Mom

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

ALSO EDITED BY DAVE ISAY:

 

 

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

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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

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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.

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.

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
]