I was 9.
A woman came to our door that I recognized as the mother of one of my classmates. She wasn’t like my mom. She dressed in comfortable clothes. She spoke in straight sentences. She didn’t wear makeup. She didn’t seem to care about what others thought of her. Not in the way my mom did. I always liked her when she came and helped out in class, but recognized the disconnect.
My mom came of age in the ‘50s, and she, sadly, bought all that society had to sell her about how women should be, which is less than. The man ran the household. And everything else. Even at that age, I recognized that my mom was struggling with her own disconnect. She was a highly intelligent woman, who pushed it all down to be a stay-at-home mom. I would have appreciated it more, perhaps, if she hadn’t been so angry, and unaware of where her anger came from.
The mother of my classmate was canvassing to get people to sign a petition to put the Equal Right Amendment on the ballot. My mother at first said her usual “No thank you,” as she did to all the Mormon missionaries who would show up monthly at our door.
But this woman, who was also Jewish, wouldn’t take the brush off. She asked my mother if she could read the amendment to us. My mom thought that was reasonable. And here’s what she read:
------“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” ------
That was it. One sentence. One simple sentence that made total sense, and clashed with all of the reporting by so-called “objective” journalists who squawked from the boxes in our family room and kitchen that the world would come to an end with this evil amendment. One simple sentence that obviated my father’s clear views against this.
Standing there in the doorway, holding my mother’s right hand in my left, looking back and forth between the woman at the door and my mother, is a moment that is indelible on my hippocampus.
Silently I was willing her to sign the petition. I knew it would be a watershed moment for her. And, likely, me.
“Please sign, please sign, please sign,” I thought, as I looked up at her face, the face I knew better than anything, reading surprise and indecision.
Seconds ticked by. Maybe minutes. Hell, it felt like hours. And my mother finally said, “I think I’ll pass. Thank you.” My heart sank.
And yet, I knew that I would have signed it.
They were 7.
We were walking from our house to the bagel store, which was a good two miles away. As we passed a church at the corner of two busy main streets, we noticed a woman whose car had stalled as she was turning right.
My twin girls were learning about Mitzvot at that time. Good deeds. And my instinct to help this woman dovetailed with giving my daughters the opportunity to do a good deed. So I told them we needed to push the woman’s car into the church parking lot.
They had never seen this done, and didn’t understand how the physics made it pretty easy to push a car. I understood that they couldn’t exert much force at that point in their lives, but I would push the car, while they exerted as much force as they could.
My kids did a lot of “work” like that when they were little – shoveling snow, raking leaves, etc. Learning to work. So we went to the back of the car and I told the woman to get back in and steer. She protested for a second. I’m not sure she understood the physics of it, either. Then she got in her car. And I pushed. And the girls pushed. And the car moved easily.
Then, after we had turned the corner and just as we were about to breach the church parking lot, two teenage boys came up, nudged us out of the way and finished pushing her car into the lot. To my utter astonishment – and to the astonishment of my 7-year-olds WHO STILL REMEMBER THIS 12 YEARS LATER – the woman got out of the car and thanked the boys profusely – without even acknowledging us.
As we walked away, the girls asked why she did that. I told them that I wanted them to learn a lesson about doing good deeds. Sadly, they learned another lesson entirely. But perhaps one just as valuable.
She was 70.
She and my dad had come in to visit us in the idyllic suburb that, in the height of the summer, looked like a park with houses. This was a place where you did not have to lock your doors. Where kids rode their bikes to friend’s houses around the neighborhood.
It was also a place dotted with country clubs - one for each group of people who the other country clubs wouldn’t allow in, when the town came to be populated with Jews in the 1970s and then Black people in the 1990s. There was one golf course that, in 2002 when we moved in, I could not play at because I was Jewish.
Our neighborhood was holding a block party, and my folks and I and the girls brought our chairs and cooler and donned our sun hats and sat outside our neighbor’s house.
I said hi to some people I knew, people who had kids in my kids’ class. But for the most part, I didn’t know many of the people on that block. They were not part of the Jewish country club, which I did not belong to, or community, which I did. They were certainly not part of the Dyke coalition, which didn’t exist and which anyway only would have consisted of two families in town, the other of which lived on the other side of the central square.
My mom’s issues with COPD were starting to become more acute at that point in her life, so she just sat, doing what she loved most - watching her grandchildren have fun. I mostly sat on the ground facing my mother.
Two Jewish mothers. Watching the people we loved.
Then, suddenly, out of the blue, a projectile came flying through the air and hit my mother on the back of the neck. Because I was facing her, I saw it coming a split second before it hit her, and exploded in a gush of water. A water balloon. Aimed at my 70-year-old mother.
What. The. Fuck.
It didn’t take a second for me to be up yelling and marching up the driveway toward the garage door where a bunch of boys were standing, saying, “WHO THREW THAT!”
The sun was coming right over the roof of the garage, hitting me in the eyes so I couldn’t actually see the boys at first. When I got closer, they were cowering.
The guy who owned the house - whose twin daughters had felt my kids were so cute when they were three - came up and asked what was going on. One of the boys standing there was his son. The other boys I didn’t know. They were all older than my girls.
It became clear to me that this man wasn’t trying to figure out which of these boys had thrown a water balloon at an old lady. He was trying to make peace. To calm me down. Not punish the boys.
I walked back to my mother, who was being tended to by my kids and my dad, and my one friend in the neighborhood. Someone had brought an ice pack. I started to gather our stuff to go home, but my mom said no, we would sit there.
A little while later, I went to get a hot dog for my mom. I walked up to the grill, manned by one of the men in the neighborhood, surrounded by mostly men. I waited. The guy behind the grill ignored me, laughing with his friends. I said excuse me. He looked at me laughing, but with one pointed look he couldn’t conceal and said, “In a minute.” I waited. Speaking silently with my presence in front of the grill, till he finally gave me a hot dog.
When I got back, my mom said her head was starting to hurt and we should probably head back.
After we got home, I got a new ice pack and laid my mother down on the couch. She looked at me and said, “They were more upset with you for yelling than they were for the boys throwing the balloon at me.”
It was a question. But it was not a question.
Yes, I said. She nodded, with a determined look on her face. That face that I could read so well.
And at that moment, I was 9 again, standing next to her, holding her right hand as she let it go, took the clipboard from my classmate’s mother, and signed the Equal Rights Amendment.
Love this! So well written
Excellent article! So insightful into the different times, and the vastly different mindsets.