Robin Reif
Within 7 years, my mother was not just my mother but mother to four other beings. I wasn’t even the first to claim her, having arrived 13 months behind my sister.
Besides being our mother, she was in some ways my father’s mother, cooking his meals, choosing his clothes, being home to receive him, exhausted from the mix of boredom and pulse-raising emergency that marked his life as a doctor.
Inhaling norms of the 50s and early 60s, she came to see her healthy ambitions as rebellions to be quashed by her internal thought police and, when that failed, her sister and mother sprung into action, reminding her that though she chafed to be out in the world, she should be satisfied at home. I can imagine them reciting the dismissive critique she later used on me—You cry with two loaves under your arms!
When I stand back and appreciate that she was 24-hour breast, referee, cook, chauffeur, soother-in-chief, I regret blaming her for not being more of a role model to the professional women she raised.
Not that she didn’t venture into the wide world; between pregnancies, she was a devotee of Arthur Murray’s Dance Studio, absorbing Mambo, Cha-Cha and Rhumba, the Latin craze in full swing by the late 50s, early 60s. She also managed to rope my two-left-feet-father into private lessons on Sunday nights, during which I sat among my siblings on the steps of our finished basement, watching in amazement, dimly aware that there was something going on between my parents that we weren’t part of, as they danced, hips pressed, under the bemused eye of their instructor, Maddie.