Mississippi Stories

I was sound asleep last night when I opened my eyes (I think) and saw a looming image of my mother's face just above my head. I am sure it was a dream only, but it made me remember what I had forgotten: the date she died, February 24. I also thought immediately of Woody Allen's 1989 film entitled New York Stories in which the protagonist must deal constantly with an overwhelming mother. In several scenes, the mother appears as a giant in the sky still dispensing advice to her errant son. I wondered what I still needed to learn from my deceased mother, and it came to me. We needed, if possible even after death, to forgive each other for what we were and for what we weren't.

Up until this point I had thought that the whole idea of forgiveness was one-sided only. I needed to forgive my mother for not trying hard enough during her single years in Mississippi. She would always complain about my father's lack of responsibility for the family, yet my sister and I were required to raise ourselves as she lay in the bed for hours with stomach pain, headaches, and clinical depression. When she was up from the bed, she was often very critical and angry. After several years of this, she finally took us to her mother (a sixty-three year old widow) to complete raising while she worked in Memphis.

I now realize that I also needed forgiveness for what I was as well. I, as a result of being away from my mother so much during the formative teen years, was distant and non-communicative. The effort on my part seemed to be too great. I now realize I should have made that effort, at least called or written more often. When she would visit in the fall, I often did not have the time (at least I had convinced myself of that) to sit and talk the way she wanted.

If it is possible to communicate with those who have gone on before us, I believe I can say, "I'm sorry." Freud certainly had it right, though not on all points, that mothers are towering figures in our relationships both in death and life.

An Education

I have been waiting for several weeks to see the art film An Education based on Lynn Barber's memoir and Nick Hornby's screenplay. My husband and I finally saw it last Friday. The film is set in 1961 in England around a young woman who is being pushed by her father to achieve the grades and standardized test scores she needs in order to be admitted to Oxford. Of course, the protagonist, as a complication, immediately meets an older man, falls in love, loses her virginity, and confronts the choice of a lifetime: to marry or to get a higher education. I knew I would love this film because I was confronted with the same choice also as a senior in high school.

During the summer of my junior year, I met a second lieutenant stationed in Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi. My mother and I had gone down to the coast in order to renew our relationship since I had been living with my grandmother for the past four years. I was sixteen, and he was twenty-two. He drove a baby blue Corvette convertible. I had to admit I was smitten in many ways because it was with him that I discovered many of the activities previously reserved for adults only. I was able to go to the Officers Club on base, for example, and hear a blues singer in a darkened, smoky room singing, "When I Fall in Love" in her sultry voice. I was able to see him "protect" me when he thought one of his friends in the club was coming on to me. When I went back to the Mississippi Delta for my senior year, he came up one weekend to my grandmother's house and proposed. Of course, my mother said "no" with the usual arguments: she's too young, she doesn't know what she wants, she needs to consider college, etc.

Ultimately, the decision came down to what I wanted, and it was an easy decision. Since the ninth grade, I had wanted to go to college and become an English teacher. I did not know how I would accomplish this goal, however, so I told my friends I planned to work and perhaps attend college later. I did precisely that: I worked full-time, took two night classes per semester and in the summer, and eventually finished two years before I married. I admit though that I did briefly consider what it would be like to travel the world with my Air Force husband in uniform. Ultimately though, a small voice within me urging independence won out.

I have never regretted this decision, and I assume that Lynn Barber in her memoir feels the same way. Both of us are published authors and have achieved our career goals without making a decision to marry too early that we might have both been sorry for.

Why Does It Have to be So Sad?

I took my granddaughter last Sunday afternoon to the Arts Center in Little Rock to see a production of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Of course, as the play was performed, one could hear many sniffles throughout the audience (primarily from the adults who were familiar with the novel upon which the play is based). These emotions flowed when Beth, one of the younger sisters, gives slippers to Theodore's Grandpa who had lost his granddaughter when she was young. Another scene occurs when the family fears their father, who is in the Civil War and very ill will die, and another when Beth contracts scarlet fever. At the conclusion of the play in the question and answer session, one of the young audience members asked this question, "Why does it have to be so sad?" I think it is a question many readers ask of literature no matter what their age, and it brings up the traditional question we ask about writing, "Should it simply entertain or teach?" I have always fallen into the category of believing writing should be realistic. As such we can learn the lesson once again, "We read to know we are not alone."

Yes, confronting difficult life experiences in literature is hard, but at the same time it teaches us to deal emotionally with our own issues. For example, our granddaughter is now eleven years old, a tween as she often tells us. Her parents divorced a year ago, and she has now dealt with her mother's new boyfriend and his daughters as part of the new family scenario. She and her brother spend six days a month with her dad. She is in that transition stage from childhood to adulthood; one days she plays with her Barbie dolls and the next day she watches the Twilight movies. I believe that reading literature and watching plays of children dealing with difficult situations in their lives is healthy. After all, it is one way that "little women" might become "compassionate good-hearted women."