The good wife

Throughout the course of  my life I have adopted a number of role models.  A true role model should be someone whose behaviour we admire and whose life path we would wish to emulate.  Sometimes I have been disappointed in my choices and other times I have been delighted with what I have taken away from my chosen models.

I think the process of choosing role models is not a conscious one in our early years.  When I was a kid I unconsciously modelled my behaviour on the women surrounding me.  My mother, my aunt, even my older cousin were influences on my early life.  I guess I learned to be a wife and a mother from my own mother.  She was a traditional almost American wife when I was young.  She stayed at home, cooked great meals, shopped for food and kept our tiny apartment so spotless it was, at times, oppressive. My aunt lived her life in exactly the same way and these two women spent a lot of time together. They were not American but they themselves role modelled their behaviour on the women in  'I Love Lucy' and other TV shows.  My mother and aunt also had their own role models, their older cousin Sophie, who taught them a bit on how to dress like an  American wife and a few cousins who had lived in the US for longer than they had.

When I was still in junior high school, at about age 10,my mother started going to work part-time.  By now she was as American as she could ever hope to be.  We suddenly had TV dinners from the freezer, I was expected to do the laundry and I often was allocated the job of starting cooking dinner.  My aunt also started working the garment district and my cousin and I became little mini housewives.

She taught me to iron, to make wonderful cookies and to take care of those I love.  My mother did this every day of her life. I never heard my mother question her role.  I have no memory of her wanting to do anything other than what she was doing.  She went to business school and learned a skill in order to work in an office as a computer keypunch supervisor.  I find it almost impossible to imagine my little Eastern European mother supervising teams of women in an American office, but by the time she retired she was respected team leader.

These were my female role models and now, looking back, I see that I learned how to be a wife from my mum.  I also have an expectation that I will do the shopping, the cooking, the ironing but I have enormous problems, as previously mentioned, with cleaning.  Sometimes a role model can be too perfect, have unattainable and often, unnecessarily high standards and it can become impossible to meet those standards.  I believe that when I saw the model of house cleaning that my mum adopted, I just said, "not for me, no way, goodbye".

In most other respects I am a lot like my mother.  I make sure we have home-cooked meals and have always done this.  I look after my husband and was, and still am, a pretty okay mother.  I thought about this a lot this morning as I was ironing shirts.  Calmly, I watched the iron glide across the fabric, smelling the steam rising and feeling the heat of the iron.  I suddenly had a strong sense that my mum was right there next to me and I remembered her with great love.

I have had many consciously chosen role models. The women I admire are very diverse and include stay at home mums, career women and activists.  I see that what unites all these women  is a kind of inner strength, a strength of charaacter andpurpose thast is difficult to define, but I always know it when I see it.  Even though I would never characterise my own mum as an activist or career woman she also had that inner strength.

My mother knew that she had a very short time left to live when her cancer was diagnosed. One of the things that she thought was important for her to do was to help teach my father to look after himself after she was gone.  I remember visiting with her and sitting in the kitchen while she issued instructions to my dad and wrote down her trusted recipes for roast chicken and baked salmon. It was left to me to make the mushroom barley soups and apple cake, but in the years after my mother's death my father, a man who had never done more than boil an egg, was able to make a pretty good roast chicken and could bake salmon with the best.

I started out writing today with the idea of writing an entry about how the unconscious influence from my mother meant that I was duty-bound to cook, clean, iron and be a 'good wife'.  For a moment this morning, I felt like an oppressed Stepford Wife and then something changed for me.  My heart just opened and I remembered to be grateful to the women in my early life who taught me to be such a 'good wife'.

I guess my mum was standing by my side as I ironed.