Some of my fondest memories from back then are of holiday visits to my Aunt Carolyn and her family on Long Island. Their table overflowed with tasty dishes and dynamic conversation, and even though the adults disagreed on politics and other topics, the discussions were mirthful. It’s why I have a soft spot for the Long Island accent. I loved to listen and foolishly expected all adult conversations to be like those at my Aunt Carolyn’s table.
My mom’s generation was divided, no doubt. The adults in my childhood disagreed on politics. But they weren’t horrible to each other. They talked, and they listened. They had civil discourse.
My family members were strident. My mom was one of the only women in the neighborhood to be a force in her workplace. She grew up in such poverty that her bedroom throughout high school was an alcove off her family kitchen, with a curtain for a door. Sleeping there, she resolved to break free, to make her stamp in the world. Her first step was nursing school and work in a Boston hospital.
When she had children -- four of us in eight years -- she stopped working for more than a decade, but she never lost that resolve to take what she saw as her place. She returned to work with two night shifts a week at the local hospital. A decade later, she was the director of nursing. She ultimately became an executive in a hospital corporation, responsible for patient care in hospitals all over the country.
This was when far fewer women reached leadership roles in American workplaces. When I was a kid, most families had only one car, because the moms stayed home while the dads worked. Not mine. I was always so proud of her.
Her generation began adulthood in the era portrayed in the television show Mad Men. They were in their 30s and 40s during the tumult of the late 1960s and 1970s, when so much divided America. Yet they navigated those troubled times without hating anyone.
Could they have managed that if social media existed back then? How might things have been different if, instead of even-keeled Walter Cronkite narrating the age, everyone was watching the partisan media of our time?
How many children today get to experience what I did, spirited conversation by people who love and respect each other? How many stories have you read in the past decade about families and friendships irreparably broken because of partisanship?
Our newsroom has put great effort over the past year into exploring civil discourse, in partnership with Baldwin Wallace University and Braver Angels Ohio. Most recently, reporter Lucas Daprile spent time with students as they learned how to talk to each other with respect. We used to know how to do that in this country. My mom and her generation are the example.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my mom this week because she died Sunday, at age 90. Poring over photos from her nine decades fortified my memories about who she was and what she stood for, and I mulled what lessons I should make sure to keep.
Like all of us, my mom had her strengths and weaknesses, her better angels and her demons. She was fierce in claiming her place, and hell be to those who stood in her way, but ultimately, her place always seemed to involve caring for people, no matter her role. That’s what a nurse does. In retirement, she spent two decades providing countless hand massages to the elderly, those suffering with AIDS and homeless people. She wished to bring gentleness to their lives in the twilight of hers.
Fierce but gentle. Argumentative but not spiteful. That’s civil discourse. That’s my lesson.
Debate fiercely. Don’t hate.
I miss my mom.
Thanks for reading.
