May292009
Generation Gaps & Skips
Filed under Family by Kim at 2:55 pm on May 29 2009
I had this weird conversation with my mom this week. See, I’d been listening to some classic labor songs from the early 20th century (thanks, Smithsonian Folkways!) and I was thinking about how most of them were about work men were doing. So that made me think about my mother and my grandmother’s work, and how my place in the world of work came about because of that. (Coincidentally this post came up on Feministing as well.)
So, I called mom up and asked her about it. In particular, I wanted to understand if she’d had career ambitions? If that was effected by the fact that my grandmother was mainly the breadwinner of the family? At a time when that was so not normal? If my mother felt encouraged to go out and work? If my mother had dreamed of being a homemaker instead? That didn’t seem likely knowing my mom, but I wanted to ask.
It turns out that what my grandmother’s life of professional work did was make my mother into someone who wanted to carefully instill in her daughter the sense that you need to fend for yourself. She felt that I needed to know that leaning on someone else was not truly ever a permanent option, even though my father was a dedicated partner and always worked hard to provide and help around the house. (Now he is retired and living off the spoils of my mother’s wages, but I think she has the sweet deal because dinner is on the table when she gets home! I want that.)
It’s kind of weird that it didn’t have that effect on my mom. She’s not really career driven. The best answer I could get out of her was that she didn’t think she was smart enough. I can only barely fathom why she’d think that, but it was not because she wasn’t smart enough.
1 Angela @ Lost In Splendoron 29 May 2009 at 8:34 pm
It’s always interesting to think of the women we have come from and their choices and what challenges they have face and worked through. I don’t feel like I’m really able to examine that in my own family.
I have tried to ask my mom about it before, but really she married young to get out of her parents home and turned into the workaholic she is now out of necessity and personally I feel avoidance of really examining her life.
Was it sad to hear your mother day she didn’t feel smart enough? I think women are classically taught to think of themselves as less than. Not as smart or strong or capable. I wish that were different.
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Kim Reply:
June 1st, 2009 at 11:13 am
It was pretty sad to hear. On the other hand, that water has already gone under the bridge so I don’t want to rub it in. My mom doesn’t tend to look back and analyze decisions a great deal. I wonder if it’s generational. Us younger folks might just tend to analyze more.
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