Sunday, December 11, 2011

Mom at 90

Written for Elizabeth Segal’s 90th birthday celebration in Portland Oregon, August 13,2011.


It was an inauspicious beginning, that’s for sure, though not an uncommon story in America of the 1920’s: a baby loses her mother just past her first birthday, loses her mama before a clear memory can form – of a face, a voice, arms, breasts, her smell and taste, the sound of her voice, the colors and textures she wore; before the baby has words to express her love…or loss. An enlarging body of research confirms what humans have long known; what happens in the womb and those first precious 3 years of life is hugely often irrevocably formative. We know what happens when things go wrong during those tender times… the children become adults more likely to use substances and mis-use each other, to have sick hearts, backs, stomachs and souls, even with none of the usual risk factors. We know less about how to help it turn out right, but early bonding and attachment are the big parent- baby buzzwords. So what then of our little Libba who lost this primary link with her mother so terribly young – at age 14 months? Her father, the Reverend Stoney, refused to go along with plans proposed by his wife’s family to place the children with different relatives. In addition to baby Elizabeth, there was George, age 5, Martha age 7 (also known as Boney ‘cause she was), and Katherine age 12 (known by all as Kack). “Remember”, Daddy exhorted them, “I kept you kids together”. There was a fifth sibling named Julia. Born physically and mentally disabled, we know very little about her. In a happy story Aunt Boney wrote about the last Christmas before Mother died, Julia is described sitting in her mom’s lap while an infant Elizabeth crawls towards a beautiful big Christmas tree decorated with dancing candle lights. Unable to care for this child at home after Mother’s death, Rev. Stoney traveled with Julia by train to an institution, a place she would live until her death at about age 11. When my mother was a 2-year old, their father, suffering from Tuberculosis and the loss of his young wife, sent the 4 remaining Stoney siblings to board in rural East Bend, North Carolina, under the care of a woman my mother knew as “Grandma Apperson”. George and Kack refused to call her grandma and reported few fond memories of the time. My mom loved the freedom and food in the country, writing “my first memories were of running barefoot in the grass and dirt, climbing a chinaberry tree with my friend the boy next door, eating wormy peaches, and hiding under the grape vine in my secret place where I made a little house design of sticks and stones and other things I could collect around me there.” She recalls “warm milk straight from the cow and thick biscuits to eat with apple butter”.

When Daddy took the children home to Winston-Salem, Elizabeth, called Libba by her family, was now age 5. Here she had to get used to being quiet in the house, playing in a closed yard, and a succession of hired caretakers, who were kind and helpful, but never lasted long under her father’s critical standards. He built her a sandbox for outside play, taught her to clean house and to read. He took special pride in the fact that his youngest daughter entered school already able read, and was angry to find the teachers disapproved of such early parental tutoring. From my mom’s perspective, this homeschooling was hardly the sort of attention she craved: “He was not very patient and got angry with me when I didn’t do well”, she wrote, “So I began getting sleepy at lesson time and taking a nap to escape”.

Libba recalls her first year at school as an unhappy one. Her clothes were often in poor condition, hand-me-downs held together with pins, esp. the ill-fitting underwear. Other kids made fun of her and she felt ashamed, awkward and ugly. It took me a long time for to understand why mom obsessively gave us girls new underpants at Christmas and AT other random times. I would shake my head or chuckle as yet another package of undies bought on sale would arrive in Hawaii special delivery from Washington, DC. Yup, now I get it; she wanted to give us something she had so sorely missed.

In the second grade, Libba was in a school performance. She recalls vividly how the teacher paid special attention to her, dressing her up in a colorful crepe paper costume, transforming this skinny little girl into a pretty, elegant, perfect butterfly, as she danced to the song “Glow Little Glow Worm, Glimmer, Glimmer”. Was it in this magical moment that a lifelong love of costume and theatre was born?

So, just how did this early childhood affect the type of person she became and the sort of mother she was, my sisters and I have wondered endlessly, indeed at times ad nauseum. Such reflection, however, is the burden and privilege of the next generation. Lib just had to play the cards she was dealt. As Aunt Kack once said to me at age 88, after a rare reflection upon the difficulties of being the eldest girl in a motherless family: “I told myself I would raise these kids and then I would go out and live my life, and I did”

Showing that same Stoney spirit and smarts, Lib attended college at the U of NC, where she completed her undergraduate degree in theatre, and was awarded a Rockefeller Scholarship, working as a graduate assistant in the costume department, towards her Masters in costume design. Then the Big Apple beckoned. Although she had never before been outside of the state of North Carolina, Lib moved to NYC, determined to try her hand at the world of theatre and the arts. At first, she experienced culture shock in a town where even store clerks exhorted a polite soft-spoken Southern girl to “speak up!” During her “New York Fling” as she called it, she met fascinating folks, including a roommate who remains her friend to this day; earned a living as an Arthur Murray dance instructor; and had a tragic romance, which is a story for another time. The need to get away from that last entanglement was what propelled her back to North Carolina and the University to complete her Masters degree. It was there, serving refreshments at a trade union educational institute, that she met the facilitator, a short, funny, cute, Jewish, trade union organizer – the epitome of everything the old South abhorred at the time. As a result of that chance meeting, and the 63 years that followed, dearly beloved, we are all gathered here today.
My mother and father shared in common the experience of being orphaned at an early age, yet they developed distinctly divergent coping mechanisms. To vastly oversimplify, the Lib Stoney strategy was fierce independence, escape into the fascinating world of ideas and art, and a ready pair of rose colored glasses; Ben Segal’s was building community wherever he found himself, and trying extra hard not to get his hopes up. My Dad helped ground my Mom to this earth, and my mom helped my dad believe the best was indeed possible.

We tell a story that illustrates the differing Stoney-Segal coping strategies, to which we are all in some manner heir: In June 1982, as most of you know, my father died suddenly, earth shatteringly, at the age of 66. My mom, sisters and I were all gathered in Washington DC along with friends and relatives, including some of you, for the memorial. Aunt Eva, one of my dad’s 3 sisters, calls long distance and is talking to my mom as she sits in an upstairs bedroom of the Yuma Street house where she and my dad raised their family. Eva asks how she is doing, and my mom is going on about how wonderful it is to have all the girls at home. Finally, Aunt Eva can contain herself no longer, warning, “But Lib, when they leave you’re going to feel terrible – oh, you’ll feel just terrible when they leave!”

So from challenging beginnings, Elizabeth Stoney Segal grew into the remarkable woman we know today: a person of unquenchable optimism, energy and enthusiasm, an insatiable curiosity and intellect, endless admiration for and fascination with people, an enduring commitment to peace and social justice, an active imagination that delights in theatre and the arts, a stubborn streak a mile wide, a preference for serendipity over planning, someone always somewhat surprised by good fortune, good relationships and good food who wonders aloud if perhaps it’s ALL “too much” (and hence underserved), a woman who so habitually turns lemons into lemonade that she often refuses to acknowledge there were ever any small sour yellow fruits in her kitchen to begin with.

It is my belief that our greatest strengths sometimes manifest as our greatest weaknesses. In my mom’s case, the eternal positive spin can at times get, well, infuriating. Here’s what I mean: So, like hypothetically if I am walking down the street with mom -- and the amazing thing is she still wants to and can walk down the street – so, I’m walking with Grandma Lib and she happens to step on a big pile of dog doo-doo. I would say, “Oh, shit, mom you just stepped in dog doo-doo, how terrible, how unlucky, how did this happen, what did we do wrong, come, sit down, let’s clean it up”… She, on the other hand, would look down pensively unperturbed and muse, “Hmmm, will you look at the marvelous design that made on my new white shoes. Remarkable! That dog is some kind of canine artiste. Let’s find that dog and go to its next opening; better yet, get out my checkbook and cell phone, let’s raise some funds to support his work. Hey, I thought I saw an unusual dog heading thataway; Come on, hop in the car, I’m driving…” Maaaaaaam!
So, in conclusion, dear family and friends, like this last parable, I can’t be certain everything I’ve told today is true. Family history and legend sit interlaced side by side, possessing fluid boundaries, grey areas where truth is elusive and perhaps unnecessary. This was a lesson learned, or perhaps just recalled, during an epic 2004 trip to Ireland with Mom, Uncle George and Kelly. We were visiting the Aran Islands, birthplace of my mother’s father, and also the site where her grandfather, Dr. James Johnson Stoney, met his premature and mysterious death. As we walked up a stony pathway (no pun intended) towards the ancient fort of Dun Angus, we encountered an old man sitting on the side of the trail with his hat out. When he learned the name of our ancestor, his eyes widened and licking his lips in anticipation, he inquired “Ahhhh, have yeh heard the stories?”

I thank ye kindly for gathering here today to honor my mom and listen to these tales, real or imagined. It is in the listening, telling and re-telling of such stories at different times in our lives that we discover who we really are and how on God’s great green earth we came to be that way.

Written by Doris Segal Matsunaga and read at Elizabeth Segal’s 90th birthday celebration in Portland Oregon, August 13, 2011.