I didn’t realize then the extent to which my mother felt personally wounded by my mainstream academic career. In early August 1993, as she waited for me at the airport, she wrote: “I am nervous about our meeting. Maybe he is, too. I feel as if he’s hostile to me because of his own career trajectory, that he feels he has to either change me or disown me in order to be accepted by his peers. This is immensely painful.”
Although I would certainly never disown her, and had long given up trying to change her, I was tired of always feeling politically judged that I was never radical enough. As I gained more political self-confidence in graduate school, I pushed back more and more. I wanted a lot more security, comfort, and stability than she had ever provided for me when I was a child—in that sense, I was more like my father than my mother. But it’s hard to have your own mother consider you a sellout.
My mother became even more alarmed when my dissertation research took me back to Washington for a year to be based at the Brookings Institution, the quintessential establishment “think tank” inside the beltway. I had hoped my mother would be impressed that I had been offered a fellowship to facilitate the D.C.-based part of my research, but on the phone she said, “Brookings? Really? Isn’t that right wing?”
“They define themselves as centrist,” I replied. “And it’s probably more liberal leaning.”
My mother quickly shot back, “Centrist in Washington means right wing. You know that, Peter. And the so-called center has been moving to the right for years now. Do you really want to even be affiliated with such a reactionary place?” I would have settled for a simple “Congratulations.”
Every once in a while, though, I could still make her proud. When my first book, Drug War Politics, which I wrote with my Swarthmore thesis advisor and two others, came out in 1996, she ordered copies to send to all of her closest relatives and friends. In 1998, after reading a draft of my dissertation, she confessed to her diary that “I am burning up inside with pride.” She also eagerly told her friends when I was awarded a fellowship at Harvard to turn my dissertation into a book, and again later when I was offered a faculty position at Brown. Even so, she couldn’t help wishing that I were following more closely in her footsteps:
I am realizing that he [Peter] has avoided using Marxism (not to mention Lenin and Mao) in his thesis. He will eventually pay a price for that. Most likely he is beginning to realize that already and knows he’s under-educated but is fighting doing anything about it. I have warned him all the way along that he should be prepared to be blacklisted if he becomes a conscientious scholar. He did not want to hear it. So he took a safe path and now he’s stumped and has to trash the whole Marxist thesis to save face.
In retrospect, for as important as our political differences seemed at the time, it came at too high a price. During my childhood, I had hated my mother’s endless, intense battles with Raul, Joel, and others, but now we were doing exactly the same thing, and it prevented us from being able to enjoy each other at the end of her life.
Chasing Rainbows
EVEN AS HER years of hard living began to catch up to her, my mother refused to slow down. She surprised everyone—herself included—by getting a tenure-track job at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. The sociology department’s only demand was that she give up her “honor system” of letting students decide their own grades.
For the first time since I could remember, my mother, now in her mid-fifties, had job security, benefits, and a real salary. But as it turned out, she hated grading, and felt disillusioned by the lack of revolutionary fervor among the students of the 1990s in northern Colorado. She wrote in her diary that she dreaded “teaching Social Change when the TV is full of the ‘triumph of democracy and free enterprise.’ ” She did have a few cheerful moments, however: in the fall of 1990, she wrote, “Classes are going really well . . . a bunch of students are ready to make a revolution or something, crying in my office, wanting to do something that will make a difference. So I will certainly get in trouble. It will be a miracle if I get tenure.” She did get tenure, but soon after that decided to retire early.
Right before my mother retired she wrote her fourth book, Meatpackers and Beef Barons: Company Town in a Global Economy, an exposé of the meatpacking industry, based on an account of the exploitative working conditions in the local slaughterhouse owned by the Monfort family. But larger presses rejected the book manuscript as too ideological, which fed into her general disillusionment: “I’m being made to feel like a pariah for being politically radical, for having principles, for taking a clear class position. This is really infuriating.” She was terribly upset when the University Press of Colorado declined to keep the book in print once the limited initial print run ran out, always suspecting that pressure from the Monfort family was responsible.
Retired or not, my mother resisted any push to “act her age.” Her romantic interests continued to focus exclusively on much younger men. At age sixty-six she struggled with how to tell one potential suitor she wasn’t interested in him because of his age: “I do have a problem with accepting OLD MEN into my life”—by which she meant anyone her own age.
At the same time, my mother was frustrated that her body was starting to slow her down: “At present I am fighting ‘plantar fasciitis,’ which has nothing to do with fascism, though I’m suffering from that, too. It has to do with dancing too much.” She had never been allowed to dance in public growing up as a Mennonite and spent much of her life making up for it.
My mother was also increasingly worried about her high blood pressure, but avoided doctors because she was convinced she’d be forced to take expensive meds pushed by pharmaceutical companies. She also started to lose more and more of her hair, which had been thin to start with, and took to covering her head with colorful scarves, her only sign of vanity. My mother always said she wondered if her hair loss came from a curse by Mama Juana, Raul’s grandmother, whom we had all suspected of being a witch.
As always, my mother was spending all of her time with younger people, usually much younger, but for the first time she had begun to feel old, and was terrified of becoming dependent on others: “I am mortified that my body is so vulnerable . . . I do not want to be hospitalized, ever.”
She had imagined that she might write a memoir, but instead turned to “visual memoir”—creating dozens of torn-paper collages, many of which recalled moments in her life. One was a collage of the two of us, heading off to South America, walking hand in hand toward the sun. She called it Chasing Rainbows.
Through it all, though, my mother never let go of her political activism. One of the last times I saw her, at a dinner with Joel to celebrate her seventieth birthday, she was fuming about the U.S. invasion of Iraq the previous spring. My mother had been going to marches and demonstrations, signing petitions, writing letters to the editor, and firing off protest letters to politicians in Washington. I should have been proud and happy that she still felt so passionate about being an activist, but instead I let myself overreact when, between bites, she blurted out, “You know, Bush is more evil than Hitler.”
My mother’s torn-paper collage Chasing Rainbows, depicting the two of us traveling to South America together in 1972
“That’s a crazy thing to say,” I snapped, embarrassed to be having this conversation in the middle of an Afghan restaurant. I was certainly no fan of Bush or the war, but I also no longer had the stomach for the kind of over-the-top hyperbole she had raised me on.
My mother persisted. “No, I’m serious. Who is going to stop him? Bush has far more power than Hitler ever had. It’s scary.”
As both she and Joel began to insist that I was in denial about the unprecedented existential threat that U.S. militarism posed to the world, I lost patience, called for the check, and took an earlier than planned plane back to Providence the next morning. Despite all our history and the love we shared, politics still held the power to break us apart.
I would not see my mother aga
in until the following August, more than nine months later, at Joel’s wedding. He married a woman he had met at an antiwar demonstration in San Francisco. During their wedding ceremony, they proudly wore matching T-shirts with the words “NO WAR!” in bold letters on the front. In my wedding toast I joked, with a smile and a wink at my mother, that we should thank George W. Bush for bringing Joel and his bride together—and that this certainly made Bush less evil than Hitler. My mother laughed and rolled her eyes. That was the last time I would ever see her.
* * *
“Uh oh, I think I’m having a heart attack, what to do.”
When I first read that scribbled line, the last line in my mother’s diary, I froze. The notebook lay next to my mother’s bed, where she had died alone the day before, on December 7, 2004, less than a month after her seventy-first birthday. Only an hour earlier, my brothers and I had emailed family and friends to say that our mother had died “peacefully in her sleep,” the same language that would be used in her Denver Post obituary.
I tried to re-create in my mind my mother’s final living moment. How did she write that last line at night if the lights were out? Or perhaps it was already morning and it was light enough out to not need the lights on to write in her diary? Did the sudden intense pain in her chest wake her up? Or was she already awake early, as she often was, writing in her diary before getting out of bed? Was she scared? Calm? Comforted by having her diary by her side, even if her sons were not? This was what I’d been afraid of my whole life—suddenly losing my mother—and now it had finally happened.
My brothers and I hastily organized a small memorial service. A local Iranian friend of my mother’s volunteered her house for the event, and several dozen activist friends, most of whom I had not seen since I was a teenager, gathered to pay their respects. There were the feminist lesbians from Denver, activists from RIP Bookstore and the Coors strike from the late seventies, and a handful of her closest former students. Even though my mother had died alone, there was no doubt that these passionate allies had been an extended family of sorts. One person read a Pablo Neruda poem, “Alturas de Machu Picchu,” and we all sang the Communist “The Internationale,” reminding me of our days together in Chile. In between the planned eulogies, people stood spontaneously to say kind things. Joel and I struggled to talk coherently through the tears. Ronald sat stone-faced the entire time; he didn’t say a word and didn’t shed a tear, but I was glad that at least he was there. Years earlier, he and my mother had reconciled enough to be in regular contact again, and it pleased her enormously that he and Dawn and their ten-year-old son, Derek—the only grandchild my mother would ever know—had recently moved to Colorado.
Back in Providence, I unpacked the duffel bags filled with my mother’s diaries that I had brought home, and put them in neat stacks in chronological order. I began reliving her life, reading backward in time from the very moment she died. At first I wondered if she’d disapprove; years earlier, she had written:
I’ve been thinking about protecting my diary and correspondence from getting robbed or misappropriated or misused. Safest, of course, is to get rid of them, and I wouldn’t do that. Could put a sign on it saying it should be destroyed when I die—that’s what I’m thinking about, but that seems a little drastic, too. . . . Could make them off limits to anyone but my sons (who wouldn’t be interested in them anyways).
But for me, my mother was still alive in these pages—so preserving the diaries was my way of keeping her alive. I couldn’t stop reading. It felt like one last chance to talk to her about our life together, to say good-bye.
Hard as the passages were for me to read, my mother seemed, in some ways, ready to let go during those final years: “I am, and have been, fixated on how to make myself disappear with no fuss and bother; it is not depression. It’s just a sense of completion and a kind of boredom that can only come from having lived to the max.”
She might even have been able to predict how it would happen: she had been struggling with chest pains for some time, yet kept them hidden from her children. In one diary entry, she noted, “I started having angina earlier when I was reading, and now it’s returned. This is why I keep wanting to be with my sons. I have not told anyone about these attacks.” Three years later, she wrote: “I had a short bout of angina in the middle of the night. Realizing ‘I might wake up dead,’ I had an extraordinary feeling of wanting not to leave my children—it was a powerful surreal experience that is hard to describe (impossible to describe).”
I did not fully realize how much she longed for her children, nor how concerned she was that we, or the world at large, might judge her to be a “bad mother.” This was one of her biggest worries at the end of her life, despite all the years of flaunting parental conventions. “When they don’t call me I think they are unhappy, then I feel I’ve been a BAD MOTHER and need to ask for ‘forgiveness’ for something. Yet I know (even if they don’t) that I was not a BAD MOTHER. Stuck again. This is a perpetual problem.”
To some degree, she was able to acknowledge, privately, that in her younger years she had to choose between her children and her political goals: “I really feel terrible sometimes when I think what I’ve put my kids through. I guess I’m trying to make it up to them by letting them go a bit now while still being there (or here) for them when they need me, which I wasn’t always able to do when I felt I was carrying all the burdens of the world on my shoulders.”
Instead of discussing any of this with me, however, she waited for me to tell her how good a mother she had been, how heroic—but I didn’t. And she certainly didn’t hear those words from Ronald, with whom things had never fully healed: “July 18, 2001: 3:24 a.m.—awake again, though I’ve been sleeping. I am needing a balm, and wondering if I’ve done all I can to heal the wounds of those teenage tensions with Ronald. Can I ask him for FORGIVENESS? I need help with this.”
As for me, I wish I could explain to my mother what I feel now. In some ways, she did fall into some “bad mothering.” A child should not feel that he must let his mother kidnap him in order to secure her love, or be a nightly witness to his mother’s political screaming matches and marital passions, or bear the weight of her suicidal thoughts. A child should not be allowed to play with a loaded gun because it is “good training for the revolution,” nor should he see his mother arrested as she shoplifts his birthday present. He should not have to defy his mother’s ideological insistence that he attend a bad high school because it is more “working class.” All in all, a child needs more stability than to live in three states and five countries in more than a dozen different homes and schools between the ages of five and eleven. Certainly, I hope to protect my own daughters from all of this.
And yet—and yet. There is so much she gave me, too, so much I would never trade for a thousand “normal” childhoods. My mother was absolutely convinced she was doing the right thing, unconventional as it was. She wanted to share with me her deepest convictions and passions for justice, to raise me according to her own highest beliefs. Some would say that the way she chose to do so was selfish and self-absorbed, yet if she had left me with my father from the very beginning, as some of her relatives urged, her own life would have been far easier. But she could not bear to leave her little boy behind. In the last years of her life she was nostalgic about our time together, realizing our bond had been as important as the ones she always sought in the arms of younger lovers: “I watched a mom and her 8–9 year old son while at the coffeehouse and remembered what a privilege it was to spend all those years trekking around the world with Peter. Better than having a ‘partner’ in some ways, but I suppose I didn’t realize that at the time?”
What I do know is that I always felt my mother loved me and wanted me. She was sometimes negligent, even recklessly so, but I never felt neglected. In the end, my mother kept that promise she made to me when we headed off to South America in 1972. She promised that I would someday understand and be glad that we had gone on this adventure together,
that I would even feel lucky. She was right. I do feel lucky—though I also feel lucky my life didn’t get completely derailed along the way. And even though I don’t share my mother’s brand of radical politics or faith in the coming revolution, without her I would have led a more narrow, insular life, less aware of other peoples and cultures and less concerned about the world’s great injustices and inequalities. I wish I shared her trust in the benevolent power of the masses to rise up and correct the wrongs of the world, but her fiery idealism and passion for social justice is inspiring all the same.
Acknowledgments
This is not the sort of book that a political science professor typically writes, though it is certainly about politics. When I wear my more scholarly hat I write more standard academic stuff. Maybe that’s why, when I first started to write this book, I kept it to myself, just as I had long kept the details of my childhood to myself. I also disliked the pretentious-sounding word memoir, and was uncomfortable using it. So I’m happy that, rather than scratching their heads and raising their eyebrows, many friends, relatives, and colleagues not only encouraged me to write this story but some of them took the time to read drafts. I especially thank Rosalind Andreas, Corey Brettschneider, Anne Button, Zairo Cheibub, Nitsan Chorev, Phoebe Damrosch, John Dinges, Matt Gutmann, Clair Kaplan, Wendy Lavallee, Paul Lavallee, Rick Locke, Cathy Lutz, Jim Morone, Suzanne Rich, Jim Ron, Jason Salzman, and Deb Taylor. My brother Joel read the manuscript multiple times, and while not always sharing my perspective, was supportive from start to finish. I’m also grateful that my father was such a meticulous keeper of letters and documents, which he kindly shared with me to help fill in important gaps. We’ve long lost touch, but I want to thank Jean-Pierre for having a camera during our time together in South America. Jane Rosenman, Suzanne Strempek Shea, and Diana Spechler provided terrific feedback. Melani Cammett and Angelo Manioudakis gave me the perfect secluded place to go through the final revisions without distraction. At Simon & Schuster, Millicent Bennett embraced this book when it was still a rough draft and helped me polish it into something much better, and Jonathan Cox expertly carried it across the finish line. I am deeply indebted to both of them. Jonathan Karp came up with the title (and wisely rejected my alternatives). Tamara Arellano shepherded the book through the production editorial process. My agent, Rafe Sagalyn, was encouraging from the beginning and smartly advised me to take my time. Kristen Lavallee made sure that I enjoyed the here and now even as my mind was often on faraway places in my distant past. I dedicate this book to Stella and to Annika, who arrived in this world while I was in the midst of writing and who did everything they could to keep me from finishing. Hopefully someday they’ll enjoy reading about their father’s childhood years with their radical grandmother, whom I wish they could have met.
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