Mom Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  WISDOM

  NANCY WRIGHT, 53 talks to her son, J. D. WRIGHT, 19

  LEAH HASELEY, 43 talks to her brother, JONATHAN SCHACHTER, 46 about their ...

  GRACE CRUZ, 13 interviews her father, JOSÉ CRUZ, 57 about his mother, Martha ...

  VALERIE JO EGZIBHER, 62 speaks with her husband, HAGOS EGZIBHER, 59 Hagos’s ...

  JODY HOUSTON, 57 interviews her daughter, BARBARA COOPER, 30

  MILLY GUBERMAN KRAVETZ, 84 talks with her daughter-in-law, JAYNE GUBERMAN, 56

  SUSAN LISKER, 53 talks with her daughters, ELIZABETH LISKER, 21 and MADELYN ...

  ROSELYN PAYNE EPPS, 78 talks with her daughter, ROSELYN ELIZABETH EPPS, 47 ...

  ARLENE FREIMAN, 58 talks to her daughter, LESLEY FREIMAN, 26

  JOHNELLA LAROSE, 50 speaks with her daughter, KASIMA KINLICHIINII, 22

  DIANE GAYLES, 58 talks with her daughter, JENNIFER GAYLES, 30

  GABRIELLE HALL, 29 talks with her sister, DANIELLE HALL, 27 about their ...

  FANNI VICTORIA GREEN-LEMONS, 49 speaks with her daughter, DANYEALAH ...

  DEVOTION

  PAM PISNER, 54, AND DAN PISNER, 55 talk to their daughter, SHIRA PISNER, 25

  SARA GLINES, 61 talks with her husband, GREG GLINES, 62

  TIA CASCIATO SMALLWOOD, 58 talks with her daughter, CHRISTINE SMALLWOOD, 27

  WANDA ZOELLER, 56 talks to her partner, SUSAN HERNDON, 51 about her mother, ...

  JERRY JOHNSON, 52 interviews his mother, CARRIE CONLEY, 80

  DENNIS MCLAUGHLIN, 58 interviews his mother, THERESA MCLAUGHLIN, 82

  RAY MARTINEZ, 56

  ANNETTE ZUMBA, 54 talks to her sister, JENEVIEVE ZUMBA, 46

  DOT CAMPI, 79 talks with her daughter, KIM CAMPI, 51

  LOURDES VILLANUEVA, 49 speaks with her son, ROGER VILLANUEVA JR., 30

  MARTHA WELCH MENDEZ, 48 talks to her friend, CATHY NICKELS, 44 about her ...

  SHARON CAPRA, 54

  ENDURING LOVE

  KRISTI HAGER, 59 tells her friend, CHERIE NEWMAN, 52 about her mom, Norine Hager.

  EILEEN COHEN, 56 talks to her husband, JAMIE ROY, 52 about her mother, Helen Cohen.

  ROBERT MADDEN, 44 talks to his friend, TOM KURTHY, 44 about his mother, ...

  HILORY BOUCHER, 61 talks to her son, DAVE MILLS, 42

  MYRA DEAN, 61 talks to her boyfriend, GARY JAMISON, 58

  JACKIE MILLER, 73 speaks with her son, SCOTT MILLER, 39

  YVETTE SALIBA, 30 interviews her father, SY SALIBA, 66 about her mother, Pat Saliba.

  BARBARA DUNDON, 60 talks with her husband, JACK DUNDON, 68 about her mother, ...

  CAROL KIRSCH, 59 is interviewed by her daughter, REBECCA POSAMENTIER, 30

  AFTERWORD

  Acknowledgments

  FAVORITE STORYCORPS QUESTIONS

  CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO EDITED BY DAVE ISAY:

  Listening Is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life

  from the StoryCorps Project

  THE PENGUIN PRESS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2010 by The Penguin Press,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Sound Portraits Productions, Inc., 2010

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mom : a celebration of mothers from Storycorps / edited and with an introduction by Dave Isay.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-42732-3

  1. Mothers—United States. 2. Interviews—United States. 3. StoryCorps (Project)

  I. Isay, Dave. II. StoryCorps (Project)

  HQ759.M842 2010

  306.874’30973—dc22 2009044752

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This book is dedicated to all moms honored

  through StoryCorps—past, present, and future.

  INTRODUCTION TO STORYCORPS

  StoryCorps launched on October 23, 2003, in Grand Central Terminal in New York City. It was admittedly something of a crazy idea: put a recording booth in the middle of one of the busiest train stations in the world, then invite pairs of people to come in and interview each other about the most important moments in their lives.

  But the idea worked, the project caught on, and StoryCorps has since spread swiftly across the country. In just six years, StoryCorps has recorded nearly thirty thousand interviews with more than fifty thousand participants. Determined to collect the widest possible array of American voices, we’ve traveled to cities, towns, and hamlets across all fifty states. Along the way, we’ve drawn participants from every imaginable background—every race and ethnicity, occupation, and age. Despite this amazing diversity of voices, however, the individual stories we’ve collected have taught us that as a nation there is so much more that we share than divides us.

  Participating in StoryCorps could not be easier: You invite a loved one—a parent, a sibling, a friend, a neighbor, anyone you choose—to one of our recording sites. There, you’re met by a trained facilitator, who greets you and explains the interview process.You’re then brought into a quiet recording room and seated across from your interview partner, each of you in front of a microphone. The facilitator hits “record” on a pair of CD burners, and you have a forty-minute conversation. (Most people ask the sorts of questions you’ll find in the “Favorite StoryCorps Questions” list at the back of the book.) At the end of the session, two CDs have been recorded. You keep one copy, and the second goes to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. There, it will be preserved for generations to come, so that someday your great-great-great-grandchildren will be able to hear the voice and stories of your grandfather, your mother, your best friend—whomever you chose to honor with a StoryCorps interview.

  Many participants see their session as a chance to leave a legacy. They use the time to talk about the most important people in their lives, to remember the best and worst moments they’ve lived through, and to pass on wisdom they’ve gleaned. Topics are broached that rarely get addressed in everyday conversation. It may come as no great surprise that memories of parents often feature
prominently in StoryCorps recordings. Our facilitators, who have been present at each of the nearly thirty thousand interviews to date, tell us that even participants who are one hundred years old—or older—will spend time remembering (and often crying about) their mothers and fathers. Indeed, many StoryCorps conversations start with reflections on our first and often most consequential bond—with Mom.

  Across the country, thousands upon thousands of people have interviewed their mothers through StoryCorps. All types of mothers have shared their stories: single moms, working moms, moms with one child, moms with a dozen or more children, mothers who adopted children, mothers who lost children, and more. These stories remind us of the unflagging hard work and singular devotion required of moms, attributes that have too often been overlooked and underappreciated. In Mom, we hope to do our small part to rectify this wrong.

  At its heart, StoryCorps is a project about the transmission of wisdom across generations, and the stories in this book are no exception. In the pages that follow, you’ll find not only wisdom, but also stories of connection and conflict, heartbreak and humor, strength and grace. I hope these extraordinary moms will inspire you with their heart, gumption, insight, and love.

  Dads we’ll save for another book, on another day. For now, it’s time to celebrate Mom.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The following stories were edited from transcripts of StoryCorps interviews that usually run forty minutes. We aimed to distill these interviews without altering the tone or meaning of the original sessions. At times, tense and usage were changed and a word or two was added for clarity. We did not use ellipses to indicate omitted text; in the following pages, ellipses indicate speech trailing off or a significant pause in conversation.

  Words and phrases that read well are not always the strongest spoken moments, and the reverse is also the case. As a result, a story may vary slightly from audio to print.

  Participants gave permission for their interviews to be published in this book, and each story was fact-checked.

  WISDOM

  NANCY WRIGHT, 53 talks to her son, J. D. WRIGHT, 19

  Nancy Wright: My mother, Frances Guy Ericksen, was born in Jacksonville, Florida. She was really defiant of authority. I remember a story of when she was growing up: She went into a classroom, and the screen door slammed shut behind her. The teacher thought she had slammed the door and made her go back and close it quietly a hundred times in a row—which struck her as highly unfair, since really it wasn’t her problem that the door slammed. So she closed it quietly ninety-nine times, and then slammed the hell out of it the hundredth time! [laughs]

  She got married to my dad, George Ericksen, who was probably not a very easy person to live with.They waited about five years to have me, because she wasn’t sure the marriage was going to take. I remember her telling me that he proposed to her after he had fixed the toilet in the house. He came in, in his true romantic style, wiping his hands on a towel and saying, “You know, if we got married, I’d be here all the time to fix the toilet.” [laughs] Whoo, makes you swoon! They were polar opposites. Dad was very introverted, and Mom was very extroverted. There were some rocky moments.

  She had a real strong faith, and she put together prayer groups. In the early 1960s, she arranged for an interracial prayer group in Tampa, Florida. There were threats of crosses to be burnt on our yard.We were in a very conservative neighborhood, too. But that just made her even more determined to continue to do things like that.

  My mom never met a stranger. She hugged people that she never met before. Her mission in life was to bring up the financial status of waiters and waitresses everywhere—she would leave a twenty-dollar tip sometimes for a five-dollar meal. And when it was pointed out to her that her tip might be a tad too high in terms of normal percentages, she was irate. There was no stopping her tipping. In fact, at the meal that we had right before her funeral we left a Frances Ericksen memorial tip for the waitress that was almost the price of fifteen of us eating there.

  My mom and I were pretty compatible up to adolescence, but then we grated on each other’s nerves quite a bit, and our relationship really kind of went downhill from there. Even after I left the house, I felt like all of my conversations with her were very judgment-laden and critical, especially because I wasn’t following the religious path that she wanted me to follow.

  Finally, when I was about thirty, we were together at the house, and we just had a miserable weekend. I felt our relationship was awful, and I told her right before I left that I couldn’t deal with her criticism anymore and that it wasn’t helping me. She said, “That’s what mothers do. Who would tell you if not your mother?” And I said I didn’t need a mother anymore; I needed a friend. If she wanted to continue to try to be my mother that way, I didn’t want it—but to call me if she wanted to be my friend.

  After I left, she was very angry. I talked to my dad once in the interim, and he told me how upset she was. I almost didn’t expect to hear from her, because she could be a little stubborn.

  I think about two weeks after that conversation, I picked up the phone and a small voice on the other side said, “Hi, this is your friend.” . . . [crying]

  And it was.

  Recorded in Gainesville, Florida, on October 23, 2008.

  LEAH HASELEY, 43 talks to her brother, JONATHAN SCHACHTER, 46 about their mother, Frances Fuchs Schachter. Leah is a physician.

  Leah Haseley: I have so many memories of Mom that make me smile.

  I really miss her when I pick up the children from school, because she used to love picking me up from school. I remember it very clearly, coming down the ramp out of school and her having this big grin on her face because she got to pick me up. I would go running to her. My younger one still does that for me.

  I remember her teaching me to drive around the neighborhood, and all of a sudden I drove up onto a curb. Mom got out of the car, giggled, and looked at the teenagers nearby and said, “She’s learning to drive.” I had driven completely onto the curb, and rather than yell at me, she had this positive, funny approach to it. The next time I got in the car, I drove very slowly, and I said, “I’m nervous.” Rather than tell me to relax, she sat up and said, “Good.You should be nervous! This is a very dangerous thing to be doing.” And to this day I still use that. I used it in the hospital a few weeks ago. I was working with a very good resident who I was training to do a procedure, and he looked up at me, and he said, “I’m nervous.” I said, “Good. You should be nervous! It’s a dangerous thing to do.” And actually, I think that helped him relax. I think it helps to have your nervousness understood. I’m sure when I teach my children to drive, I’ll miss her like crazy.

  Whenever I’m having difficulty with one of the children, I often think, What would Mom say to do in this situation? Some of the things that Mom told me I use a lot with my kids. One is, Mom always used to say, “You be the one.” You be the one to make up with a friend or to reach out and break the silence between you. So whenever one of the kids announces that he had a fight with another child at school and he’s not talking to them, I always say, “That’s not going to help you at all. You be the one to reach out and try to connect with your friend again.” The other thing Mom used to say was, “If you’re ever on the fence about whether to stay home or to go somewhere,” she used to say, “just go!” So I say that to the kids whenever they’re torturing themselves about any kind of decision that they have.

  Mom took me to Boston when I was starting my residency. She was quite sick at that time, but she was bent on taking me to Boston to shepherd me through finding a place to live. It was our last trip together as mom and daughter, and we slept in the same room in this bed-and-breakfast. After we got in bed she said to me, “I want you to know a few things.” And it was very clear that she wanted to give me advice before she died.

  So when we were in bed, she said to me, “When you have children, always remember that a parent should be like a gas station. The children can come to y
ou and then go out into the world and do their things and then come back for more. But be careful that the gas station stays in one place. Don’t run after your children. Just stay there in the gas station to give them support.” That’s something that I’ve always governed myself by. Whenever I see myself running after one of the kids or trying to control what they’re doing, I always try to stop myself and say, “I’m just the gas station.”

  My mother was a career woman, and she was proud of that, but I think above all she would want to be remembered as a really remarkable mother. On countless occasions she would say to me, “You and Jon are the greatest thing I ever did in my life.” And I always say that to the children: “You are the greatest thing I ever did in my life!”

  Recorded in New York, New York, on August 23, 2008.

  GRACE CRUZ, 13 interviews her father, JOSÉ CRUZ, 57 about his mother, Martha Estela Cruz Santana. José was born in the Dominican Republic.

  Grace Cruz: What was the happiest moment in your life?

  José Cruz: When I heard that I was coming to New York to be with my mother. She left Santo Domingo when I was six years old. I used to see the letters that she wrote, but I wasn’t a very good reader and I couldn’t understand her handwriting. On one occasion, she sent a recording—I remember that it was a reel-to-reel tape. My grandmother, my grandfather, my aunt, and myself went to a neighbor’s house, and we sat there listening to my mother say how much she missed us. She ended that whole recording with a hymn, “Hogar de Mis Recuerdos [Home Sweet Home].” At the end, we were all in tears.

  Grace: Would you say that listening to the recording of her voice was also one of the saddest moments of your life because you hadn’t been with her for so long?