds her baby girl
up to the glass and smiles.

Baby Susan squints and looks down–
the glare hurts her eyes.

It’s the first day of school for her
two big brothers. They wave bye

and board the bus but are
invisible from this angle.

It’s the outside world reflected
in the storm door that stands between them.

Wilma and Susan have clouds for hair,
and a hill in the distance furrows their brows.

They have a whole future together ahead of them
to ruin, to rise to, to remember, someday.

This daughter will disappoint her mother.
This mother will fail her daughter.

But not in all ways.
The end will bring them together again.

It’s all right there,
reflected in the glass,
a whole world.

Takeaways

It's unsettling that all humans are prone to repeat with their children the same mistakes their parents made with them. Patterns are that difficult to break. We have to parent consciously. Being a mother helped make me aware of some patterns from my own upbringing that needed reworking, and I tried to do better, though I know I fell short, too. 

Mom was a much better mother to me than my grandma was to her, and I know she wanted me to experience the love—and the things—she never had. But sometimes her vision was clouded by what she had missed and so she overlooked who I was and what I wanted. That's generally what we quarreled over.

I think I've also learned from my failings as a daughter. 

Maybe that's how it works, if we're lucky: Each generation gets a little more conscious.

Mom remained a pretty lady all her life, meticulous about her appearance. After she passed away in 2010, whenever I encountered other women who knew her, they’d say that very thing and tell me I looked so much like her. I took it as a compliment, though I never thought we looked much alike.

But as I get older, there are times I look in the mirror and see, for a few seconds, mom looking back through my eyes.

One thing I do know for sure: Even though she never competed in that beauty pageant, she really was “Miss Wear-Ever” to have survived what she did.

I wish I could tell her how proud I am of her, and that I sometimes see her looking back at me in the mirror.

Use comments to share…

• For what do you most remember your mother?
• What in your relationship caused conflict?