A motherless child

I officially became an orphan in 1949. That is, I was a motherless child, and by definition, back then, if you were without a mother you were an orphan. The next spring I wore a white carnation to church. a red or pink carnation was only worn by those who still had a mother. I became " the poor little thing" to the elderly ladies in our congregation.
Without the mentoring that naturally takes place between mother and daughter, that poor little thing grew into an inept young woman. In my quest to find out just what it meant to be a young wife and mother, I watched the tiny television we brought into our home. I studied the mothers in the sitcoms of the 50's and 60's. Jane Wyatt never argued the point that indeed father always knows best, and sweet June Lockhart and her adorable little boy, along with the famous non-shedding Lassie, resolved all their issues by the end of each show. Barbara Billingsly, or better known as Mrs. Cleaver,kept her house and her family in shipshape while wearing her ever present apron. None of these women, including Aunt Bea, had any identity confusion.
But I did. I lived like Lucille Ball's I love Lucy character, rushing from one comical disaster to the next. To this day my culinary creations are fodder for family reunion stories. The grandchildren love hearing about the creamed carrots I made. Sliced raw carrots with cream poured on them. They also like the story about the Thanksgiving bird that was served on his knees instead of breast up.
I did find my niche though. Some family members call it my grand obsession and others labeled me the purex queen. I approached housekeeping with a vengeance. My short reign as the bleach queen caused the death of the kids fish and the guinea pig succumbed to the kitchen sink bath. So did the parakeet when I tried to give him a shower with the spray attachment. However,my children survived their bleach baths on the last day of summer vacation each year. A little bleach in the tub faded the grey knees and elbows before their first day of school.
I rented my first apartment from an Italian landlady who washed down the woodwork, stairs and bathrooms of the apartment building with Lysol each week. In her apartment she did not allow her husband or her children to sit on the couch with the plastic doilies and nothing was ever returned to her closets until it was laundered, dry cleaned and pressed. What an act to follow!
I tried. After the long Montana winters, most housewives of yesterday participated in some kind of spring cleaning. Anything that was not nailed down was put out for an airing in the changing winds and windows were washed with a vinegar solution and wiped squeaky dry with newspapers.
There was no such thing as frost-free refrigerators so pans of boiling water were placed in the icebox and the door was closed. Massive chunks of ice could be heard hitting the bottom after awhile. That mess was mopped up with towels, and so was the kitchen floor. Self-cleaning ovens? Myself cleaned the oven with a gel that I painted on the walls of the oven and then opened windows and waited a while for the toxic substance to melt the baked on grease. When I wiped the gel from the walls I always came away with a few burns on my arms, but with a very clean oven.
By far my grandest attempt at housekeeping perfection was the time I varnished the linoleum floors. I had read that by applying a thin coat of varnish or polyurethane on the linoleum I would have a no-polish shine for over a year. So I carefully varnished my family into their bedrooms one night, thinking the varnish would be dry by morning. It wasn't. The children needed to use the bathroom. I tried to make them wait a little longer, but father knew best and in his anger he stomped across the tacky linoleum in his black wool socks and opened the door to the bathroom and marched into the kitchen to make his morning coffee.
What I now know about mothering, on this Mother's Day of 2009, is that bleach is not always a good thing and sometimes colors fade unexpectedly, like mothers. I am happy that my children will be able to wear a red carnation this year.