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!

Hey all, apologies for last Monday without Mike. I took Memorial Day off — in fact, I took the whole week off. I hadn’t had a vacation in, well, I don’t remember and I was getting more squirrelly than normal. So, for me and for all those around me, a little rest and relaxation was in order.

My goal was to not think about work or check work email at all for a week, with the intention of getting out of that twitch-respond mode that electronic communications can put us in. A little nature — as in getting out of the concrete jungle of downtown Chicago — was also a goal.

Travel to a faraway place was at the top of my list for a while. Nothing gets me out of my own brain and my own rut like being overseas. But I only had a week<!–more–>

and airfares were sky high so I passed. Thought about a mini-camping trip but…was too lazy.

So, I stayed home. I mean, I left the apartment, but I stayed home and made selected ventures out  —  to see the White Sox-Yankees-Derek Jeter farewell game with my nephew, for example. And to see pianist Eric Reid at Jazz Showcase. Or, just down to Hackney’s to watch a ballgame or hockey game knowing that I had time to do my laundry whenever I wanted — after I slept in. And to Chicago Sweat Lodge, where I shared Russian and Turkish saunas with a bunch of East Europeans and very little English was spoken. It was like going overseas without the jet lag.

Best of all, I got my nature fix when our friend Brad and I spent a fantastic afternoon at Shedd Aquarium. We paid full price and got access to all the newer stuff (like the Oceanarium, whales, penguins, jelly fish and my favorite, the Wild Reef Exhibit. Spectacular). Prices are a little steep but you can also get in for $8 with somewhat limited access that amounted to the original aquarium area I remember from the days of school field trips.

It’d been 10 years since I was at Shedd and about the same for Brad, so we were like a couple of kids, oohing and aahing. It’s cliché, yes, but the diversity of life forms on this earth is almost imcomprehensible. Blue iguanas, puffer fish, anacondas, jelly fish, poison dart frogs. Kicks the daylights out of a 3D movie. It’s like, you know, really 3D.

Which brings me to the only wart on the experience: Incessant picture taking. Now, because I do occasionally suffer from electronic twitch syndrome, I understand the temptation to stop and take a picture of that crazy looking lungfish. Except…why not just pocket the phone, and look at Mr. lungfish directly, unmediated by a lens or electronics? I mean…that’s why you go, right? Because…and this is the killer: because in the modern electronic world, I can find you absolutely stunning photographs of all those species — better than any photo you’ll take on your walk through — on the Interwebs.

Brad and I are separated by around 20 years, but we share some, shall we say, traditional sensibilities. And we were both annoyed by all the folks putting their camera phones to the glass. The topper, though was when a girl — who looked to be a Tweener, nudged me, pointed to the gaggle of girls lined up in front of the glass and in an annoyed voice said, “Excuse me? We’re trying to take a picture here.”

Because, you know, the shark’s not important. The other museum-goers — like the guy with the beard standing entranced in front of the display — aren’t important. What’s important is that WE’RE HERE and we need to tell everyone about it.

I would’ve gone all shark on her but I was well into my vacation and my quick twitch muscles were on holiday, too. I let it all run off the proverbial duck’s back.

I don’t get it though. I really don’t. Probably never will. I think with all the talk about privacy these days, a bigger problem is forgetting how to act in public spaces.

Apart from issues of propriety or decorum, I’m thinking these behaviors limit the shutterflies’ own experiences. As Brad and I walked out, for example, because we were just walking and looking around and not thinking about how we could be advertising ourselves in some way, he noticed some incredible detail in the ceiling of the original Shedd building. And beautiful wall sconces. We just stopped for a bit, heads on swivels, it was the end of a mostly perfect afternoon.

And I’d show you a picture but I didn’t take any.

My friend Nicole Dotto left Chicago this past week to move closer to her family in California, and I’m sure going to miss her.

That’s me as Annie Hall, thanks to Nicole.

Loyal blog readers might recognize Nicole’s name from a 2013 guest post she wrote here after Mike and I were invited to a costume ball for Mardi Gras. The theme of the party was “Hollywood” and Nicole helped me put together a costume. Nicole and I met as volunteers for Sit Stay Read here in Chicago. She runs an online vintage shop called DOTTO on Etsy and has a whole lot of handsome and classic items for sale there, along with what she affectionately calls “interesting train wreck pieces” (she tells me a lot of those are thanks to the colorful 1980s).

Nicole is moving her Etsy business with her to California, but before she left Chicago she was interviewed for a piece about her shop on the etsy blog. The story was on the Etsy front page for two days — a huge deal as far as Etsy goes.<!–more–>

She was pleased that Etsy included pictures of items from her store along with some behind-the-scenes shots of her Chicago apartment, but she did have one complaint. “They totally cropped one photo that had my cat employee snoozing on the ground next to me while I was taking shop photos,” she told me. “The nerve!”

In the Etsy interview, Nicole said that while in Chicago the past three years she lived and worked in a studio apartment and grew to love all parts of running her shop: finding clothing, cleaning, mending, measuring, editing, shipping, and answering questions. She models most of the outfits she sells on her ETSY site, too, an in the ETSY interview she claims she “can take photos with a timer like no one’s business.”

A story in the Lincoln Park Village newsletter this month by Bonnie Keplinger described Millennials like Nicole as:

• over 80 million strong in the US
• born roughly between 1980 and 2001
• self-directed
• tech-savvy
• confident
• multi-tasking
• upbeat

The Lincoln Park Village article said that if you’re a Millennial, your life-style and friends trump your work. “They aim to change the policies of corporate America to achieve better work-life balance: Hello meaningful, collaborative work and transparency; goodbye performance reviews and 60 hour work weeks.”

Nicole told me that starting her own small business and relying on it as a sole source of income from the start never felt like a huge risk to her. She gives a lot of credit to her family and friends who encouraged and supported her along the way and hopes others will consider opening their own small online businesses. “It can sound terrifying, but I want everyone to know that they can do this kind of thing, too.”

That’s Nicole modeling the ‘WHO WOULD WEAR THIS?’ kind of thing she carries in her online vintage shop. (sorry, folks. It’s sold.)

I can’t vouch for the photos — you’ll have to link to the ETSY blog post and check them out yourself. I can tell you that the interview paints a beautiful picture of Nicole, though, and will end here with her answer to a question about what she loves most about having her own shop on ETSY:

I love the fact that DOTTO allows me to call the shots, give new life to clothing that otherwise might be discarded, pretend that I have the grandest closet in all the land, meet people from around the world, and put cats in my pictures, but what I really love about it is the glorious flexibility it affords me. I joined the Peace Corps after college because I wanted a broader perspective of the world, and I’ve continued volunteering in some way ever since. Having my days free lets me volunteer around Chicago a couple of times a week, which is truly what I love to do. I have working limbs and my wits about me; there is no reason I shouldn’t be helping others as much as I can.

People have been asking me if I’m excited about the “driverless car” Google is working on. Truth is, I don’t miss driving that much. Mike and I live in a neighborhood in Chicago so close to downtown that I can walk or take a train, cab or bus just about anywhere I want to go. Parking costs a lot here, so many of our neighbors who can see don’t have cars, either.

And then there’s this: I was a bad driver when I could see. I miss riding my bicycle independently far more than I miss having a car. I’m in the minority, though — when I talk with others who have visual impairments (more…)