Maria, January 2020
I think that my very life is the revenge of my foremothers, all of them.
I’ve thought many times about my grandmothers. One was Anastasia, who I never met. She died 5 years before I was born. But I know that she was born at the turn of the last century to a “lace curtain Irish” mother who had married beneath her station to a beer truck driver. He died of sepsis after cutting his hand on a beer bottle, leaving her a young widow to raise her children alone.
Anastasia raised five children during the Depression while married to Walter, a union man who worked for New York City transit, and spent most of his paycheck on alcohol. I’m told that she was smarter than her husband, and significantly more ambitious, but women of her generation had very few options in life, and mothers, even fewer. By the time Anastasia had my mother, the youngest, Anastasia was agoraphobic, leaving the house only to go to church, and occasionally drank too much herself.
My other grandmother was Ana, from a German emigre family in New Jersey, who met my grandfather working at a factory. They raised their four children in a cold-water flat. Ana was known to change pretty much any conversation topic into a story about herself, and why she was either aggrieved, or a failure. She had a tough life, and did not make it easier on those around her.
I think Anastasia dreamed of a different life, one in which she could support herself, make her own decisions, free herself from depending on someone undependable. I think Ana’s family would have benefited had she had at least a modicum of self-determination.
And now here I am, a woman in the United States in the 21st century. I can vote, and I damn well do in every election. I have reproductive health care and I can and have used it to determine the outcomes I choose. I have had an excellent education and I have a career that I really enjoy and that pays me well. I have money in my own name – I’ve borrowed in my own name, invested on my own behalf. I can support myself, and I don’t have to consult anyone else about my choices. I choose my friends, I choose how I spend my time, I choose my own faith community. And I have a partner who cooks for me more than I do for him, and who values my independence. My life, with my freedoms as a woman, would have been a miracle nearly impossible to fathom for my grandmothers.
It was my mother who spanned that difference. And it wasn’t easy. Her marriage – to Ana’s son – failed. He expected someone who would cook, raise the children, do all the domestic work AND make money outside the home, while still deferring to his decision-making. And he considered himself enlightened, to boot. I suppose it’s an extremely common sin for the privileged to want the version of the liberation of the oppressed that assuages any guilt, but still mostly benefits the privileged.
And so while my father left us and moved 1,000 miles away, my single mom sacrificed to raise two daughters, all the while trying to find her place within shifting cultural sands. She never remarried, hardly so much as dated again. I think it can’t have been fun to be married to Ana’s son, and men her generation would hit on her by saying things like, “You should come over and make me dinner.” But she tried really hard to empower us, her daughters, to be brave, confident, risk-taking women who can make all our own decisions. And I think she did a pretty great job.