As I lay upon my bed, my mother gently took my left arm and raised it above my head. Then she moved it down toward my side, all the while speaking to me words of encouragement. She explained how this exercise would make stronger an arm that had recently become much easier to move. At age 33 she was doing her best to help me, her first-born, get the most use of a limb damaged at birth four years previously.

Looking back some 70 years to this experience, I recognize it as my earliest memory. Even now I can feel the reassurance in my mother’s voice as she carried out doctors’ instructions to improve the use of my arm after surgery to repair my damaged muscles.

My mother, Alice Barry, grew up in Peabody, Massachusetts in a household that was formed in the Victorian period and had imbibed many values of that culture. Outwardly, she seemed to break with that regimen in her early adulthood. In the 1920s after her graduation from college, she was one of the first young women in her milieu to own a car and she sported what looked like a carefree lifestyle.

She herself used to tell me that this was the best time to have lived, the Roaring Twenties, when freedom reigned and our country was at peace. In response I would take issue with her and suggest that her being young and in good health was the reason why the times seemed so good to her; I also gently suggested that the good times were limited to people of her social class.

The older she got, the better that era looked to her because of the many problems that assailed her. The worst was the anxiety that plagued her inner life: from age 40 on, she suffered from scruples and other mental problems. I remember the crucial point at which, out of fear, she gave up driving the family car.

In mid-life, Alice also suffered life-threatening cancer. Surgery brought her through this crisis but she had to endure its effects for the rest of her life.

My mother also had external events that were difficult to cope with. The worst of these, by far, was the death of her husband, my father, when he and she were only in their middle 50s. After that catastrophe she was never the same.

Her husband’s death left her with responsibilities that she was not prepared to handle by herself. Only two of her six children were on their own at this point. Like many middle-class women of her time and place, she was not skilled in business matters and was hard pressed to deal with other major decisions suddenly thrust upon her.

 Writing about my mother from the vantage point of my current age, I am giving a different account from what I did earlier in my life. I like to think I now bring to my mother’s life a greater empathy than was possible when I was young. Age allows me to enter into the misfortunes that she suffered and the inner demons that afflicted her.

The injury that I suffered at birth must have been especially difficult for her. For her to have begun child-bearing this way probably stirred feelings of guilt and regret.

So my mother’s life was hard in many ways. However, she did have the satisfactions of seeing her children grow up healthy and reasonably successful, and she enjoyed the pleasures of her grandchildren. When she suffered physical decline, she received loving concern and help, especially from her two daughters, making her last years somewhat less anxious than the earlier years.

My mother passed on to my siblings and me a strong physical inheritance that has already assured us relatively long lives. And she gave us a set of values that have proven vital in an era marked by sudden and drastic change. Even in the midst of her many difficulties, she persevered in love for each of us and she supported us in our basic choices.

Still, I wish that she could have known more inner peace. A prime source for that might have been her religion but, unfortunately, she seems to have regarded that as more a source of obligations than of consolations. The faith which she professed throughout her life would appear to have brought her little serenity. I will always regret that she could not have known peace on mind and heart.

As Mother’s Day 2004 approaches, I thank God for my mother and appreciate the many gifts she gave me, life itself being the most precious of them. On this occasion, I like to think back and see her as I never did with my own eyes: a young, carefree woman driving her car, scarf flying in the wind, laughing with friends in the spirit of the Roaring Twenties.

Richard Griffin