Mom's Feminist Marriage

Frances Smoot ca. 1970

When Dad retired, he complained that just going to the bank, the store, and the post office had taken him all morning. Mom quipped, "Try it with three small children in the car." Thus Mom described her life as a wife and mother in the 1960s.

So Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique (1963) spoke to her. Friedan begins her book with a survey of the best selling women's magazines. In 1960, a year of startling changes in politics, culture, and technology, McCall's and Woman's Day contained no mention of the world beyond the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. Women, now largely college-educated, were dependent on their men and spending their days on trivial chores.

But household chores are sacred, women were told, not trivial. The "feminine mystique" was the party line that women, with their mysterious child-bearing powers, were "closer to nature" than men, to be cherished and protected from the harsh realities of the working-day world. (The hit TV sitcom Bewitched embodied the myth of the mystique, as a super-powered wife stays home doing chores while her husband goes to work, so that he can have what he calls a "normal family." Made explicit, the feminine mystique was ridiculous.)

Years later, Mom remembered how she drove with Friedan's book to a signing in downtown Pittsburgh. "But when I got to the front of the line, I saw how ugly she was and thought, no wonder her husband left her!" Mom dropped out of line.

Still, within a couple of years, Mom was changing her life. When my big sister was in elementary school, Mom became President of the PTA. She was also elected chairwoman of the local chapter of the Republican party [I remember being fascinated by the gavel that she brought home.]

So she was a community leader when Dad told her he'd taken a new job in Chicago and we'd be moving. "And you didn't even ask me?" she said. Decades later, Dad was still abashed about that. "She went along with it that time," he said, "but I never made that mistake again."

In that same conversation with my parents, they were astounded that I didn't remember Mom's Day Off. Saturdays, Dad fed us breakfast, supervised cartoon-watching, and took us on excursions to the garden center and hardware store, while she dressed up and drove away to no-one-knows where. Mom told me that her Saturdays probably saved their marriage.

In the 1970s, Mom went back to work as a teacher at Holy Innocents Episcopal School. (She'd taught sixth grade one semester before her first child started to show.) Dad encouraged her to get her Master's in Education. Laughing, they told me that he even wrote some of her papers. She became the team leader for 3rd grade and created the school's summer program, which she directed for two decades. Mom also became an entrepreneur. With friends, she purchased properties to rent or resell. She managed a pool of writing tutors that she called “The Write Connection.” When she was called forward at an all-school faculty meeting to be honored at her retirement for her 33 years of service, she astonished the crowd by doing a handspring.

Super-powered indeed.

[See my page Family Corner for much more about Mom, Dad, and their families. See my Dementia Diary about the downs and occasional ups in Mom's life since she moved alone to a retirement home near me. See also Bewitched Craft for more ways that the sitcom reflected its time.]

Dementia Diary: Mom at 89

In the photos below, Mom receives a necklace given by her mother to Mom's cousin Pat. When my sister and I visited Pat this month, she gave us the necklace for Mom to have. It made a great birthday present when Mom turned 89 a few days later.

These days, Mom appears to be engaged in anything I say with her Visiting Angel Laura. Sometimes she comments. Although her speech consists largely of half-words and non-sequiturs, her tone and expression clue us in on whether she's expressing a concern, recounting an amusing anecdote, or making a tart comment.

She didn't say much of anything during my visit Friday. I stood beside her wheelchair holding her hand while Laura chatted with me. With her free hand, Mom felt my arm and sometimes leaned in to kiss it.

Theology for Breakfast: Forward DxD Aug-Oct 2023 - Faith is a Body Thing

Every morning I read scripture assigned for that day in the Episcopal Book of Common prayer, then relax into a short reflection on those readings offered by the quarterly Forward Day by Day. Every quarter I've culled highlights, going back to 2013.

AugustFr. Allen W. Farabee of Florida found so many life lessons and life questions in the scriptures for August that I'll just list highlights.

• The "hillside picnic" in Mark 6, when the crowd is anxious about having enough food, reminds Farabee of grocery-store raids at the start of COVID. For most of us, food insecurity was a frightening new experience. "In the end, the crowd is asked to sit down, and they are served -- and all eat are filled."
• "The first words spoken by a person to God in the Bible express fear" (Adam: I heard you...and I was afraid.) Stepping into the boat from the surface of the lake, Jesus says, "Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid." Farabee comments: "In the end, it is all we want to hear."
• In the Greek marketplace, Paul speaks the language of the Athenians. Farabee asks, "Where are you called to proclaim the Good News? In what ways will you need to 'speak the language?'" (I reflected that this blog is my way of doing that -- as I find God in the books and movies and musicals of secular artists.)
• God emptied himself and took the form of a slave, in Phil.2.5-7; those who want to save their life will lose it, in Mark 8.35. Farabee comments, "I don't think such a premise can be debated. It is unprovable. But this reversal is the way of life. So says Jesus. And I believe him." That's pretty close to being the only creed we need.
• Most of our sins are not as gross as David's murderous determination to rape Uriah's wife Bathsheba, but sin still "distorts our lives." To illustrate, Farabee tells how he broke a date in 6th grade when a more attractive girl asked him to the dance. Life went on, he said, "but my soul has never forgotten. Nor should it." Yet God still used even David, and God is still at work in us.
• Psalm 88 ends without hope. Farabee recalls a time when he served a congregation that rejected him, when he "could have prayed Psalm 88 over and over." He reassures us, "Don't skip over the darkness. God is still there."
• "Are you able to drink the cup that I drink...?" Jesus asks James and John. Seeing that everyone is able to be killed, Farabee asks just what "able" means in this context? Are we "able?"
• I never noticed what Farabee points out, that the Prayer Book schedules readings that celebrate the goodness of creation for Saturdays. "Our faith begins in the goodness of creation -- or it will lead us nowhere."
• The broken pieces of rejected pottery outside an artisan's studio seemed wasteful to Farabee, until he saw the finished products inside. This gives a different spin on Mark 12.10 (a quote from Psalm 118). The stone that the builders rejected could have been a first draft, a model, for something much better. "Trust God to turn waste into glory."
• Psalm 140.10 prays for hot coals to fall upon the enemy. Farabee says, we've wished that too. "Come on. Admit it. We get hurt or offended or maligned... and the bitter impulses of our souls bubble to the surface, searing out better selves." But remember another verse for the same day, 143.10, "Teach me to do what pleases you, for you are my God."

At the end of August, Farabee responds to Mark 14.17, Jesus coming to dinner with the twelve on what will be a night of betrayal. "If you remember," Farabee writes, "we began this month scattered on the hillside, hungry... worried there would not be enough." How fitting that we end with Jesus, friends, Passover bread and wine, signifying the promise of God's kingdom. Farabee's last words to us are: "Try to remember Jesus each time you break bread, feed the hungry, and share what you have."

SeptemberJodi Belcher holds a doctor of divinity degree from Duke and continues to live and teach in Durham. What stood out to me in her morning meditations was her emphasis on the body in our scriptures. Belcher tells us how, as a teenager, she got the impression that faith was purely spiritual and the body was bad. I can identify.

She finds physicality in prayer, as when Jacob "wrestles" all night with his inner demon, and Jesus is praying apart from his friends and "falling apart" with tears at Gethsemane. In the sweeping grandeur of the Exodus story, Belcher notices "grace notes of earth and flesh" when Moses and the Lord "find each other": the flock, the bare feet, the sacred ground, and a couple of basic questions, "Who am I? Who are you?" For Belcher, the familiar phrase "faith without works is dead" is telling us "faith is a body thing," not a spiritual feeling or intellectual belief, and mostly involves "welcoming and caring for bodies, our own and our neighbor's." transition to social ills - "wages cry out" in James 5.4 -- which I read after hearing a piece on "true price of immigration"

Other familiar scriptures are more comforting or more urgent when taken as physical realities, not metaphors. "I am with you," the Lord repeats three times to Jacob (Gen 28.15). Picturing Psalm 23, Belcher wonders how "goodness shall follow me all the days of my life," since she imagines the Shepherd leading us from the front. Is goodness perhaps something we leave behind wherever we go? When Paul assures the Philippians that God "will transform the body of our humiliation [to] be conformed to the body of His glory," Belcher isn't sure what Paul is imagining (and I bet Paul wasn't, either), but at least the apostle is telling us that our bodies are worth resurrecting. Again, God derides Jonah for mourning the withering of a shrub while thinking that God wouldn't care about the destruction of Nineveh, where there are 20,000 human bodies "besides many animals." (Belcher comments that the story doesn't say that love is more important than justice, but that justice can go beyond punishment and oppression.)

When Matthew takes Jesus to his home for dinner, Belcher notes how often Jesus's ministry involves just "sitting with" people who are usually avoided. I saw a demonstration of that when I played piano for a communion service that my church offered at a retirement home. After the last hymn, a woman asked me if I could play "You'll Never Walk Alone" because her sister used to sing it, and "she's being pulled off life support in Florida right now, as we speak." She wept. Mother Pat noticed, and simply sat with her and listened to her. (Meanwhile, I did find the song's chord chart on my phone and played it on the piano, softly).

Anger makes us "liable to judgment" in Matthew 5.22, but anger may also be a physical alarm in response to an injustice or a crack in a relationship. Take care of those when you feel anger, Belcher advises us.

On the same day that Belcher reflects on James 5.4, "wages cry out," I heard a story on NPR about "the true price of immigration." When we figure how underpayment of immigrant men, women, and children for their labor keeps down prices for goods and services, while we save taxpayers' money by cutting immigrants off from such services as English lessons and medical benefits, the thought that wages cry out makes a strong physical image for injustice.

OctoberThe writer for October, Kathryn Nishibayashi, fourth-generation member of St. Mary's in LA and graduate of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, spent 12 years teaching elementary school. I'm grateful to her for reinterpreting the parable of the sower (Matthew 13) as her analogy for teaching. In a few students, now grown and still connected with her, she sees how "the seeds" she had sown took root and helped them to "grow into the people God has made them to be." But, like me, she will never know for most of her students what took, and what didn't. "The gift God gives us is not a certainty in the outcome but the honor of laboring together in the field."