Not Becoming My Mother Read Online Free PDF

ecstatically happy.
    But the calligraphy series did not do very well, so they changed directions and produced a twelve-volume series called The Homemaker’s Encyclopedia , which was written entirely by my mother. It included volumes on needlecraft, home repairs, gardening, housekeeping, entertaining—even personal beauty and charm. How my mother, who could not cook, had never sewn a single garment, gardened not at all, despised cleaning and used no makeup, managed to produce this vintage gem still baffles me. “It was a challenge,” she said proudly. “But I have always been good at research. And”—she could never resist adding this—“it made a fair amount of money.”
    They finished the series just after I was born, and then they started a magazine for brides. But that did not do very well either, and by then their financial needs had become pressing. My father’s parents, who had escaped Hitler by fleeing to Shanghai, had finally made their way to America and were exhausted, ill and destitute. Desperately trying to support them, my parents sold their company. They thought that Dad could earn more doing the work that he was known for—designing books. And I can’t help thinking that after his stint with homemakers and brides Dad must have been secretly happy to return to the literature that he loved.
    Mom ran his office for a while but she knew nothing about typography and could do little more than answer phones and type invoices. Before long she realized that she was back where she had been when they met: doing dull, routine chores that neither exploited her talents nor engaged her mind.
    Dad encouraged her to find other work, but after the war jobs for women were not easy to come by. In fact, women who worked were considered unpatriotic. “You women and girls go home, back to being housewives as you promised to do,” trumpeted an army general in a widely televised speech. In the background you can hear the men cheering wildly. Little wonder, then, that by the time I was old enough to notice, Mom was not working at all.
    And, with the exception of a couple of widows and the women she pityingly called “career spinsters,” none of her friends were either. All of those smart, competent women sat at home, twiddling their thumbs and telling their daughters how much they had enjoyed working during the war.

Chaos
    Whenever my mother ’s parents came to visit our cramped apartment my mother flew into a panic. She would go rushing through the rooms like Hurricane Miriam, flinging things from every drawer and closet. Playing with my toys I would find myself surrounded by heaps of clothes, piles of linens, stacks of books and towers of plates, while my mother, her now-graying hair tied up in a scarf, madly ran the vacuum cleaner through the clutter as if that could somehow make it magically disappear.
    “They’ll be here in three hours!” she’d cry, terror in her voice. Even at four I understood that “they” were the old people who appeared on our doorstep from time to time. Mom always undertook a cleaning binge right before her parents arrived, a kind of mad last-minute frenzy that never left enough time to repair the mess that she had made.
    When the bell rang, Mom’s eyes always went wide. And there they’d be, my grandfather with his elegant shock of white hair and my impeccably regal grandmother. They would stroll in, look at each other in dismay and sadly shake their heads. From the floor I’d look up, hating them but not really knowing why.
    I resented my grandmother and dreaded her visits. I used to think it was because they made our crowded apartment feel even smaller than it really was. But now I know that whenever she showed up our apartment turned into a battle-ground where two deeply disappointed women waged a war that was especially fierce because it had been such a long time coming.
    The combatants themselves were conscious of the struggle, and they knew exactly where the lines were drawn.