Mothering in the 50’s

I didn’t really have an example of what a mother should be doing. I didn’t have a good example and I didn’t have a bad example. I had an absent example. 

This is what many of us had growing up in the 50s and 60s. Our mothers spent quite a bit of time in their bedrooms and I don’t understand what they were doing in there. Some of us had mothers who took us to school and some of us had mothers who picked us up from school, but many of us didn’t know where our mothers were most of the time and they didn’t know where we were. This was the 50s.

I liked the freedom of it, but it also terrified me. I felt as if I could die any minute and no one would know. The strangest thing is I still feel that way. I care more now because I have a dog and I don’t want my dog to be abandoned and without food or water and of course, if I were dead, they would be.

We had animals in our house growing up. We had birds and we had dogs and we had cats but the one cat we had only lasted for one day. I’m not really sure what happened to it after that,but I just know it disappeared. The dogs were not allowed in most areas of the house and slept off the garage in a cold room that had a cement floor and metal walls and there was a large bed with a really dirty pillow on it. I think that pillow stayed there for at least 20 years without being washed and three different dogs lived on that pillow. It never occurred to me to ask if I could have a dog in my room at night which definitely would’ve been helpful to me, but that was the way our family was run.

 During the time I was home alone, and my parents were away, and I could become invisible,which I could do by taking a-special powder in my mind and then exploring the house. I was very interested in the area where The Animals lived because there was a beautiful glass greenhouse that had the most amazing smell. It was deep and earthy, and it made the inside of my nose enlarge and want to take in more of this quite amazing smell. In the greenhouse there were tables and on the tables were plants that had been abandoned some years before never watered ever nurtured. I just left them there. It was very similar to how the children were treated in our house.I always thought this was interesting so the greenhouse was my first stop when I was invisible.

Once I knew a little child who like to pretend he was a dog so he would bark on the floor, and then his mother would have to put his food on the floor and he would eat out of the food dish. In the same vein, I once crawled into the very large metal dog bed on top of the dirty pillow and just lay there for a moment to try to see what it was like to be our dog. I couldn’t stand it, however because it was smelly and felt really dirty and extremely sad. After I did that, I don’t think I went back to the Dog apartment. I always wondered who put the dogs in there and who took them out.

One year I failed math because it was never my strong point ands I had to have tutoring all summer from someone in the neighborhood. It was the most tiresome slow summer of my life. I remember how hot it was in the room and how there was always one fly, trying to distract me.I wasn’t allowed to have a glass of water or any snack during this tutoring.

Sometimes our dog would quietly enter the room and lie on the floor under my feet. Whenever this happened, I felt as a miracle had occurred. Another human presence to witness the boredom of my life. One morning, prior to the arrival of the tutor, I was lying on the floor with my nose on my dogs nose, staring into his eyes, telling him in my secret language that I understood him. 

The tutor entered the room and exclaimed that there was something wrong with children who talked to Dogs. I guess that was the beginning of the end.