BY GARY JOHNSON
Reprinted from Loose Change (TCBMag.com)
“You come along, tearing your shirt, yelling about Jesus. I want to know, what the hell you know about Jesus?”—Carl Sandburg’s “Billy Sunday”
My mom was a single mother at a time when couples simply didn’t get divorced. The only kids without dads lost them in the war. Involuntarily, she went from being a mother at home with three kids to finding an occupation to keep her family’s boat from sinking. She moved in with her mother, who had a large house of female boarders. And she chose teaching school as a way to make a living, all the while worrying about whether child welfare would come and take her kids away.
She worked for 35 years from 7 a.m. until 4 p.m., five days a week. As a child, I remember her coming home right around the time the soap opera Edge of Night was ending. As the TV show “edged” toward its dramatic climax, an always to-be-continued episode, the schmaltzy music and credits rolling signaled her entrance through the front door. Once home, she’d grab the kid baton from grandma, who worked as a seamstress at home and who provided us with no-cost day care, i.e., keeping us fed and out of juvenile detention.
I’ve been listening for decades to the endless opinions about working moms and mothers at home. I recall the sound bites from the women’s liberation screed excoriating mothers at home as mindless automatons. Later, post-lib females wondered aloud if there might actually be some benefit to staying at home with kids, particularly for the kids. I heard countless cases for and against home versus work, single moms versus married, breast versus bottle, two dads-no mom, or dad being mom. Most recently I’ve listened to the ridiculous back and forth around Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen pillorying Ann Romney, mother at home and wife of presidential candidate Mitt Romney, as a “basketball wife.”
My mom, Marge Johnson, was a simple, unassuming, hard-working, committed parent. She stuck by her values and lived a moral life. She rarely raised her voice, never hit us (that was for Grandma’s paddle sitting on the top of the ice box), and didn’t drink or carouse. Her idea of getting her ya-yas out was going to Catholic Daughters meetings or monthly teacher sorority mixers. I rarely heard her complain, but given the circumstances, she had to be exhausted. The only outward signs of depression or anxiety came with being crabby and irritable. I never heard her speak enviously or disparagingly of the majority of women who didn’t work. Nor did she speak badly of the young, scared Marine who left her with a brood of kids. She hung with my brother and I through all manner of scrapes with the cops, fights, shoplifting, vandalism, and things boys do with their free time. She taught us how to work, dragging our whining butts out of bed at 5:45 a.m., six days a week each summer, to lug bags up and down lush green fairways for rich golfers. She paid the bills, put food on the table, sent my sister, brother, and I to college, and kept her nose to the grindstone her whole adult life.
She got no medals, received no certificates of merit or awards of appreciation, except from this lowly blog. I asked her once how she did it and she replied, “Well, I never really thought about it.” She did what she did out of necessity, not choice. But the outcome of her effort had everything to do with the kind of person she was. Not perfect, but better than most.
Given the chance, she’d tell Hilary Rosen to just sit down and shut her big yap. Any woman with five kids has plenty on her hands, rich or not. And I think she would have told Ann Romney to fall on her knees and thank the Lord for handing her a multi-multi-millionaire husband and five healthy kids. For all those liberated working women who criticized and chided mothers at home, well, Marge would likely have given her eye teeth to have been at home while her kids were growing up. She would have been wondering just what in the hell those women were getting all excited about going to work every day.
Editor’s Note: Gary Johnson is President of MSP Communications in Minneapolis, MN and authors the blog Loose Change for TCBmag.com.