A Celebration of the Unconventional Mother

I saw “Revolutionary Road” starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio months ago, and I am here to tell you if you have not seen it yet that it is not, as advertised, simply a look inside a marriage. It is the story of an unconventional, unsatisfied woman in the 1950’s who had no likeminded companions or fulfilling outlets. The film unfolds as she tries to break out of the little box into which her life had settled, and the results shine a harsh light on what was missing for women, particularly wives and mothers, in that time. I jokingly wrote to one of my friends inside the computer that “Girlfriend could have used a blog.”

Last night, thanks to my dying lover the Los Angeles Times, I went to see an incredible movie. In her review of “Must Read After My Death,” Betsey Sharkey told of a powerful film about a wife and mother in the 1960’s that was created using her “more than 200 hours of home movies, 50 hours of tapes and 300 pages of transcripts in a file labeled ‘Must Read After My Death.'” I was hooked right there. As I contemplate creating a legacy for my children, the idea of someone leaving behind such a file filled me with a sort of morbid curiosity. I was pleased to find the film more than just an edited down version of someone’s personal archives. Instead “Must Read After My Death” is a lovingly crafted cautionary tale about the fate of an unconventional woman stifled by the rigid mores of her time and society.

Morgan Dews spent years piecing the footage, tapes, and photos together to tell us the tale of Allis, his maternal grandmother, and how she handled the emotional collapse of her family in the 1960’s. As her four children suffered through adolescence and her husband, Charley, buckled under the pressure of work, alcohol abuse, and domestic ennui, Allis turned to psychotherapy where she was told she was responsible for her family’s unhappiness. Allis’s spunky voice narrates most of the film (with subtitles) and the scratchy, poppy audio immediately brings the viewer back in time to when such recording devices were novel. Even after years of therapists placing the blame on her, Allis rebelled against the idea that The Mother was a figure to be denigrated, blamed, and pigeonholed. When she railed against that school of thought I wanted to pump my fist in the air and shout in the darkened theater. Since I was one of the youngest people there I am not sure that would have gone off very well, although since Dews himself was present he might have gotten a little thrill from that kind of outburst.

I know women who were mothers in the 1960’s. My grandmother. My husband’s mother. Their friends. Hardly conventional, somehow they seem to have turned out alright, so I am hoping that the stories I saw in the movies above were the exception to the rule.

My grandparents in 2006 with little fat Kyle

In 2009 I try to imagine being a mother in a time when one could actually get together for a daily cup of coffee with a girlfriend from down the block. When she could let her children run through the neighborhood only to return for lunch or dinner. When she had to do all her laundry by hand. When she couldn’t just turn to her laptop and send out an S.O.S. on twitter that she was about to go crazy, and the fact that the world knew she was going crazy was okay.

I can’t imagine it. I know it’s all relative, and that you do what you gotta do with what you’ve got, but I just can’t imagine how I would mother without this. Thank you, internet and 2009, for letting me be crazy, for making mistakes right along with me, for celebrating my journey as a person and a woman as well as my journey as wife and mother. I like to think I am an unconventional woman, sharing this experience with so many other unconventional women, in a time when being unconventional is what we strive for.