THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 12, 1996 TAG: 9605100094
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E7 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ANN G. SJOERDSMA
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines
SHE WAS ALWAYS the exception. My mother.
Valedictorian of her high school class. A zoology major in college. One of only a handful of women in her medical school graduating class.
An actress, a dancer, a poet, a painter, a physician.
The mother of four children.
I've thought a lot about my mother's exceptionalism and how it shaped the woman I am now, living in a time when exceptional women are no longer so exceptional. A time when exceptions have become rules, or so it seems, and rules are being questioned.
My mother always appeared to me to be a career woman, worldly and confident, the exception. But she always thought of herself first as a mother, the rule.
How often, I wonder, does the ``rule'' lurk behind the exception?
When my mother married in 1950 at age 26, her own mother, a bright woman who studied a year in college, breathed a sigh of relief. Her daughter, the doctor, would be a wife and mother. She would be taken care of by a promising young man. Her future was secure.
Grandmother, who shared my mother's first name, rarely spoke of Mom's educational or career accomplishments. And she never boasted. Such accomplishments were nice, but they were the exception and hard to understand. Family made much more sense. It was life. It was love.
And so it was for Mom, who never worked because she had to, but because, as a thinking and caring person, she needed and wanted to. She adored her mother and learned from her the woman's traditional role. Her children always came first. Without a doubt. She wanted to love. She still does. She embraced the ``rule.''
I didn't see this when I was a child, when I was so proud of my mother's exceptionalism. I envisioned Mom as the feminist ideal. She represented choice and opportunity. Self-determination. Knowledge.
But now I realize it was because she put me first, not her career, that I could even imagine reaching beyond myself. To my choices.
And now when I reach, I find myself, in a time that my mother never imagined, to be both the exception, and the rule. I find myself in conflict. But also in love.
In my childhood eye, I see my father leaving the house early every day, returning at 6 p.m. to preside at one end of the dinner table. At the other end, I see my beautiful mother, who also went out into the world to do important things. Things I wanted to learn and emulate. As a woman.
Later when patients came to our door, Mom assumed an even greater aura. She had something valuable to give people, people outside of the family and the neighborhood. Even my teenage friends sought her out - one with anorexia, another with an alcoholic father. She was the mother everyone could talk to.
When years later Mom guiltily apologized for not serving school cafeteria duty or running car pools, I was stunned. The exception I had so prized had caused my mother anguish!
``You were always there, Mom,'' I told her. ``I didn't need you to actually be there, too.''
I had never wanted her to be like other mothers, but that's exactly what she'd wanted to be. The ``rule.''
My mother's exceptionalism has made me independent, but vulnerable. It also has helped to make me an exception: 40 years old, never married, childless. Career-oriented, but devoted to family. Without a doubt, I, too, want to love. First.
I have spent hours and hours talking with my mother about the difficulties that women of my generation, distinct from hers, face, and this much I have learned: The only ``rule'' is love, and with it, the exception, any exception, can flourish. And light up a room. For life.
Valedictorian. Medical student. Dancer. Poet. Physician. Mother.
Happy Mother's Day. MEMO: Ann G. Sjoerdsma is a lawyer and book editor of The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB