Listen to Your Mother

As my mom likes to remind me, at my age, she was the mother of a 12 year old and an eight year old. She was divorced and struggled to raise us herself while getting her teaching degree and working.

We grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, across the street from the university, and among graduate students and young couples. My mom would borrow the neighbor's vacuum cleaner, my sister headed over to an artist who lived nearby to do arts and crafts. And, strangely, all the pets on the street got along, cats, dogs, birds, squirrels. My sister's best friend on the block was the daughter of a woman who practiced mid-wifery and brought it into the mainstream, Michelle Harrison.

My sister and I looked after the cat of a photographer for Michael Graves. A French woman and her daugher, a ballet dancer in Switzerland, decorated the front porch with a profusion of flowers. We heard that the man who lived next door to us, who always kept his hedge clipped while ours grew wild and tall, had fought in a war. He had no jaw. Our downstairs neighbor was a Ph.D student in classics, who occasionally subbed at my high school, never had any visitors and eventually, one day, killed himself.

One block from my house was the public library, where I headed most days after school. I read through the entire kids section and moved into adults. Until I was old enough to go home by myself, that place, full of comfy chairs and a librarian, Dudley Carlson, who was ready to set me up with the 10 books I was allowed to check out at any one time, was home.

My mom decorated like, as she said, a graduate student. This meant the desk in her bedroom was a door held up by cinder blocks. Ditto the book shelves, except instead of a door, she painted wooden boards a cheery yellow. Orange curtains hung from the Bay windows and we sat in butterfly chairs, slept on mattresses (with Marimekko bedding) on the floor and ate at a Danish modern table.

I guess we were lucky -- the cost of renting a three bedroom house is about the cost of renting a couch in New York City these days. We scraped by, but we weren't unhappy or uncomfortable.

Not that it was easy. In fact, imprinted in my mind is actually how hard it was. Maybe that's why I always figured being a mom was something someone else did. That taking care of myself, family and friends, was challenge enough.

Now I watch as many of my friends become parents, I see it's true: Life only gets busier with kids, work, and everything in-between. And when you have a moment, you're wondering why things haven't gotten easier since you were a kid. There still is no easy path, no one way to get things done. And, let's face it, life has only gotten more expensive since the 70s. But this only seems to make the sacrifices all that much sweeter. It is hard. But as my mom told me today, she started having fun the moment she met me.