Rites of passage

I recently finished reading The Goodbye Quilt by Susan Wiggs, in which Linda takes a cross-country road trip with her daughter, Molly, to start college, working on a quilt along the journey and musing on her husband, married life, and short-circuited career aspirations. While I am not a parent (and thus saved from the tears apparently jerked among mothers), the story triggered many random memories of my mom and my childhood and young adulthood. It also made me regret all the questions I never asked before my parents were gone.

musings:

• When I was started high school, Mom took me out of school for a few days to go off on our own adventure: taking an airplane for the first time to fly cross-country to California to visit my sister and her husband, an Air Force sergeant. In those days, circa 1974, the front of the plane actually had a lounge, and of course, smoking was still allowed. We drove up and down the Cali coast in a VW Beetle, including a stop in Reno so Mom could gamble, and I could grouse about being stuck in the “kiddie area.”
• My parents were married more than 50 years, apparently quite happily. I pondered whether this was due to the depths of their love or the modesty of their expectations.
• How hard was it for Mom and Dad to recraft their relationship when I, the “baby,” finally left the nest? I know that in their late 60s and early 70s, before my Mom’s health badly declined, they went to happy hours at local hotel bars, a fact that I found simply astonishing at the time: MY parents cruising bars?
• In the novel, Molly’s boyfriend is someone Linda considers not good enough, lacking in ambition. It made me recall the infamous family story of Mom sending home one of my sister’s hoped-to-be-boyfriends to cut his hair if he wanted to date her. He did!
• One stop along the journey, Molly insists on taking her Mom to buy some more up-to-date clothes, which Linda does only under duress, figuring her well-worn but still functional apparel is just fine. It made me think of all the years my Mom forewent clothes so we could have new ones for the school year, and how, in her 60s, she went on shopping sprees to buy new coats, jackets, tops, pants—the stuff she’d denied herself.
• When my folks dropped me off at college, it was only the second time that I had seen my Dad cry; the first time was when my brother called from basic training in the Vietnam-era Army. That time, like all of my childhood, Dad went into the basement to hide his tears, because it was an unspoken rule never to show emotional distress, a “rule” that hurt me deeply during a crisis later in life, and that was finally overturned when my Dad, in his 70s, seemed to cry at the drop of a hat.
• In the book, the mother is making a quilt composed of fabrics from various large and small milestones of her daughter’s childhood. It made me think, first, of Mom’s unsuccessful attempts to teach me how to knit; and then, of what milestones my Mom may have chosen to memorialize in fabric. After all, my bedroom many years after I left was still sort of a museum to me, filled with diplomas, sports awards, and other marks of my success as a student. But because Mom grew up with a horrid miserly stepmother, she wanted her children to have new stuff, not hold onto and pass down clothing. So there was no way she could have made a quilt like in the book. (Though, because I was really fat until high school, she would have had an ample supply of material!)