It’s Father’s Day, and tomorrow Nancy Lerman — a writer in one of the memoir classes I lead in Chicago — will be on stage at the Goodman Theatre to read an essay about her dad.

That’s Nancy and her father, awhile back.

This is a big deal! The Goodman won a Special Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre in 1992, and it’s recognized for its artists, productions and educational programs. One of those educational programs is a six-week writing workshop for people over 55 called GeNarrations, where participants develop personal narratives (more…)

The World Cup starts tomorrow, and while I won’t be paying much attention to the games, I am interested in the opening ceremonies. Here’s why: a teenager who is paralyzed is going to use a mind-controlled robotic suit called an exoskeleton to do the first kick.

I learned all about this thanks to my part-time job at Easter Seals Headquarters in Chicago. I’m the Interactive Community Coordinator there, which is just a fancy-schmancy title that means I (more…)

Beth writes often about her mom, Flo — most recently this past mother’s day.

This past Saturday, Flo had visitors from Ohio, Delaware, Michigan and Florida.

Flo spent that day at a rehabilitation facility, where she has been getting geared up to move into her new assisted living apartment. Flo has yet to make it into her new digs — but she’s working on it.

She’s had a series of setbacks, and at 98 years old, well, every setback gets us all — the legion of Finke children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, great-great grandchildren, friends and in-laws like me —- worried, concerned, anxious, teary-eyed. She’s bounced back so many times that for me, considering the possibility that she won’t again feels a little like what I imagine a taser to feel. Stunned dumb.

I lost my own mother 23 years ago. I’ve known Flo now for more than 30. My mom had absolutely nothing in common with Flo. At least not on the surface. As I think about it though, they both had known some serious hardship, and were forced to fairly claw for survival at points in their lives. Flo lost her husband when she was 45, had six kids at home, had no job and only part of a high school education. My mom’s first husband was in a horrible oil refinery fire in Bakersfield, Calif., just before Christmas in 1952. He survived a couple agonizing weeks, and then died — leaving my mom Esther, just turning 30 about then, with a 6-month-old daughter, thousands of miles from her own family.

My mom, well, it’d take a lot more than a blog to cover that little fireplug. Whatever our difficulties were though, I always knew I could count on Esther if my back was against the wall. I think it’s because she’d been there.

It’s been that way with Flo and me, too. Through all of the tribulations Beth and I faced, the question people immediately asked me most often was, quite reasonably, “How’s Beth?” “How’s Gus?” For as long as I can remember, though, Flo always asked, every time she saw me, “How are you, Mike?” She worried out loud that I looked tired (I did). I drove too much (I did).

Of course she was worried about her daughter, too. But I got the feeling that, looking at me, she saw someone in over his head — exactly as she had been years ago — and that she knew what that meant and wanted me to know: She was in my corner.

Right now I, and what I would estimate to be around a 1,000 members of Finke nation, are in hers.

Therapists of various stripes are on the case, and Flo’s working hard. But it’s not all work and no play. She lights up when visitors enter. She’s enjoyed the fantastic weather of the past few days. She tells everyone how good they look and how much she loves them. And she just got her nails done. When asked how long it took them to do her nails, she said, “98 years.” It was her first mani.

See you in your new place, Flo.

Sharon Kramer is a new writer in the memoir-writing class I lead at the Chicago Cultural Center. I’d intended on using an excerpt from her “One Thing I Didn’t Like About My Mother” essay in my last blog post, but soon realized that to really get the gist, you have to read this wonderful essay in its entirety. So here it is.

Nothing is wrong. Why do you ask?

by Sharon Kramer

When my sister got a divorce, my mother wore sun glasses for an entire month. She loved my sister’s husband, Lenny, and thought Marilyn was making a mistake by leaving him. She never said a word. Just wore the sunglasses. That was her statement.

When I was married Mom wore sunglasses to my December wedding<!–more–>

because, I assume, she didn’t like my choice of a mate. She never said a word. Just wore the sunglasses. I had to guess what she was thinking.

My mother wore sunglasses through every family trauma, dispute, emergency, abnormality, argument, or opinion that wasn’t hers. I would often say, “Is everything ok, Mom?” She would invariably respond, “I’m fine. Nothing is wrong.” She probably thought she was being strong and discreet. Actually, the sunglasses made a louder noise than screaming or stomping.

My mother believed that showing any emotion was a sign of weakness. She must have thought that the sunglasses were a perfect disguise, mysterious and controlled. What she didn’t realize was that the sunglasses cut off all communication. We could never disagree with her or fight for ourselves or offer an opinion, because the sunglasses bellowed, “I am through communicating about this topic. Don’t bother me.” And, often we didn’t even know what the topic was.

As a young girl I always thought I did something wrong when I saw the sunglasses balanced on my mother’s nose. I would hide in my room and mope, trying to figure out what I had done to provoke her. Often I ended up apologizing. As I grew older, I realized she couldn’t cope with feelings, fears and opinions and the sunglasses had nothing to do with me.

Travelling as a family, my mother would be the first to go to the ladies’ room in a restaurant. If it was not to her liking, she returned to the table, popped open her purse and put on her sunglasses. “I lost my appetite,” she would say, “but order what you want and enjoy yourselves.” My sisters and my father were silent.

Of course, we left the restaurant and found another where my mother inspected the ladies’ room while we all sat silently, hands and menus folded in waiting.

My mother wore sunglasses the day after I quit college. When my Dad went into a nursing home, Mom would visit in her dark glasses. You couldn’t tell if she was crying, frightened, sad or relieved. When Mom’s best friend Pauline died, I accompanied mom to the funeral. Of course, she wore sunglasses throughout the service.

When she was 100 years old, I took my mother to an assisted living facility for an interview. She had been saying that she needed more help.

On the way home in the cab, I said, “Well, mom, what did you think?” She opened her purse, took out her sunglasses, and popped them on. I knew we would never go back. We never did.

The writers in the three memoir-writing classes I lead are between 55 and 95 years old. As far as I know, none of their mothers are still alive, so I wondered what their reaction would be when I gave my writing topic for Mother’s Day last month: One Thing I Didn’t like about My Mother.

“Only one thing?”” a few of them asked with a laugh. “You’re limiting us to one? Others fell on the other side of the spectrum. “I’m the victim of a happy childhood!” one likes to say. This second group didn’t think they could come up with anything they didn’t like about their mothers. Not one single thing.

All three of my memoir classses are on a short summer hiatus now –one class met at Anne and Bruce Hunt’s house Monday for our final session.

My writers aren’t quitters, though. They thought long and hard about this topic,<!–more–>

and so many of them came back with thoughtful, moving and sometimes funny essays that I had a hard time deciding which ones to highlight in this blog post.

I mean, sure, I got some angry essays, and some sad ones, too, but these memoirists are looking at things from an adult perspective now, and it was touching to hear how forgiving, or at least understanding, they are of their mothers.

Sheila and her siblings grew up with an abusive father, and as a child she always wondered why their mother didn’t stick up for them. “Growing up, I didn’t understand why she was so whiny and passive,” she wrote. “As an adult, I can better appreciate what might have made her that way.” Another writer only lived with her parents full-time until she was five years old. They were missionaries and left the United States to save souls on foreign continents when their daughter started school, leaving her behind at an American boarding school.

I assumed this writer would write that the thing she didn’t like about her mother was that she abandoned her. Instead, she wrote about how her upbringing left her strong and independent, and how a long and bitter divorce taught her that strength and independence isn’t necessarily a good thing. During divorce proceedings, she often wished she was helpless, the type who leans on others. “But that is not in my nature,” she wrote.  “Is this a gift or curse that my mother gave me? I don’t know. I am who I am.”

Some writers did choose not to write on this topic at all. One writer’s mother died when he was two days old. I suppose he could have written that he didn’t like her dying in childbirth, but he chose a more lighthearted topic: his mother-in-law!

Long before When Harry Met Sally came out, Kathy’s mother was using her own version of the movie’s famous line.” I’ll have what you’re having,” her mother would say, whether it be a take-out order, a dessert choice, a cup of tea, — almost anything, really. Her mother seemed incapable of making a choice, or perhaps she was afraid of making the wrong choice.

“Why should that bother me so much?” Kathy asked herself in the essay she wrote. “I loved my Mother.” As if to answer her own question, Kathy’s essay goes on from there, spelling out the cultural mores that shaped her mother. “Inez Tiller (Tillie, as she was called), born in 1906 in Tennessee, was shy, sweet, and obedient. She was subservient to parents and her confident older sister, Verlie. Decisions were made for her.”

All decisions except for one, that is. “She confided in me that Daddy never knew how she voted.” Kathy claims the implication was clear. “Inez Wright was a closet Democrat!”

Bruce’s family lived with his paternal grandmother from the time he was seven until he was 13, and they all sat down for formal dinner together each and every night. “The ritual typically began with my father’s making some outrageous claim,” he wrote. “No matter the claim, my mother would listen, wide-eyed and react with something like: ‘Really?’”

All this set off Bruce’s grandmother, a co-conspirator reinforcing his father’s claim with evidence from her own life. “The conversation would proceed with mother protesting from time to time: ‘How can that be?’ Or, ‘Is that possible?’ And occasional outbursts of ‘Really?’”

It wasn’t until the level of fantasy got totally bizarre that his mother would realize it had all been a fabrication. And then, as Bruce so eloquently phrases it, “The rest of us would smirk in a superior way.”

And so, parents of smirky teenagers, don’t despair – kids have been smirking at their parents for multiple generations! And who knows, maybe in 60 years your child will be like Bruce, writing a memoir about how he looks at his mother’s naïveté in a whole different way now.

“Her curse was that she was gullible, but that was her blessing too,” he wrote. His mother was a teacher, and her students, all kindergartners, were just beginning their educational journey. These children trusted Bruce’s mother, and she believed what others said. “She could not imagine a world where that was not the starting assumption,“ Bruce wrote in the conclusion to his essay. “Mother would not have understood the snarky banter of 21st century comedy and news analysis, but she helped a number of young people, including her son, be open to new truths, even when they might be embarrassing.”

So now, how about you? Anything you didn’t like about your mother? Vent about it here, in the comments. and oh, by the way, yes, you *do* have to limit it to just one thing!