I was thinking about my mother last night and today, and it occurred to me that -- at least here at TPM --  I have dropped more criticisms than praises of her in various comments -- comments that may have been objectively fair from the perspective of a child who did not have her upbringing, but for which, over time, I have felt some remorse because I have not fairly balanced the picture. 

So I thought it only fair, on Mother's Day, to describe her as the whole person she was --  a woman with a loaded history, who was, yet, a remarkable person as a human being and, in her idiosyncratic way, a remarkably good mother. (I wish I had a few scanned photographs of her to include -- at least one, as there is that one which somehow seems to say it all):

As you may know, southern women are baptized with lots of names. Their last names are, of course, the family name of their fathers. Their first names are, usually, either their grandmother's names or that of a female relative of note for one reason or another. Southern women have two middle names, to cover the territory of their family or origin and their intermarried family names that are of direct relevance. 

Thus my mother, ADDB, was born in New Orleans. She was the third, last and therefore youngest child of a highly-educated, respected judge who was, nonetheless, twenty-five years older than his wife -- my mother's mother, my grandmother (whose cradle he essentially robbed when she was only eighteen -- ok, seventeen... oh all right, sixteen).]
 My grandmother's lack of extended education was perceived as no handicap, however; in a letter to his brother my grandfather said: " It is a constant source of astonishment to me that AMA is not only lovely and warm but that she can now also bring my colleagues to their knees, mouths agape, by listening to their talk over dinner and then, as the coffee is served,  asking the fundamental question that should be asked. This is a quality I did not foresee when I courted her, but it is a wonder to behold." 

But I digress -- my grandmother's is another story -- one worth telling. 

Controversy immediately attended my mother's birth; she was not named for her mother, but rather, named "Anna" in honor of not one, but three of her father's extended family aunts... who immediately began to squabble about which one of them was the one she had REALLY been named for. My grandfather wasn't putting up with that; no sir -- he marched down to his own court and told the clerk that there had been a mistake in the records -- that his new daughter's name was not "Anna." The clerk, anxious to please, expressed her apologies for whomever had committed the error and asked, anxiously: "What, Sir, is the correct name so that I can fix it?"

My grandfather hadn't thought that far, unfortunately. And so, because he was a student of theology, he pronounced the first name that came to his mind that began with an "A'; his daughter's name, he said authoritatively, was actually...."A......" This name was duly noted, and became a lifelong cross for my mother, who was a natural "Anna," to bear -- the first cross of many.

Nonetheless, life for "A"  in the beginning, was not all bad. Though my grandmother -- that apparently smarter-than-was-expected siren -- had dark hair, fair skin and bright hazel eyes (as did her eldest child, my aunt) my mother and her older brother, like their father, were blonde, with the largest, most crystalline pale blue eyes -- eyes that riveted, mesmerized. There is a photo of my mother, age six, hanging onto the halter of her pony, yet somehow already communicating a sense of self-awareness and confidence. Those pale blue eyes bore into the camera, even in black and white, as if to say: "Pay attention; I'm older and wiser than you perceive; like my mother, I may surprise you." 

Shortly after that particular photograph was taken, my grandfather dropped dead, in court, of a cerebral hemorhage.. 
As it turned out, he had not been the wisest manager of money; his family had lived very well, but there were no savings and very little insurance. There was property, of course, in Charleston and in Camden, South Carolina (and in Alabama) -- but all of it was jointly owned with his siblings. 
Suddenly, then, my grandmother, my mother and her siblings were in real peril. 

My grandmother apparently had a breakdown of sorts, overwhelmed and distraught by the reality that she had no education to speak of and that, no matter how well-read she was, her native intelligence and sparkling dinner party repartee were not going to translate into earning a living to support her children. So that, when she recovered from her initial vapors, she used her surprising insight to take a hard look at her assets and liabilities. And she determined that her best course was to marry, again, and promptly.
And so my mother, her brother and her sister were farmed out to relatives, separately, while my grandmother began the serious business of attracting a husband who might, despite her charms, be put off, initially, by three grief-stricken children.  My mother's brother went to live with a powerful uncle, an important Alabama politician and his childless, adoring wife; while my aunt -- already attractive and whip smart -- was placed with a Charleston aunt who immediately sent her off to a first class northern boarding school. 
But my mother was only six, and "needed a mother" and so she was packed off to the ostensible at-home nurturing of her maternal grandmother -- a woman whose sole distinctions, at that time, were that she : a) had allowed her 16 year old daughter to marry a man more than twice her age; and, b) had divorced her own husband (unheard of, then) after which she had bought an orange grove in Florida with her settlement. And so my mother went to live with her cheerful, entrepreneurial grandmother -- a species entirely unknown to her --  while her brother and sister continued their old south path. This two year experience was the second, pivotal trauma of my mother's life -- not only was she cut off from her revered siblings, but also the woman-as-entrepreneur syndrome was so entirely foreign to her experience (and the era), that it frightened her, fundamentally, and affected her choices for the rest of her life.
Fast forward. My grandmother married again, this time to a rakish, French shipping company heir whom she met when he was in New Orleans, on business. He was a relatively young widower -- with five children. He was attracted to her allure, her insight, as well as to the chance to have a young mother for his young children; she was attracted to his sophistication, his financial prospects and the chance for her children to become more worldly than they might be, otherwise. They married, and tried to meld families and continents.
My mother was eight. Disoriented. And now suddenly the sibling of not only her own brother and sister, but also five others, who did not speak the same language she did. Her new stepfather was often away, on business. And her mother, at first relieved and grateful, was increasingly stressed by her husband's absences and frightened by her new stepchildren, with whom she could not converse, easily, and by whom she felt judged, pejoratively. 

Some years later, the new Papa had a heart attack, at sea, and died. Once again, children were farmed out -- the French children to French relatives, my grandmother's own children, back to America, to the south, to siblings and cousins. My grandmother had another, extended breakdown. Nonetheless writing her children impassioned expressions of regret and devotion, sometimes in French, sometimes forgetting to whom she was addressing the letter in question. 

My mother's elder sister, at this point, was at Barnard, having aligned herself with a roommate's family -- a  New York family who had it together. Coincidentally, my mother's brother had gained admittance to West Point, based on the strong Alabama political connections.  And so my mother left France, ignoring the south and headed  to New York -- at sixteen --  to whatever.
My mother had assets -- she was beautiful -- and she was smart, and she was bilingual. And the family that had taken in her elder sister adopted her, wholeheartedly. And so, at sixteen, she went to a great school in Mahattan, and spent some weekends at West Point, visiting her adored older brother. Where she met my father, his friend, also a southerner.
My uncle graduated from West Point, got into flight school in Texas, and died, in flames, six weeks later.  My father showed up at her door, immediately, mourning his friend, her brother.Within months, my mother and father were engaged, and then married. While he was away, during WWII, she lived in New York, working at a fashion magazine... that is, until she had my sister -- way too young and way, way too alone, given her history.
My father returned, went to graduate school (where I was born) and started his career, in Maryland, where he was from. My mother followed his geographic path, determined to be a good, a perfect 1950's wife. AND SHE WAS. I think she was on automatic pilot then -- remembering the lessons of her mother -- "Marry well, be safe" and so nothing about her own life, her own inner person, mattered. Despite the amazing poetry she wrote, day after day, secretly, typing on her Smith Corona, paper boxed and stored, under her dressing table.

Until later, when all that she had endured, did matter. Because my father, who did adore her, almost to extreme, nonetheless did travel, a lot.  And so she was left with two daughters and, effectively, no man. When a man was the only, essential, fundamental figure who was required in her life....for safety. For God's sake -- she had lost her father, her stepfather, her brother. What fickle finger of fate kept stranding her alone, without a man?  She was undoubtedly frightened, assuredly spooked.... yet, she performed.
We had a perfect house, no matter where my father was transferred in his corporate climb. We had a family house in SC in which to spend vacations, to call the south home. We had another house, a mountain lake house, in which to spend Christmas, and a month in the summer when other summer venues were too hot to be borne.  
We were so lucky, so fortunate and, yet ..... so haunted, so traumatized, as only southerners can be so specifically traumatized,  because we bear not only the burdens of our own life experience but the scars of those who came before us. 
It's true -- it's sad or foolish, but it is true. I can go to the family place in Camden, SC ---  where I personally never lived ---  and I can hear, smell and see the image of a woman in whose body I somehow am, galloping across a field, the grasses of which I can smell, the insects of which I can hear.
It may be for a reason that southerners are thought to be thoroughly demented. It may be because we are. Because it is just possible that memory is as inheritable as is any other trait. Or not.
What I know about my mother is that she had serious weight to drag into her adulthood. And that she did it, with grace and, as a matter of will, with apparent weightlessness, that came at great cost to her.
So I cherish the fact that, when she was so psychically weary, she read to me, every day and every night when I was a child. I cherish the fact that she cared to teach me, when it cost her energy she did not have, the name of every bird and every wild flower wherever we were. I honor the fact that she filled our houses with sensuous pleasures -- cut flowers, ironed sheets, books everywhere and her family harpsichord -- because she cared -- when I did not care, but protested -- that I observe the rituals, that I go to cotillion and to French class, and to whatever.... 
And I care, really care, that she had a private life, in which she read and wrote and made margin notes, because there was a fierce insistence in her, for all her outward acquiescence, that she was alive, and that meant that she deserved some private time to be who she was, however alone she felt that needed to be, to have it.
This is what I know about my mother: she was beautiful, she was magnificent, she was difficult. She never spared herself, always asking more of herself, whether it was natural to her or simply that which was a standard she must meet, because, on whatever level, it mattered. 
She was tough as a mother -- how could she not be? She looked at the safe world she and my father had created for us and, as we took it completely for granted, she saw, poignantly, how lucky we were -- a fact of which we were, of course, unaware. And so she resented our naive assumption of safety, which had eluded her.
We saw the resentment -- didn't get it. Thought she was a shallow, selfish, entitled bitch.
How little we knew. And how sad it is that we know now, when she is gone, and we cannot tell her, WE KNOW. 
So. As false as her values may seem to some of you, now, please know that for my mother, they were hard won, in her life. It took her  a lifetime to go from southern security to southern security. And I honor her, for that struggle, and for her fierce pride, in seeing it through, to the end, when she was -- as she always feared, alone again, without a man.