Vic Socotra

11 May 2008

Here’s to Mom

Mom at her 60th Anniversary

It is a gray speing morning here in the Nation's capital, and the birds are singing in the moist air. I am thinking of the little town by the Bay, that is just now rousing from a hard winter.

I’m going to take a step back from the shadowy world of terror networks and shaped-charge instruments of horror. I am going to deliberately walk back from heaps of stolen gold and ancient atrocities.

I am going to thank Mom for my life and what passes for my competence. For my acumen, skills and work ethic, I have to thank the determined woman from Ohio, who cast herself on the flood of social change and global war, rising from a Depression household in a failing railroad town in the valley next to the big river.

She was the first of her family to attend higher education, after finishing as the valedictorian of Bellaire High School, and all her children and grandchildren followed her.

She made it through Bethany on the men’s wartime program, in two-and-a-half years, and double-booked her academic course-load in ways that were not approved by the administration. To make one tight sequence of classes, she had to duck out a window.

Mom is remarkable; pretty and graceful, she was not above a creative solution to tough times. She was offered a position with the Texas Company, who had offices in the iconic Chrysler Building in New York, and she was there when The Boys began to come home from overseas to take their rightful place in a society that had been permanently changed by their absence.

Of course, it was only changed by those who seized the opportunity. If the young people of that day chose to re-establish “traditional” families, that was their choice, and our choice for the rejection of it when our time came. Something that had been broken forever was the notion of staying close to home. The new nuclear families were post-war nomads, migrating far from extended families to go where the jobs were located.

Marrying a talented young Naval Aviator, they left New York for Detroit and the auto business, all fins and chrome, when the Big Three car companies straddled the world like Titans from their plants in the Arsenal of Democracy.

It seems a world away now. Mom’s children are part of the same great diaspora, in Washington and Arizona and Alaska, and time together is rare.

Of course she went back to work as soon as we no longer neededher full time. It would not have occurred to her to sit home, and even when she was raising us she was active in the League of Women Voters, and Michigan's Consitutional Convention. She was involved always, and in everything. She taught us that, along the way, along with everything else.

Mother’s Day has its roots in the anguish of loss. President Wilson declared the first official one as a tribute to the Gold Star mothers who had lost sons in the First War. Transformed now into a festival of Brunch, it is important to remember what this is about. It is the celebration of the most intimate relationship of our lives.

As a first child, I carry the laboratory of first-time parenting with me, even as my sister and brother carry the unique legacy of their experience in the learning curve of a very intelligent and very determined woman. There will never be anyone who has taught me more, or loved me without question through good times and bad.

I wish I could take you to brunch, though I am far away, and it seems a little inadequate, given the love and support you have provided without fail, in good times and bad.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.