What was your mother like?
My mother (Helen Dorothy Mills ne Kahn) was 22 when I was born in 1945. She was a mere 18 years old when she married my dad (Mike). He was 23 and in the air force at the time of their marriage. He was stationed in Syracuse, NY. My dad had convinced my mom to visit him and get married before he was shipped out somewhere. I’m told that when he went to fetch Helen at the Syracuse train station (in a very romantic mood), he was shocked, if not dismayed, to see my grandmother Rose Kahn get off the train first with a determined look in her eye. They got married under her supervision.
What was my mother like? My perception of what she was like changed of course as I grew older. But I think that the best thing I can say about it was that she always gave me the impression that she liked me as a person, not just loved me out of parental obligation. I’m sure that there were times when she wondered if having me was such a great idea. She gave me a ton of freedom at a very young age. As a five year old, I was allowed to run wild in the streets and back alleys of Allston (part of Boston). I hopped street cars, broke into the Boston Armory, got in a fight over a knife I found with another kid, found a vial of some liquid that stained my hand yellow for about a year, fell into a pickle barrel. When I was eight, I fell off my new Raleigh bike and ruptured my kidney (peeing blood is not a good sign) and spent a few weeks in the hospital. The list of visits to the emergency room visits continued apace as I grew into y teens: fractured my arm, got blood poisoning in my arm (having put my fist through a window trying to punch a fellow boy scout who had locked us out of a cabin in winter), cut off a piece of toe that had to be re-attached. But the worst was when, trying to do a somersault over my bed, I misjudged and almost bit my tongue off. I couldn’t talk, was bleeding profusely. My mother almost fainted when she saw it.
So I kept her pretty busy. Looking back, probably the best gift she gave me was to follow my dreams. I remember her saying that “life is not a dress rehearsal.” So she always supported some of my schemes like going to university in Hawaii, leaving a great job at Bell-Northern Research to live in France, and other moves of dubious wisdom. The one time I saw her cry because of one of my plans was when I threatened to buy a motorcycle when I was eighteen and had saved up the money.
Apart from her being on call to shlep me the Children’s Hospital (one of the docs there said they should name a wing after me), what did she do all day? Great question. My parents started me in school at four and a half (way too young). I’m pretty sure starting me so early was so that my mother could get some alone time. But what did she do with that time? As far as I can tell, she puttered. My mom was an interesting mix of talent and lack of confidence. She was very comfortable with mechanical things. She loved tinkering. She used to take odd objects and make bizarro lamps of out of them. My favorite was a lamp she made of an old lawn mower blade. She was also a good self-taught artist. She had all the Walter Foster books on how to draw and paint: faces, hands, children, horses (my favorite(, cats and dogs, etc.. These how-to books taught the method of “schemata and correction” where you would start with simple circles and then modify them to fit “reality.” It’s not lost on me that this concept of “schema and correction” would play a big role in my later Ph.D work on cognition as the “reconciliation of schemata” or “ideals” as Al Bregman (my advisor — more on him later —) used to call them. I perused these books and I remember having an almost mystical experience. I must have been six or seven. I drew an outline of a person and then smudged a contour by accident. It popped a third dimension. I had discovered “chiaroscuro.”
So mom was busy. But not ambitious in the traditional sense. She tinkered, she read, she puttered, she explored but did not enter the traditional workforce until she sixty! She was basically hiding out from the world. She rather liked her own company. But more than that. She had a lack of confidence. I picked up on this rather by osmosis than a specific event. I asked her about this in later years because when she did enter the workforce as admn/secretary/project manager for a construction company, she was beloved. A huge success. And she loved it. She said her lack of confidence was, in part, because she was a pudgy middle child sandwiched between a brilliant older brother (Leon who went to Harvard in days when it was tough to get in if you were Jewish) and a younger sister Selma who was also brilliant. Selma was so smart, in fact, that the teachers in her school begged my grandparents to find a way to send her to university. My grandparents said that, unfortunately, they could only afford to send Leon. So Selma never went to college. Selma was so good in math that, years later, she tutored me in algebra. She was a gifted and generous (still is). She would have made a fantastic math professor or engineer. But women were not encouraged to do this in the fifties. In fact, they were actively discouraged from entering male dominated arenas. I will say that this was not just a big deal for my aunt Selma and my mother. It affected the men in the family too. I believe that the sisters took their pound of flesh in being denied careers by sometimes subtle, sometimes overt criticizing, indeed belittling of their spouses. My dad, in particular, was a victim of this. It had it’s effect on me too. More on that later.
