Many Voices, One Tongue

My parents were the psychic center of my life. I think that their child-rearing style was to give us everything we needed to go our own way but not to dictate any expectations to us. My mother's mother had been very disciplined and formal, so my mother was determined not to put limits and restrictions on us that would inhibit our creativity. On the one hand, that made me very independent; on the other hand, sometimes I think I yearned for limits against which to rebel.

In many ways my mother was not incredibly maternal. She was loving and supportive, but she was committed to her own studies and her own life. When Aaron and I were young, she went back to school to get her doctorate. Every afternoon there was a time when she would close the door and work on her thesis. Aaron and I had a baby-sitter, and I'm sure we whined and complained. But it allowed us to see that her work was as important as Dad's work, and it let me see that I too could close the door when I wanted to.

 

I admire my mother's self-creation, how she came out of sorority land and became a pioneer in her field. In midlife she went back to school and, with courage and autonomy, developed a new skill. My mother was always doing her own work, and that was important for me in a positive way. I never felt as if she was sacrificing her identity for me. That was an incredible gift she gave me. She worked intensely in the lesbian community in San Francisco. I grew up mostly around lesbians. A radical lesbian took care of my pet rat (my brother was allergic to larger animals) when I went away to Israel. When I had my bat mitzvah party, my mother invited a group of self-proclaimed dykes on bikes.

I can't relate at all to the guilt and resentment some of my friends feel about having full-time mothers who lived out their lives through them. My mother gave me a lot of space. I didn't experience those weird, complicated knots people get into when they feel like their mother is always present and judging them. My mother was intent on being a person who had fun with her children; she rejected the enforced maternal role under which a lot of women labor. I loved her youth and vitality, but sometimes I just wanted her to be grown-up. When you're an emerging sexual person, especiallyas an adolescent, you want your mom to be this fixed piece of furniture and not to stand out so much. Sometimes, I remember, I wanted her to act more like a conventional mom.

I'm so glad in retrospect that she didn't. Because she gave us space to grow up alongside her, instead of under her, I now feel that becoming an adult isn't about acting old, it's about reclaiming the innocence and enthusiasm my parents had. I have to remember this when I think about having children myself. I forget that being a successful parent doesn't necessarily have to mean acting like an adult all the time.

My parents relationship was quite egalitarian, considering that my father is really of an earlier generation. My father took my mother's work more seriously sometimes than she had been raised to take it herself. He was way ahead of his times. I always knew that dad was working and mom was going to school but someday mom would be working, too. The fact that my parents had such an equal relationship gave me a skewed sense of what was normal. I thought the whole world was going to be like that bubble of tolerance and progression in which I grew up. I was astonished to find that it wasn't so. I think that my entire life as an activist since has been an attempt to convey the values with which I grew up, to explain why the hurdles that stand in women's way don't need to be there.

My father has a more maternal personality than my mother. I grew up expecting and accepting that he would assume at least half of the responsibility for child care.He was very involved in our upbringing, the caretaking and diapering. We had a number of baby-sitters while I was growing up but none of them registered too deeply with me. My father always treated me like a very serious little person.

Excerpted from The Conversation Begins: Mothers and Daughters Talk About Living Feminism, Christina Looper Baker and Christina Baker Kline (ed),Bantam, distributed by IBD, $ 20.ter>