13 May 2007
Mother's Day
I downed the morning coffee with the new knowledge that three American soldiers are missing south of Baghdad, and the incorrigible North Koreans have unveiled another missile, based on knock-off technology from the Soviet past. I scowled over the paper, since it is also Mother's Day.
Some historians say has roots in the ancient Goddess festivals that existed before men figured out where babies come from, and the subsequent rise of the Patriarchies.
The Roman festival was known as Hilaria, and lasted for three days. Here in America, a woman named Anna M. Jarvis is credited with popularizing a day of honor that really should be spread all across the year. She spent her life crusading for a day of recognition of the sacrifices of mothers, citing her own as an exemplar. Her mom had nursed the wounded of the Civil War, both sides, and became a crusading pacifist as a consequence.
In Anna's New York Times obituary in 1948, the editors noted that she had become embittered because too many people were sending printed greeting cards to their mothers. She considered it "a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write."
Our generation has taken it one better. Now we e-mail.
My Mom is somewhere in Ohio today. I managed to get flowers to her on Friday before she and the Famous Navy Attack Pilot she has been married to for nearly sixty years hit the roads south to attend the wedding of a great nephew or something. It is distant enough that I did not get an invite; that would be second-cousin territory, removed at least once by distance if not fact.
It is a bit of a State Visit. Mom is now the Dowager of the clan, having outlived her two lovely sisters. She is now the symbolic senior member of the clan left that started with the tough Irishman Mike Foley and his beautiful bride Hazel Voight a century ago.
There were three daughters, all strikingly attractive, like their mother, and combined an inner coil of strength to go along with the good looks.
On this day it is striking to look back on what the women of the family have accomplished, not by beauty, though that is part of it, but through their strength.
I know of the ladies through some generational research that started with one of our rascal Irishmen, who had the good fortune to survive the Civil War, and live long enough to dine out on his tall tales for the rest of a long life. What intrigued me, though, was the nature of the women who raised him, and coming from other families to create our line, how they were the ones who made it all possible.
No bands, and no fancy uniforms. They endured crushing burden of maintaining the hearth and home, and the perils of childbirth in a day when the production of several children was necessary to ensure the survival of a few.
Mary Martin, bless her, is the first I know of. She stayed in Ireland, and lived more than a century. She sent her daughter Honora out to the sprawling frontier of America with her husband, waving goodbye to little Patrick in his mother's arms. The little boy would grow to become Patrick, the Confederate Irishman. Honora left her daughters behind with Mary. One ran away and was never seen again. The other crossed the ocean on her own, and traveled across a war-torn nation. Barbara was strong enough to convince James Foley to abandon the profession of arms, and stay home with her.
That strength of will passed down through their son, young James, who married Anastasia, who had come through Canada and down the fertile Ohio River. Their son Mike, the last tough Irishman married my grandmother, Hazel, and that is where my personal knowledge begins.
Not with Mike, of course. He was a railroad man, and lived hard. He died in 1941, and Hazel was left without his pension and three teen-aged daughters to care for in a little Valley railroad town.
Hazel re-invented herself as a respectable working woman, harnessing the skills she had learned as a schoolgirl in the vocational class at her high school. In 1915, she was honored for being able to take shorthand at the rate of 127 words per minute, a record.
In 1941, her husband dead and the economy only beginning to emerge for the Great Depression, she picked herself up and moved on. Being a woman of intelligence and determination, she rejoined the workforce and took over the administrative chores at the Bellaire Rail and River Coal Company.
Possessed of timeless beauty, she married again, and moved to Massalon, Ohio. Evan is the man I recall as grandfather, but it took wits on Hazel's part to recreate a home for the girls to come back to.
My own mother was the first of her direct family to graduate from college. Betty did it with energy and application. When she graduated from high school as the valedictorian, her father dead and the pension stopped, she had no means to attend an institution of higher learning. She secured a scholarship, and paced the young men who were on accelerated programs to get their degrees, and get to the War.
Told she could not take as many classes as she wanted to graduate in less than three years, she simply did it. In order to make the schedule work, she was not above exiting one classroom through the window in order to get to another on time. She worked, too, and was the President of her sorority, Alpha Xi Delta. .
Upon graduation, she had an offer to work for the Texas Company in New York, through an administrator who had worked at Bethany and knew how capable she was. She was not sure about going to New York. Manhattan was a big rough and noisy place, filled with honking taxis and wise-talking, fast moving people.
Hazel told her that she was going, of course, though Mom told me that she might not have known the full consequences of leaving the Valley on the train for Gotham.
I think she did. That is just one of the characteristics of the mothers on this line. They were able to look the future in the eye, send their children off to meet it, and deal with the consequences where they stood.
Happy Mother's day, ladies, where ever you are.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com