My mother, Dorothy Holmes, was born in 1909 in Pound, a little town in Northern Wisconsin. She died in 2008. I bring her up because this Sunday is Mothers Day, and my Mom witnessed a lot of changes regarding what it means to be a mother in her 99 years on Earth.
Her mother died when Dorothy was 13, which made my mother the mother of that household for the next six years. But my mother was an independent woman and a good student. After just one year at what was called a county normal teachers college, Dorothy was an elementary classroom teacher. The year was 1929, the start of the Great Depression.
Like I said, my mom had an independent streak and was in no rush to get married. She and three other women bought a car one summer, drove out to the West Coast and back for the fun of it and sold the car after returning to Wisconsin.
Most summers she would pick up a few credits in summer school, eventually earning a B.S. degree.
One of her pastimes was horseback riding, which my father enjoyed too. Warren was 10 years younger than Dorothy. He was an outgoing charmer, popular, with many friends. I never understood the attraction, I don’t think sex was high up on the list, at least not for my mom.
My father was stationed in Florida during World War II. In the cavalry. Seriously! In the cavalry!
My mother took the train down to where he was stationed in 1942 when she was on Christmas vacation. The chaplain at the base presided at the wedding.
In those days, the Manitowoc school district hired only single women. During the Great Depression, it was widely believed that a married woman taking a job was stealing a salary from a male breadwinner or a single woman. “Marriage Bars,” as they were called, were policies that forced teachers to resign if they married, a common practice nationwide until World War II labor shortages forced schools to lift these restrictions.
Such policies were rooted in the belief that married women had husbands to support them, while single women needed independence. After Pearl Harbor the labor shortage forced the Manitowoc school district to rehire my mother, albeit at the pay rate of a substitute teacher.
I came along in 1947, and that meant Dorothy became a stay-at-home mom, a job I think she rather liked. I don’t think she saw herself as a career woman. My father never saw himself as a sensitive new age guy. I don’t think he ever changed a diaper in his life. Both my parents played culturally approved roles, and it seemed to work for them.
A big stressor in my mother’s life came when my parents built a house in a new development. The Depression made both of my parents afraid of debt. In order to pay off the mortgage as quickly as possible, my mother went back to teaching.
My father’s life didn’t change much, but my mother continued to serve as the full-time housekeeper, cooking all the meals while teaching full-time September through May. I remember her being short-tempered and irritable nine months a year and enjoying life in the summer.
They paid off the mortgage in seven years!
My father died in 1970 when he was only 50 years old, which really put my mother into a tailspin. She did miss my father, but a big source of security for my mom was feeling in control. She was a strict disciplinarian as a teacher. On my youth baseball team some of my teammates had been her former students.
“Mrs. Holmes is your mother?” they would ask and add, “I feel sorry for you!”
My mother once told me that if she had it to do over again, she would have become an accountant. If you do your job well, numbers always behave; they always come out right.
I was graduating from college. The house was paid off. And then my father goes and dies on her.
Six years after my father died, my mother held her newly born grandson for the first time. Two years after that she held a granddaughter. It wasn’t going back to her career that became the key to her recovery. It was relationships — family, longtime friends and church.
My mother was a progressive in some ways even though she always voted Republican. She had lots of teacher friends — independent single women who formed part of my extended family. In those days you did not ask and you did not tell.
Lillian, Merle, Bernice, Hazel, another Dorothy — they were just my mother’s friends, who were good to me. I think my father “guessed,” but he never ever even hinted that he knew there was a parallel lifestyle going on.
Follow the spiritual adventures of the fictional Pastor Walter Mitty through Tom’s blog at https://tomholmes10.substack.com.