My mother the saint

Don't get me wrong. My mother became a wonderful, selfless, generous person. People thought her a saint and I, who knew her best, knew her to be one.

But I still have had to dig out from under the harm she did my self-worth in my early years by her greedy guarding of her own time at my expense. Ironically, "her time" was devoted to writing (a murder mystery and then) children's books--books in which I was always one of the characters, Becky or Margie or Emily or Joan. They were all me, all "cute, irritating, funny, and teasable." What was wrong with me that she preferred their company to mine? She lived in their world, couldn't wait to get out of ours into hers, where all three of us kids--and Dad--lived lives she managed, all with very satisfactory endings.

In addition to books, she wrote articles for magaines, each one solving some problem common to families. She told me privately years later that by the time her articles were published, the solution was no longer working in our own family.

And she wrote frequent letters to her own mother and her father's mother, who lived together in another state--and who expected a weekly missive plus prompt turnarounds to their own letters, responses written the day their letter arrived. This, from a mother of three!