This article I wrote and posted on LinkedIn in 2018 on the occasion of International Women's Day in honor of my mother. I have altered it slightly given the change of venues and the irresistible desire to improve on it.
The other day two unrelated items, posted to my LinkedIn feed and a mere scroll bar from each other, caught my attention: the law firm Vedder Price sent a crew out to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the less fortunate and, separately, International Women’s Day was nearly upon us.
Sometimes social feeds have the happy consequence of an old newspaper editor’s deliberate and considered layout.
Following some links, pages later I was ready to click "PressForProgress" and commit to “believ[ing] achievement comes in many forms; valu[ing] women's individual and collective success; ensur[ing] credit is given for women's contributions; celebrat[ing] women role models and their journeys; support[ing] awards showcasing women's success.”
Who can argue with such effusive sentiment?
So I thought back a bit about one of my favorite women, one to whom (you might say) I reported.
Having grown up on the Southside in a large, lower-class family, we became accustomed to shopping with our father on his trips to Chicago’s storied Maxwell Street. We chose shoes from piles (not boxes) in the second-story warehouse that was Zimmerman’s, and we chose warm but ugly winter clothing from Weinstein Brothers a short distance away.
We did not know it at the time, but had we walked less than a half block north from Maxwell Street, we would have come to the lot that had once held a small apartment building where my mother was born to Italian immigrant parents.
Only years after her death did we learn that her birthplace had been so close to a place so familiar to us. But our ignorance was born of our mother’s painful reticence to discuss her childhood, a reserve understandable in light of the hardship she would endure because of her father.
You might say that my Sicilian grandfather was a bit of a trailblazer. Long before the Sexual Revolution made it acceptable for men to abandon both the children they procreated and the women to whom they professed ‘love’, my grandfather did just that. When my mother was about eight years old, he left wife, son, and daughter . . . to the Great Depression.
My grandmother worked as a seamstress out of her apartment, and she insisted that her children not speak Italian in order that they gain command of English and succeed.
My mother would both obtain to superior English and deliver the valedictory at her high school graduation, earning a full tuition scholarship to Mundelein College.
But one obstacle remained: cost of room and board. Despite a personal visit by college representatives to that small Westside apartment, my grandmother could not pay the cost and Mundelein was not going to waive it.
So my mother got a job, would meet my father and, just eight months after Pearl Harbor, begin life as a married woman. In that school of higher education she would graduate and deliver another sort of valediction to the world: bearing and raising nine children.
Often enough I hear people say that having a large family ‘back then’ was easier. I don’t know that having children is ever easy; whether easier is another matter. Consider just a few snippets: many dads in that fertile neighborhood had to hold down more than one job (my father had at least three); childbirth, as difficult as it can be today, was far more dangerous back then; and my mother never had a nanny to handle matters in her absence – just listen to the peals of laughter bursting from my siblings when they contemplate such a thing. (My mother's escape was the grocery store. When mom asked you to take her there to get a ‘few things’ you could count on about a two-hour stay. She would tour the aisles and, I think, hope to happen upon neighbors she couldn’t otherwise see. That was her modern water well.)
We grew up in a bit of an extended family. My parents would take in my cousin. That was followed by my dad’s mom, whom my mother would feed, bathe, and keep company (while we ran about and demanded of her). Just a few years later she did the same for her own mother.
As if the budget wasn’t stretched enough, and long before anyone heard of Mother Teresa, mom was forever raising donations (from us and neighbors) for Sister Sophie, a Catholic nun in India.
I was beginning to think mom was running some sort of money laundering operation until one day a dark, diminutive, and humble habited woman appeared in our living room. (How, in the 1960s, mom ever came in contact with this creature half way around the world is beyond me.)
Still, mom bound our wounds, helped us with homework, encouraged us. Spending hours in her chair, late into the night, she let spill across her hands those blessed wooden beads, momentarily gripping one after the other as though holding close one then another child. Just hours later she’d be the first out of bed.
More, she left us an example of simple erudition, reading widely and acting as the fount of everything literary. Shakespeare was a favorite and, now years later, I appreciate more deeply the gift of her large Shakespeare volume. Not only in the flower garden she cultivated around our house did she live his reminder that 'From fairest creatures we desire increase, That thereby beauty's rose might never die.'
Finally, could my Italian mother cook, and that at last brings me back to Vedder Price.
Let’s give those attorneys and their co-workers their due: they did good work for themselves and for those who ate those PB&Js. But they and we know something essential was missing. Man does not live on peanut butter alone, even when matched with jelly.
For you must know that, when my siblings and I came home to Italian meat sauce, simmered day-long on a well-used gas stove, replete with pork bone, garlic, and oregano, our mother was there.
The comfort wasn’t the food.
So my 2018 PressForProgress Award goes to a woman who gave me life, substantive food, an abundance of wonderful siblings, and an irreplaceable sense of security. That’s the woman whose success I showcase and whose achievement I praise.