By Veronica Buckman
I recently met with a group of young women from Alpharetta, Milton and Roswell to speak about college and career options. I answered their basic question about getting into top schools and spotting hot careers.
As I left, I worried the discussion was incomplete. These were high-achieving girls who wanted a road map for career success. Ideas on nurturing a family escaped their concern.
Before the meeting I had spent the holiday talking with my own young adult daughters about college, work, marriage and kids. Their 91-year-old grandmother had come to visit, and brought strong opinions. A mother of 12, she expressed how the women’s movement had left today’s young women with false impressions of work done by wives and mothers of the past.
“It was different in my time when I started my family,” my mother-in-law said. “Women could work, go to college — it’s just that we didn’t often aspire to such things. Most of us wanted to be educated, but were very content as wives and mothers. The domestic front was our focus. I know I was domesticated!”
She was being self-deprecating. In fact, she was a college graduate with a degree in chemistry. Now the matriarch of an extended family of more than 50, including surgeons, lawyers and business leaders, it was clear she’d done an amazing job.
I thought about my own grandmothers – Eleanor, a mother of German stock in Minnesota, and Laura, a Norwegian farm mother nurturing children, crops and livestock on the North Dakota prairie. Both had hard-working husbands and homes filled with family.
I thought about my own mother – Joan, the third daughter of six children, whose Irish Catholic father, a railroad mechanic, died when she was 17. Mom started working at 15, riding the trolley to a Minneapolis meatpacking plant. She later found work as a manager at Montgomery Ward, where she met my dad.
And this mother-in-law visiting us, Gladys, had quite a life as well. Her parents had escaped their besieged country of Armenia to live in the Bronx, where her father was a textile artist. He died when she was 15, leaving her alone with her Armenian-speaking mother. They both worked, her mother as a seamstress, and Gladys went on to Fordham University. That’s where she met my late father-in-law.
If you look at these stories, what might you think of these women? Their hopes and dreams? Did they find success and fulfillment?
I see hope when I look into the faces of our energetic and creative young people. Really, has there ever been so much opportunity for success and happiness?
If we all take time to imagine the adversity faced by past generations we can appreciate our situation, and remember that it is in the love of family that joy most often resides. And that means remembering the importance of being a good wife and mother.
Veronica Buckman has been a resident of Milton for nine years. You can reach her at vrbuck01@aol.com
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