Nurse Judy

"Inside me there's a skinny woman crying to get out, but I can usually shut the bitch up with cookies." Anonymous

When Mom and I moved from NY to Oregon, I felt I was being "ripped away from the only family I'd ever known" largely because that's what my father and grandparents told me. Mom was finally returning to the only family she'd ever really loved.

She'd been raised in Portland, was part of the first graduating class of David Douglas High School in 1957, went to beauty school after that and had a fabulous time discovering her independence in dance halls, on the waterfront during fleet week and with her friends. She met my dad when he was in the Air Force and chose to marry him over some Italian guy she was engaged to named Vern because Dad didn't drink (not yet, he was still trying to be a good little Christian boy).

They got married, had my brother within the first year and lived in a little house on Liebe street, which she showed me once, but I was a teenager and too self-absorbed to remember much about it. When my brother was about a year old, or maybe just a few months old, they moved to upstate NY where Dad was from, where his parents were from and where our family has been from since the late 1600s.

There she started a new life in a very small town. Even after my brother was old enough for school, she didn't work because my dad, like most husbands of the time, declared, "No wife of mine is gonna work." Evidently that would have been too big a blow to his pride, although not being a good provider was fine by him. So Mom, like most wives of the time, took up macrame, ceramics and needlepoint, and took to the couch with a book. More on that later.

These were her low years, yet she somehow mananged to make a happy childhood for me. She rarely if ever laughed with Dad, but she often laughed with her friend G and on the phone and with people who lived in Oregon, people she said were her sisters, though I'd never met them. When they called, they would talk for hours. Mom would talk on the green rotary phone, sit at the green desk in the red dining room, which we never dined in because the table was always covered with laundry and sewing projects. And she would laugh. She would laugh harder than I've ever seen anyone laugh. Laugh 'til she couldn't breathe and her face turned beet red and she couldn't speak anymore. When we moved to Portland, she was moving back to her sisters, back to laughing like that again.

She worked in a nursing home as a nurse's aide, raised me, was at least emotionally available to my college-going brother, and put herself through four years of college in her mid-forties. Another whole new life. One of her class requirements was to do a mock interview and then watch the video of it. I remember she looked beautiful in a shiny blue dress that made her eyes sparkle. When she came home her sister L who lived with us asked her how it went. She was dejected. We thought perhaps it hadn't gone well and prepared to console her.

Instead she said, "I'm fat. I can't believe how fat I am. My face is fat, my neck is fat, even my hands are fat." She was clearly disgusted with herself.

My aunt asked her, "Well, Judy. What are you going to do about it?"

Here's the part that makes Mom Mom. She said, "Well, I'm not gonna let myself be videotaped anymore."









Here's a picture of my mom when she graduated from nursing school. She was 47 and as proud as anyone could ever be and really not as fat as she thought she was.