This Post Could Cost Me Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars and the Love of My Mother. So Be It.

My mom visited me twice last week, driving over with my dad, who is fixing up my breezeway. She and I sat at my dining room table and yakked up a storm. At some point during her second visit, she said to me, "If any of this turns up on Facebook, you're out of the will."

I choose to interpret that injunction as applying to only the subject we'd been discussing for some time at that point: the disposition of estates, family finances, and my father's life expectancy, which I promise you we had a good reason for discussing beyond "when can we get our hands on his hard-earned loot?"

But the conversation we had two days earlier? I figure that's fair game.

Also, my mother didn't say anything about my blog.

My dad is a man for whom actions speak much louder than words. Indeed, his actions often contradict his words. He complains about my mother's disability, but when it comes to caring for her he is, if not quite tender, then certainly kind and indefatiguable. Over the last decade he has taken over all the cooking and housework, after 50 years in a marriage with such traditional division of labor that my mother even fixed him lunch on Saturdays, something it would never occur to me to do for Raider. When my nephew, Word Boy 2, was born three years ago, my 75-year-old dad even took up diaper-changing so my folks could baby-sit him.

He built my mom a little half-step that he carries in the car to help her get up short unavoidable flights of stairs, like my front stoop. For some reason, this little wooden home-made step warmed my heart. Quintessence of Dad, right there, to jump in and build something to solve a problem.

Anyway, on Wednesday my mom and I sat around for three hours and told family stories. I like re-hearing the stories I heard as a kid, if only because it reassures me that I haven't made stuff up. Or because it lets me correct the misunderstandings and mistakes in my versions.

But sometimes, my mom surprises me by telling a story I haven't heard before, and that happened on Wednesday.

I used to joke, darkly, that I came from a long line of women who didn't want children. The only thing in that line that's not true is the "long" part. I don't know how my maternal great-grandmother, parent of 13, felt about having children. I do know that the family story goes that my grandma, number 13, didn't have a middle name because her parents had flat-out run out of ideas.

My grandma, though, didn't choose to have children. The defining story of her life is that at 17, a senior in high school and on-track to be valedictorian, she fell pregnant and was forced to drop out of school to marry my grandfather. She always regretted school; she was proud of her accomplishments there, and hoped at least to go on to nursing school as so many of her sisters had. She sometimes regretted my grandfather; their marriage was not an easy one, marked by conflict, some of it physical, and it wasn't until their children were grown and gone that they enjoyed some measure of financial stability.

She blamed my aunt for ruining her life, as if my aunt somehow got herself conceived and born, and she had a remarkable capacity for not forgiving. She carried childhood slights to her grave, and apparently never repented of her tendency to blame her children for the disappointments of her life.

She was 17 in 1927; she had three children while she and grandpa were still living with her parents. And here's the new story my mom told me:

Apparently, the road they lived on was a long, straight country road with no stop signs. Cars got moving pretty fast, and when the road ended in a T, it took many drivers by surprise. You could tell how surprised they were by the wreckage of their cars up against a big tree that stood straight ahead and brought them up short if they didn't make the turn onto the cross street.

My grandmother, not very happily married and with three young children, found herself pregnant again, and despaired. She told my mother that she drove down that street, thinking about that tree, and it was a powerful temptation.

"Well," my mother said, "I was her fourth child. Talk about your unwanted children!"

My grandma didn't want that fourth child so strongly that she thought about suicide. My mother, pregnant in 1965, didn't want that baby, either. She wanted an abortion, but she couldn't get one.

My mom told me about grandma and the tree without apprently referencing or remembering my own status as the baby who wouldn't be here if she'd had her druthers. And one direction this writing could go in might be about my mother's and my shared wound, of knowing that we were unwanted children. Or it could turn into a story about how my mother, recognizing her own wound, nonetheless turned around and inflicted the same one on me. I've always thought that the "I wanted an abortion" story was one I could have lived my whole life without hearing, and knowing that she was told her own version of it does make me wonder, just a little, what she was thinking, not keeping that to herself?

(It also lends a delicious irony to her distaste for people on Facebook who don't know when to shut up.)

But I don't see the story that way right now. What it has had me thinking about for days is my grandma, my mom, and me, and how our lives were shaped by the times we lived in.

My grandma became sexually active at 17 in a time when birth control was not only not readily available, but frowned upon for "decent" women. There's a story (there's always a story!) about her turning my grandpa out of her bed unless he bought protection. He drove to a neighboring town to buy condoms, because no decent man would use condoms with his wife.

Well, somebody saw him there. And word got back to my grandma that LJ was cheating on her. Because why else would he be buying condoms? The story goes, my grandma just laughed when she heard that.

I don't know if the condoms failed them, or they didn't use them for long, but my grandma got pregnant three more times after my mom, the unwanted fourth child, was born. One of the babies was a full-term stillbirth, which she birthed at home, all alone. Grandpa had to go to work, and although he had stopped by on his way to tell his sisters my grandma needed them, by the time they got to the house it was all over. My grandma had given birth, stripped the bed, bathed and dressed herself, washed and wrapped her stillborn baby and laid it neatly in a clean shoe box.

Because back then, women like my grandma were tough, strong, matter-of-fact people who did what needed to be done. I wonder how she felt about that baby, buried under a walnut tree somewhere on that farm. Grief, I imagine, and also relief. In what measures? We'll never know.

That's my grandma's story, in her time and place: seven pregnancies she had almost no control over; six children to raise in poverty. Wanted or not, the babies came.

My mom got married 40 years later, in 1957. She was 24 years old and had been living on her own and supporting herself for eight years. She and my dad had their first child, my brother, four years later. Sooner than they'd planned to; they were putting my dad through college and wanted him to graduate first. And they had me not quite four years after that, also at a time not of their choosing.

My mom and dad at least had some option for family planning. In the pre-Roe, pre-Pill days of their early marriage, though, their children also came as they would. Two birth control failures. That my folks wanted at least one child is implicit in the plan to "wait" until after graduation. They didn't get to choose their times, but they were at least able to space their children, to have only one kid under three at a time instead of 2 or 3. And they were able to stop at two.

My mom quit work when my brother was born. She'd been at the phone company since she was sixteen, and was by then a supervisor. She liked her work and was good at it. She has some great stories (of course) about being a telephone operator in a college town in the days when operators had to place long-distance calls for you, and fake collect calls ("Collect call from Miss Blue Shoes") could be placed in the hope that Dad would be clever enough to realize you needed something mailed to you in time for Saturday's dance.

In 1961, women quit work when they "started a family." So that's what my mom did. But she always regretted it, at least a little. She liked her work, and felt competent and appreciated there. She liked her independence. And she did not find being home full-time with her children especially fulfilling.

She was just a bit too early; she just missed a coming revolution. By the time I was in middle school in the mid-70s, the mothers of my friends--most of them a decade or so younger than my mom, who'd had me when she was 32--worked. Our neighbors worked. My mom thought it mattered that there was someone home for us when we got back from school, but the other kids in our neighhorhood got by with a mix of babysitters, unsupervised time, and the careless oversight of slightly older children. And they seemed to be doing fine.

To add insult to injury, it seemed to my mother that my brother and I envied them, that we also wanted the freedom of an empty house and no adult supervision. We didn't, it seemed to her, treasure the mother who waited for us at home. We resented her.

(I say "it seemed to her" because I don't remember feeling that way. But I am perfectly preparted to believe that my behavior was consistent with her interpretation.)

By the time I became sexually active, around 1985, I had easy access to a whole array of birth control options (and my mother, bless her, made damn sure I knew what they were and how important it was to use them). Abortion was an option. And by 1986, I'd stopped having procreative sex--I haven't had to deal with the spectre of unwanted pregnancy for 25 years.

I know that, as a lesbian and then as part of a couple who can't reproduce without medical intervention, I'm an outlyer. I could only have babies I planned for. I know that people still have surprise babies. Word Boy 2 was a late-life bonus for my brother and sister-in-law. My sister-in-law's sister has a daughter who is significantly younger than her other children. "We joked," she told me one time, "that we should name her Daisy. As in, Whoops-a-daisy!"

But even these surprise babies are, at least in some measure, chosen babies. At least for the families I know, who have the knowledge and the resources to exercise their options even in today's climate of attacks on abortion rights.

I had the luxury of actively choosing each of my children, something my mother aspired to and couldn't quite manage, something my grandmother couldn't even imagine.

My point is that I don't think my grandma's story, my mom's story, and my story are just sad personal tales of children who weren't wanted and knew it, of women trapped or constrained by childrearing. My grandma was eight years old when women got the right to vote in federal elections. The first time I voted, I voted for a woman for vice president. We're not just our own stories. We're the story of a whole century of women in America.