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Publisher’s Note

We enjoy celebrating Mother’s Day here at womensvoicesforchange.org even though we recognize that this is a holiday filled with wonderful memories for many but anxiety over how to “honor” the mother in one’s life by others. Today we have the memories of the Keenan women who were mothers made of tough love, women who were admired and women who survived.  Our editor who creates Fashion Friday each week offers suggestions for those who want a gift to delight the mothers in their lives.  Post a comment and join the conversation with memories of your mother or your favorite Mother’s Day story. — Patricia Yarberry Allen

The Keenan women from whom I descend are made of something very like steel. They wield a thousand-yard stare that can stop cold any child, misbehaving or not. My cousin Jen calls it “the look that separates flesh from bone.” We are known to be no-nonsense, unflappable, tough, stoic, independent, and resourceful. My cousin Liz suggests that we are “quietly domineering,” while my cousin Judy insists “we are very loving—even if we don’t want anyone to know it.” Whether by nature or nurture, and for better and worse, I’ve inherited these traits. It’s not hard to trace them, in a direct line, through my mother to my maternal grandmother, Lucy.

The Keenan thousand-yard stare, practiced by Grandma Lucy.

As family legend has it, one November day in 1939 Lucy informed her husband, Frank, not only that she was pregnant but that she was in labor. She gave him instructions for feeding their children, left the house, and took the trolley to the hospital. Three or so days later she returned home, again by trolley, with John, the couple’s fifth son and their tenth child in eighteen years. Those ten children went on to bring twenty-nine offspring—my siblings, my cousins, and me—into the world.

The Keenan clan in 1948 at the wedding of my Uncle Ed Keenan to Ann Raymond. My mother and Grandma Lucy stand to the right of the bride.

Because this family and their (our) 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. It doesn’t even surprise me that she hadn’t bothered to tell him. Times were tough in their household, and Lucy never did anything less than forge ahead and take care of business. Frank was not a reliable breadwinner, to say the least, and his children were fortunate that their mother never flinched from the responsibilities that rested on her alone. He sometimes drank away his wages, and even when Lucy rode the trolley to downtown New Haven to collect his pay before he could get his hands on it, there often wasn’t enough money to feed everyone. As the head of the household, Frank was served dinner before the kids and ate alone. Whatever was left was shared among the children when he was done.

In the stories my mother and her nine siblings have told about their parents over the years, “the old man” is peripheral and their mother is the central figure, loved and admired. “Mama was so brave!” my mother once exclaimed, recalling the time she watched from the window as Lucy dashed out in a raging storm to round up her children. In 1925, one tale goes, shortly after Lucy had given birth to her fourth child, a toppled candle started a fire that substantially damaged their apartment building. Forced to move, the family gathered up its belongings, which included a cast-iron stove, and packed them into a horse-drawn wagon. When they arrived at their new residence, Lucy, just two weeks postpartum, helped wrestle the stove up the stairs to their new apartment—a feat that earned her the nickname “The “Powerful Katrinka.”

The Powerful Katrinka.

When I was a child, we often visited Lucy on Sundays in her dark and old-fashioned house, with its rattly doorknobs and separate hot and cold taps. An old wringer washing machine on the back porch gave us a glimpse into how hard housewifery had been in her day. A battered percolator bubbled on the stove, a tiny Bayer Aspirin bottle screwed into the top in place of its missing glass bulb. Lucy was old-fashioned too. She wore a hairnet and had a wart in the middle of her forehead (good for anchoring that hairnet), and wore floral housedresses. She was soft-spoken and busy and not very talkative. In repose her face had a grumpy cast. But her green eyes could betray a conspiratorial gleam or a good-humored twinkle.

Grandma Lucy with her daughter Kathryn in the early 1970s.

My mother, like Lucy before her, followed the prescription “import babies, export adults” when bringing up her own seven children. She too juggled an outsize load. She was a preschool teacher, and by the time my youngest brother was five, had opened her own school. At home she managed our household, cooked all our meals, and ran a tight ship as far as we were concerned, wielding discipline in a manner only slightly less rigid than that of a drill sergeant, and instilling in us a complex suite of manners and rules of etiquette. She was not amused when my youngest brother burst into laughter at the dinner table and shot not milk through his nose, but a strand of spaghetti. When a new friend invited me over in the fourth grade, having sat through the formal ritual of our evening meal, she worriedly warned me beforehand, “We don’t have manners at our house.”

Nine of Lucy’s children on the day of her funeral, in 1974. My mother, the oldest daughter, stands to the far right.