Listen to the Wisdom authors read a one-minute excerpt from their memoir about mother. Click on the arrow to hear the audio track.

“A Moon Song” by Barbara Toboni

In the early sixties, Mom found work at the Purple Onion and the Hungry I, two nightclubs in San Francisco. Many celebrities got their start there, Bob Newhart and the Smothers Brothers. She sang cabaret and starred in Annie Get Your Gun and Kiss Me Kate. She could sing any song requested and she danced, too.

Nan and I helped her learn the lyrics to the song “Triplets.” The song, from the film The Band Wagon, had lyrics that were complicated but funny. We giggled our way through each verse.

From our apartment in Orange, Mom traveled to the airport in Los Angeles and from there caught a plane to San Francisco. Once in San Francisco she stayed at the home of friends, two male opera singers. One of them played piano so Mom could rehearse.

When she left L.A., Dad took us to the airport to say good-bye. We watched the big silver jet take off, and then Dad would take us somewhere, maybe to Thrifty for an ice cream or to the beach.

“A Moon Song” by Barbara Toboni

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“Liebestraum: A Daughter’s Reflection” by Jeanne Jusaitis

Her hands drop tentatively, softly, on the keys of our old player piano, and I recognize the opening chords of “Liebestraum.” My mother plays on, but with more confidence so that the music crescendos just where it should. My thirteen-year-old chest aches for my mother, for her tenderness, her beauty. It is only when she plays this song, the song that means love’s dream, that I see the melancholy.

She turns to me with a big smile, giving up on the piece. “I wish I could play that like my mother,” she says. Light from the afternoon sun streams through the window to brighten her auburn hair.

“I like the way you play it,” I say. “Nana does better with the jazzy pieces.”

Mom smiles. “She plays by ear you know.” She starts “Liebestraum” again, reading the music this time.

And then I remember the parts of my mother that I know, that I’ve seen, that maybe nobody else has. There’s the blue flash of anger in her eye when she speaks of the circumstances of her parent’s divorce, of her stepfather’s violence, of her hardworking mother.

“Liebestraum: A Daughter’s Reflection” by Jeanne Jusaitis

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“The Deal We Made” by Marilyn J. Curry

One of the last television shows my mother fell for was Deal or No Deal, a game show hosted by Howie Mandel, where the contestants pick one unopened briefcase that they believe has their million dollars. There are no questions to the game, no competition, just the fascination of watching people who seemingly don’t have much money pass up six-digit amounts in the belief they have picked the million. The show was a hit, and my mother, who always knew the show business back stories, got a kick out of Howie having a comeback. Apparently he needed it.

My mother was always an in-the-know kind of a person when it came to movie and television personalities, but in the last phase of her illness, virtually housebound, she had limited options. When my brother and I saw her watching reruns of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, we tried to talk her into cable, of course offering to pay. She insisted that the broadcast networks were enough. I had never been a television person, but I crossed over. At first it was a way to visit with my mother, then it was something to talk about when we were apart, and now there really is no excuse.

“The Deal We Made” by Marilyn J. Curry

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“Not My Mother’s Child” by Ana Manwaring

How do I tell my story without pity, rancor, or guilt? Dad and his beautiful, sad first wife, Marguerite, adopted me, but the marriage didn’t last and they divorced in 1952. After the divorce and Dad’s ugly custody battle to keep me, the Episcopal minister, my godfather, introduced us to the woman who would become my mother. I know Dad thought he’d found a perfect wife and mother for his little girl—me.

Marjorie was nothing like the violent drunk Marguerite had become. My father’s second wife, “Mom,” brought her eight-year-old natural daughter and her adopted two-year-old son to the union. We became an instant family in 1955 with three small kids—I was smack in the middle at five years old. We were going to be one loving unit, indivisible, all for one and one for all.

“Not My Mother’s Child” by Ana Manwaring

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 “Edgewood” by Clarice Stasz

My mother was the eldest of daughter of five girls, reaching adolescence during the Depression. She left school to serve as a social secretary to wealthy women in elite Shaker Heights, Ohio. There she practiced her impeccable, clear handwriting, imbued by the nuns at her Hungarian-speaking Catholic grade school. Daily visits through the servants’ entrance to the pristine, calm, and artful atmosphere of the ladies’ private sitting rooms to write invitations became a terrible attraction. She even glanced noted people who came through the front doors. (Bob Hope would become a lifelong acquaintance, but that is another story.)  Perhaps there she absorbed her love of opera and fine art, her spirited motive for philanthropy, but at what cost, knowing she could never cross the front thresholds?

Escape she did, stealing a sister’s best clothes, to flee to Chicago where she sang on the radio and competed in dance contests. A photograph reveals her sylph slim figure in a clinging satin gown, the closest she would ever come to resembling the ladies of Shaker Heights. By age twenty-one she was married, widowed, single parent to a daughter, and back with the family she had fled in Cleveland.

 ”Edgewood” by Clarice Stasz

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 ”Little Traveler” by Laura McHale Holland

I can recall several scenes from the two years when my mother’s life intersected with mine. They are like pencil sketches drawn in haste on napkins and stuffed into pockets, not exquisitely rendered oil paintings on canvas hung with care on museum walls.

In one memory, my sister Mary Ruth comes to my crib. Her wide, blue eyes are the only part of the memory with color; most of the scene resembles the black-and-white television shows of 1950s America, which is the era of my early childhood. Mary Ruth calls out, “Mommy, Mommy, can Laura play?” At first our mother says no from another room, but Mary Ruth persists, wears her down. And finally my mother comes into the room. She has wavy, dark hair, glasses, and a gentle but distracted touch. She lifts me from my crib and, with a weary sigh, plunks me on the floor and speeds away. I begin to play with Mary Ruth and my other sister, Kathy, but I cannot keep up with them, which frustrates me. I begin to wail. My mother rushes into the room, picks me up, puts me back in my crib and leaves the room again.

I believe this sort of thing happened quite a bit and that I spent more time in my crib as a baby and toddler than is customary, but this is just my surmising. I cannot honestly attest to what day-to-day life was like for me when my mother was alive.

 ”Little Traveler” by Laura McHale Holland

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