Lessons From My Mother's Life: Post World War II Short Fiction

By Tam May

How happy was the 1950s happy housewife?

 

Women in post-war America were supposed to have it all: generous husbands with great jobs, comfortable suburban homes with nice yards and two-car garages, and all the latest gadgets to make their housework easier.

 

The pain and horror of World War II were over. The economy was booming and America was becoming a world leader. American women were to play a role in America's prosperity, the role they were always meant to play: supporting mothers, wives, and daughters. Theirs was a life of ease. They were the fairytale princesses with the happy ending.

 

The women's magazines told them so. The advertisements for laundry detergent and TV dinners told them so. The doctors who treated their children's colds told them so.

 

Women in 1950s America were sold a bill of goods about their purpose in life and their futures. Some bought it and some didn't.

 

This book is about the women who didn't.

 

These are not nostalgic stories about my mother's life or your mother's life. They dig deep into the lives of five fictional characters who knew in the back of their minds that their lives weren't happy and they wanted something more.

 

In "Fumbling Toward Freedom," Susan reconsiders her plans for an early marriage after visiting an art exhibit one Saturday afternoon.

 

"Mother of Mischief" tells of Mary, cast in a maternal role since childhood, who discovers her true worth after a tragic episode in her loveless marriage brings her past to light.

 

The story "Soul Destinations" is about Joan's encounter with a has-been musician on a train which launches her soul's journey.

 

In "Devoted," Rachel's Aunt Amelia teaches her about the consequences of losing her identity when a woman takes her role as caretaker too seriously.

 

And, finally, there is "Two Sides of Life," a story based on a true incident in the author's mother's life. Leanne's unexpected bond with the wife of her husband's lab assistant shows her the true meaning of life just at the dawn of the women's movement.

 

Five stories. Five women. Five roads that will lead to self-identity and fulfillment.

 

These are not true stories about my mother. But they could be. They could be stories about your mother or your grandmother or even your great-grandmother. They are stories about the women many of us know.

 

Purchase Lessons From My Mother's Life today and walk in the shoes of five American women struggling with what Betty Friedan called "The Problem That Has No Name."

 

What reviewers are saying:

"Smart, interesting and down-to-earth, these are stories that are close to the heart of every woman either because they lived through something similar, or because, as the title says, our mothers did."

"Great short stories that really do speak to what women had to face mid 20th century."

"I know my mother absolutely could have personally dealt with some of the experiences described in the book!"

 

This book also includes an Author's Note and a bonus chapter from The Specter, the first book of the author's Gilded Age saga, the Waxwood Series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dreambook Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9780998197999

Tam May

Writing has been Tam May’s voice since the age of fourteen. She writes stories set in the past that feature sassy and sensitive women characters. Her fiction gives readers a sense of justice for women, both the living and the dead. Tam's stories are set mostly around the Bay Area because she adores sourdough bread, Ghirardelli chocolate, and San Francisco history. Tam is the author of the Adele Gossling Mysteries which take place in the early 20th century and features suffragist and epistolary expert Adele Gossling whose talent for solving crimes doesn’t sit well with the town’s more conventional ideas about women’s place. Tam has also written historical fiction about women breaking loose from the social and psychological expectations of their era. She has a 4-book historical coming-of-age series set in the 1890s titled the Waxwood Series and a post-World War II short story collection available. Although Tam left her heart in San Francisco, she lives in the Midwest because it’s cheaper. When she’s not writing, she’s devouring everything classic (books, films, art, music) and concocting yummy vegan dishes. For more information about Tam May and her books, check out her website at www.tammayauthor.com.

Book preview

Lessons From My Mother's Life

LESSONS FROM MY MOTHER'S LIFE

TAM MAY

Dreambook Press

CONTENTS

Author’s Note: The Lessons of Our Mothers’ (And Our Grandmothers’) Lives

Fumbling Toward Freedom

Mother of Mischief

Soul Destinations

Devoted

Two Sides of Life

Bonus Excerpt from The Specter (Waxwood Series: Book 1)

Free Novella Information

Free Novella Excerpt

About the Author

Lessons From My Mother’s Life

Tam May

Published by Dreambook Press.

Copyright © 2020 by Tam May. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events or locales is purely coincidental. Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited.

Click or visit:

https://www.tammayauthor.com

Cover Design © 2023 by Aries/100 Covers

ISBN: 9780998197982 (Print)

ISBN: 9780998197999 (ebook)

Quotes in the text are as follows:

Epigraph

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique (50th Anniversary Edition). W. W. Norton & Company, 2013 (original publication date: 1963). Kindle digital file.

Mother of Mischief

Epigraph

Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. Harcourt, Brace, & Company, 2006 (original publication date: 1937). Kindle digital file.

Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman quote:

From The Housewife

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46058/the-housewife-56d225d31d71a

To Aila and Becky for their confidence in me as a writer and their enthusiastic support of my work.

A mother might tell her daughter, spell it out, ‘Don’t be just a housewife like me.’ But that daughter, sensing that her mother was too frustrated to savor the love of her husband and children, might feel: ‘I will succeed where my mother failed, I will fulfill myself as a woman,’ and never read the lesson of her mother’s life.

— Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, p. 71

AUTHOR’S NOTE: THE LESSONS OF OUR MOTHERS’ (AND OUR GRANDMOTHERS’) LIVES

I’m including this author's note because if I didn’t, this book would have some unfinished business.

Lessons From My Mother’s Life is the second edition of my first book, Gnarled Bones and Other Stories, published in January 2017. This current edition went through a tremendous evolution in so many ways: style, tone, timeframe, themes, and purpose, to name a few. I felt I couldn’t release it without including some kind of background for my readers.

When I published Gnarled Bones and Other Stories, I was at the beginning of my writing journey. At that time, I was engrossed with psychological fiction (fiction that explores the emotional reality of characters —Edith Wharton, Margaret Atwood, and Toni Morrison, for example), and I still am. I began where many writers begin — my own emotional experiences. The five stories that made up Gnarled Bones had been sitting in a folder on my computer for nearly fifteen years. When I wrote them, I was going through a rough time, and my perceptions of my family and my childhood were shifting. I was exploring my own psychological reality, some of which found its way into stories rather like beliefs that become part of your being without your really knowing it until something happens to challenge those beliefs.

I revised those original stories, organized them, and released them in Gnarled Bones. My goal was not only to give readers a deeper look at what we call family dysfunction laced with loss, fear, and guilt, but, on a more practical level, to test the waters as an author and discover my readers. I am one of those people who learns by doing, and I knew I could only read so many books on self-publishing before I had to jump in with both feet and pray I didn’t make a total fool of myself.

The book received little attention, but the generous readers who did read and review it encouraged me. Many remarked that the stories were too short and their endings too abrupt. These were legitimate critiques and, over time, I understood why I left the stories half-finished. A writer might end a story prematurely when the characters are at the point of an emotional breakthrough, and the writer herself may be reluctant to dive into those difficult psychological moments the characters are experiencing in those breakthroughs. I realized this is exactly what I had done with the stories in Gnarled Bones. They told of people who, incited by unexpected incidents, see moments of their past they had been blind to and change their perceptions on life to move toward a more hopeful future. The characters in those stories were going through such moments in their lives, and I was afraid to take them through to the end. Additionally, a fellow writer who had read some of my other works remarked how my fiction offers something comforting, no matter what the subject matter. I realized in Gnarled Bones I had shortchanged readers of this gift. As a result, although I had meant the stories to point toward hope for the future, some readers found them too dark and depressing.

There was another reason I decided to release this second edition. I started out as many writers do, writing about my own time, or rather, an unidentified time period interpreted as the present. In 2018, my writing went from contemporary to historical fiction. I wanted to take my lifelong passion for writing about women and write stories about women who defied the constraints of their time. I think history gets a bad rap because we’re forced in school to memorize dates and events that represent the past and have no relationship to how we live in the present. We forget history isn’t just about what happened, but who it happened to, how they felt, how they reacted, and how it changed the way future generations will feel and react. It’s about the way people lived emotionally, their ideas, beliefs, and values and, most importantly, how we can see our own lives shaped in the shadow of the past. Historical events are the context in which people live, but they are not in and of themselves the reason why history is still relevant to us today. They are a path for us to trace back what used to be to understand what is now and what the possibilities are for the future.

In this way, historical fiction is ideal. A college professor of mine once said, "History is about what happened. Fiction is about what should have happened." In fiction, we reinterpret the past through the lens of what we know and understand about ourselves today. We enjoy reading about people, events, and emotions of the past, certainly, but in fiction, we can take them into our own lives and relate to them in a different and more meaningful way.

In 2019, I already knew I wanted to create a new edition of Gnarled Bones which included placing the collection in the past. As with many historical fiction writers, I have certain eras I’m drawn to, such as the Gilded Age (the last quarter of the 19th century) and the Progressive Era (the first few decades of the 20th century). But when I started to reimagine Gnarled Bones, I found neither of these really fit. The stories in that collection were about complex psychological issues that I felt belonged to a later era. So I struggled to decide what time period would be the most emotionally relevant to the new edition.

The answer came to me when I reread one of the first editorial reviews I ever received. The reviewer remarked the style and tone of the stories reminded him of the 1950s, so much so that he expected housewives to walk around with curlers in their hair (this is a paraphrase, not a direct quote). That comment was my a-ha! moment, and it hit me why the fiction in Gnarled Bones were so complex. Many of the stories in that first edition were about women trying to define themselves as women beyond the expectations of feminine behaviors, values, and stereotypes. I recalled reading an excerpt from Betty Friedan’s seminal book The Feminine Mystique in a course I took during graduate school. Published in 1963, Friedan traces her quest for the happy housewife after her experiences as a journalist interviewing women in the 1950s for magazine articles. Her journey led her to identify what she calls The Problem That Has No Name.

What was this problem? Simply, that American women in the 1950s, specifically, middle-class white housewives (let’s establish right off that Friedan was talking about a very specific sector of American life) had everything any woman could ever want at that time — faithful and prosperous husbands, plenty of money, smart kids, a nice house in the suburbs, a nice car or two, and, in the post-war boom, a whole lot of nice things. They didn’t have to go out and work for their living; they didn’t have to struggle and suffer, and they didn’t have to figure out who they were as individuals because they were defined by their relationships (wife, mother, daughter, caretaker, etc.) They even had a college degree to show they weren’t just pretty paper dolls wearing aprons and baking cookies. They had everything, and yet, they were discontented, despaired, and unfulfilled. Hence, as Friedan saw it, they had a problem that didn’t, at that time, have a name.

Friedan was so interested in this reoccurring theme in the lives of women she encountered that she embarked on a quest to find out why they were unhappy. The answer she came up with the feminine mystique. This isn’t just about women who fulfill their feminine duties by devoting their lives to their husbands, families, children, and church. It isn’t just about the idea that this is what all women should aspire to be, but that this is what should make them happy. Friedan’s 593-page book argues that the feminine mystique was a bill of goods sold to women by institutions (most of them controlled by men) in the 1950s and early 1960s, some of which included women’s magazines, the medical and psychiatric establishments, and ad agencies.

I realized many of the stories in Gnarled Bones, re-set in the 1950s and early 1960s would mirror the feminine mystique and its discontentments in ways even women today could understand and identify with. The original collection was loosely tied together by themes of loss, fear, and guilt. I wanted this edition to be grounded in a historical context particularly relevant to women socially and psychologically.

This is not to say that women are still struggling and oppressed in the 21st century in the same ways they were in the post-war era. We've come a very long way, and we can be proud to watch our daughters and granddaughters pursue their dreams and juggle family, work, hobbies, and anything else they want to do in life. This is also not to say the post-war eras didn't have their heroines and warrior women. The women who broke out of the feminine mystique during these decades are plentiful, and the topic for another book in the future. But the general feeling of discontentment among women did prevail (as many women still living from that era can attest) and it’s a sentiment worthy of exploration in fiction.

As for this edition of my first book, now retitled Lessons From My Mother's Life, three of the stories are set in the 1950s and two in the early 1960s. These are the years when the feminine mystique was at its peak, before the birth of the second-wave feminist movement that grew from, among other works, Friedan’s book. The protagonists in these stories are women at different stages of their lives, from the young and eager bride-to-be to the mother experiencing the turbulent emotions of the empty nest. The thread tying these women together is their realization that the feminine mystique, that bill of goods they were sold about what would fulfill them as women, is, in fact, not enough for them.

Some readers have said that the stories are still dark and depressing. The purpose of these stories is not to give a happily-ever-after ending (because they question the reality of the happily-ever-after ending that put women in a box in the 1950s). But each woman in the five stories is moving toward a new realization of her worth and what is left off the page is the new directions their lives will take which will be, in a sense, their own individual happily-ever-after.

As with all my other books, the setting for most of these stories is the San Francisco Bay Area (although the Los Angeles area plays a cameo role in Soul Destinations). I once wrote a guest blog post about how San Francisco became a symbol of autonomy and freedom for me when I first lived there in 1995. It became my first home away from home where I found myself as a woman and a writer. It felt like the logical place for my protagonists to find themselves also.

As I reviewed the stories from the original collection, I realized not all of them would fit in with my intention for this collection. Bracelets, for example, was more about the loss of childhood innocence, and I couldn’t make it fit thematically in this new edition. I removed that story and included Two Sides of Life instead. I changed the title of two of the stories because I felt the new titles would better suit the characters’ psychological journeys. So A First Saturday Outing became Fumbling Toward Freedom, and Broken Bows became Soul Destinations. A fourth story remained from the original edition (Mother of Mischief) and has been considerably expanded, its ending now complete and, I hope, more satisfying and uplifting than the one in the first edition.

I think the biggest change I made was to remove the title story of the first book. In that first edition, the story Gnarled Bones was, I felt, the apex of the collection, encompassing those themes of loss, fear, and guilt that held the five stories in that version together. It made sense to me to title the book after that story. I tried reworking it for this new edition, but in doing so, I realized the themes involved (loss and guilt, and, further, the way in which the horrors of Nazism affected the third generation) simply did not fit the themes in this new edition. I also realized the story could and should be its own full-length novella. I replaced that story here with Devoted, and I might publish Gnarled Bones as a stand-alone historical novella sometime in the future.

This second edition includes five stories, all full-length, in addition to a bonus excerpt from The Specter, the first book of my Waxwood Series (a historical women’s fiction coming-of-age series set in the last decade of the 19th century).

I hope readers who have read the first edition will be very pleased with the changes here, and I hope they will agree the stories are more complete, less melancholic, and more thoughtful and enjoyable. I also hope readers will find themselves or their mothers or grandmothers in these characters and understand what some women might have gone through in this era. Most importantly, I hope that readers will see their own resilience reflected in these characters and their lives, no matter what their age or background.

Tam May

January, 2024

FUMBLING TOWARD FREEDOM

Want more feisty heroines who go against conventions? Love intricate mysteries with humor and a fun cast of characters? Then you’ll love my free offer at the end of this book! So don’t forget to check that out when you get to the end. Happy reading!

The tiny flat Susan found for them had a view of Golden Gate Park. She stood on the fire escape and traced the grid-like streets, following Ninth Avenue down until it spilled right into the park. She could just