“I always wondered why somebody doesn't do something about that. Then I realized I was somebody.” – Lily Tomlin
Years ago, my husband and I went to see Lily Tomlin’s “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” with my boss and her husband. It was an amazing show and Tomlin, whom I had loved as a kid on “Laugh In” in her roles as five-year-old Edith Ann and Ernestine, the telephone operator, was beyond description. Alone on a blank stage, she brought character after character to life, mesmerizing the audience, many of whom were much older than I. It was one of those shows that made you laugh so hard that your face hurt.
We all had our favorite skits and on the drive home we chatted excitedly about characters and lines and the ideas that Tomlin and playwright Jane Wagner had so eloquently and masterfully put in front of us. My boss, who is just a few years younger than my mom, had especially enjoyed Tomlin’s portrayal of the three frustrated women’s libbers. I listened intently as she described the connection to her own life experiences, the transition that she had made at some point in her life to embrace her own power, her own sense of who she was, her own strength. And while I listened I realized that I didn’t understand. Not really.
I hadn’t grown up like that. While my mom was of that same generation, she hadn’t been raised to believe that women were second class, that they couldn’t achieve their dreams, that they had to stand in the background and wait for the right time or the right place. She hadn’t been taught to put herself and her dreams on the back burner for someone else’s. Despite the fact that she followed a fairly traditional path, marrying right out of college and almost immediately beginning a family, she always had a strong sense of who she was and what she wanted in all aspects of her life and she went after those things with determination and passion. And she taught us to do the same.
She was a work at home mom, a writer who wrote a twice-weekly newspaper column in the days before computers and spell checks and white out. In the evenings, long after we had gone to bed, I could hear her pecking away at her Smith Corona, her weekly deadline looming. She was there at the track meets, the drama productions and the band concerts. She drove the carpools and hosted the classroom parties. On my 16th birthday she threw me an amazing surprise party and to this day I’m still not sure how she pulled it off without my knowing. She had opinions and beliefs and viewpoints and she shared them. She taught us to believe: in God, in our family, in each other and in ourselves. She was strong and creative and passionate and she taught us to be the same.
It isn’t always easy. There are times when being strong is hard, when having an opinion isn’t welcomed, especially when it goes against the main. There are still places where a woman’s opinion is not respected, where we are looked at askance when we try to step out into environments that have typically been the property of men. We have to go there anyway. We’ve got to embrace our power. A wise friend once told me, “Know what you know.” Words I try to live by.
“My friends asked me what we were doing for Mother’s Day,” my son reported when he came home from his baseball game this afternoon. “I told them we were going to the Giant’s game. Most of their moms wanted to go to spas or out to dinner or something like that. They said they thought you were cool.”
My mom loved sports, especially baseball. She was born in Brooklyn and grew up a diehard Brooklyn Dodgers fan. It broke her heart when the Dodgers moved west after the 1957 season and when New York finally got another team, she switched her allegiance to the New York Metropolitans. As a kid we would go to Shea Stadium and Mom would always keep a scorecard, something she had learned to do as a child. Her love of baseball rubbed off on me.
Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. Thanks for teaching me to be strong, to ask questions and to speak my truth. Thanks for teaching me about family and to live with passion. Thanks for teaching me that there isn’t anything that a girl can’t do and thanks most of all, for believing in me.