My father’s sister told me she had always loved my mother’s 19th-century sensibility. “Unhand me,” Mom would say if my cat rebuffed a caress, likening her to a Victorian heroine resisting the advances of an unworthy suitor.
Because the Keenan family ways are so familiar to me, it doesn’t really surprise me that my grandfather didn’t notice for nine entire months that his wife was pregnant—or that she hadn’t bothered to tell him. Times were tough in their household, and Grandma Lucy never did anything less than forge ahead.
Because I am both daughter and mother, I’m stuck in a no-man’s-land in the middle. My mother pulls me and my daughter pushes me.
Sketching my mother as she lay in hospice, I drew the heavy lids framing the beautiful, once warily alert gray-green irises, the “yes” and “no” eyes, vividly etched into my memory, that my twin sister and I could bring to an outpouring of tears or a ray of pride . . .
When I first went to work as a museum exhibit designer, I wore jumpsuits and drove a Volkswagon bus, and I remember my younger girl, then perhaps 7 or 8, saying plaintively, “Can’t we have a station wagon? Won’t you ever be a normal mother?”
“Here you are at last,” says your mother, reaching up to embrace you. Her brittle body trembles like that of a twisted, fragile bird. Dismayed, you wonder if this is how you will be in twenty-five years.
To help a teenage girl focus on what really matters—like her brain, strength, passion, and conviction, her rights as a human and as a citizen of this country—is one of the most important jobs I have as the mother of a daughter.
The relationship between Vanessa Williams and her mother, Helen, was often fraught. Their memoir, "You Have No Idea," takes us inside that relationship with candor, truth, and very little gilding.
Where? Radio City Music Hall. Who? Me, my tween daughter, my 40-something sister and 70-something mom, thousands of screaming kids - and the cast of one hit TV show.