Sarah’s Memories of Her Mom

Our family moved to Reston in 1967, when I was fifteen. That was also the summer I had the second round of orthopedic surgery on my feet. Both at the same time so that I would be able to start school in the Fall cast-free. There we were, renting a house just a few doors down from Lake Anne Village Center, a five split-level affair directly across from the Heron House high rise. Visitors from around the world still thronged to Reston, peering into our windows as though we were zoo animals. I couldn’t walk, didn’t have a single friend in Reston, didn’t like television except for Star Trek, and was BORED! Luckily, I had Mom.

That was the summer we read Winston Churchill’s The Birth of Britain, which I combined with a series of historical novels about the Plantagenets.  After meals, my mother and I would remain at the table, in serious conversation about early British monarchies, grandly enjoying each other’s company. Mom would punctuate her remarks with drags on her latest Lucky Strike, the same unfiltered cigarettes that advertising agencies had peddled to nice young ladies during the interwar period by photographing America’s debutants smoking as they walked down fashionable New York City boulevards. My mother also was fashionable, just naturally chic, her hair a blue-black bob with a wide—completely natural—streak of white across the forehead. She dressed well, she was always going out to meetings with the Denver Women’s Press Club and the League of Women Voters, and she earned actual money as a writer and a journalist. As my middle son would say decades later, she “knew stuff.”

Of course, by the next year, she no longer knew stuff. So much so that, in her words, we met head-on most of the time. Both of us were stubborn women and our agendas did not always align. While I organized for the Vietnam anti-war protests, she was president of the PTA and deeply involved with integrating the faculty of a high school that had been all white, students and teachers, only a couple years before. The late 1960s came as a bit of a shock to the school administration and the principal responded to my lunch-break assembly about the war by deciding I was a member of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and repeatedly searching my locker for drugs. My poor mother initially was infuriated that HER DAUGHTER (!) called attention to herself as a malcontent right in the middle of delicate negotiations with the principal about changing his hiring practices. Our mother/daughter after meal exchanges tended to occur at the tops of our voices and she even reamed me out in public on a couple of instances. But here’s the thing. The era of the anti-war protests and counter culture was a fraught time for parents and children. And my mother did something unusual in my circle—she apologized. No matter how angry she was—and let me tell you, small, vibrant ladies of Irish descent can get really, really angry—she had the intellectual integrity to admit when she overstepped or tried to crush my agenda in favor of her own. Then there was the fact that we loved each other.

So, as years rolled by, I chose to rear my three boys in Reston in the midst of the older generation. My parents, my Uncle Ward and Aunt Sue Schram. My husband’s parents, John and Suzy Mook, who moved to Reston from Oshkosh, Wisconsin after the grandchildren began to arrive. Mom didn’t get to smoke in front of the boys, yet the after-dinner conversations continued. Even though both of my Folks worked full time, they took my kids on adventures to parks and mountains and to almost every single community festival and concert Reston had to offer. I never would have finished my PhD without help from my parents. I never would have managed to juggle multiple surgeries with motherhood without my parents. My children would not be the grounded and compassionate men they are without my parents.

To a large extent, even once I moved to Massachusetts, my life revolved around my parents. Well, my sons first, parents second. Christmas, my mother’s absolutely favorite holiday, became an annual family reunion once my kids were grown. To my utter delight, even my youngest son’s not-quite-in-laws came for Christmas. These last almost four years, I was a full-time caretaker for my parents, with nephew Koaw. And I’ve had the pleasure of seeing how often my sons touched base, dropped by, came to visit. Almost completely unbegrudgingly, I can report that my Boston son, Galen, called his grandmother far more often than he did his mother. Son Benjamin, who hates riding in cars and passed that dislike to both his son and daughter, Moses and Ayelet, brought his whole family down from Brooklyn every summer, every Christmas. (Actually, my DIL, Avigail, did the driving.) D.C. son, Nate stopped by with interesting kitchen appliances when Mom was still cooking and interesting carryout thereafter. Galen’s lady, Jess, knowing Mom liked to eat almost as much as she liked to cook, arrived with homemade jams and other delicacies. 

What will we do without my mother? Where will we gather? With whom shall I chat after dinner? It’s a new era and, so far, rather bleak. However, my mother was not one to sit around and lament. Following her lead, we shall carry on nurturing this extended family she loved so intensely. We shall show the great-grandchildren photographs and tell stories of both Nancy and Cal Larson and maybe, in honor of Mom, exaggerate some of the time to keep the tales lively. God knows we have a lot to work with!