Knock on Every Door

The first five minutes of this podcast, "No One is Coming to Save Us"  (which I tried to embed but Stitcher wouldn't cooperate) sounds  like a chapter straight out of my mom's life.  Moving to a strange town where she knew no one.  Having to start her job teaching school almost immediately and having three kids who needed looking after in an America where child care of any kind barely existed and in a suburb expressly built with the idea that all Dads commuted to Chicago every morning and all Moms stayed home.

So she squared her shoulders and started knocking on the doors of strangers.

Here first stop was the next-door-neighbor who had moved in just a week or so after us.  One of the only African-American families in town.  And my mom's first question to the woman who answered the door -- "Do you work?" -- and our neighbor's quite understandable reaction to this nosy white lady asking about her employment status -- "Excuse me!?" --  might have sent our long and deeply intertwined relationship with that family careening down the wrong path if mom hadn't immediately apologized and cleared up the context of her impertinent question.  She was a starting a new job teaching school and needed someone to look after her children a few hours a day, and she didn't know anyone, had no relatives within 400 miles, and asking your neighbors for help was how she was raised.  

Our neighbor invited her in for coffee.  Turned out, she was a teacher too.  And also had children about our age. And that's how a friendship that lasted a half a century, though all kind of tragedies and blessings, started.  Eventually both moms found people to look after their children when they were at work, which is how my brother and I ended up having PBJs and milk at the kitchen tables of several different women over the next few years.

Like the narrator of the podcast, this story has passed into family lore: something my sibs and I take out of memory's glass case and pass around with a laugh when we reminisce.  But when I think about what my mom actually did -- shepherding our tiny family literally around the globe, through airports and customs and vaccines, getting situated in weird little hotels for a day or a week, navigating us through the streets of Paris and Hong Kong and Beirut, then landing in a suburb full of strangers and having to set up housekeeping, get us enrolled at our schools and start a new job a month or two before our furniture arrived, all without the internet, without email, without reliable phone service -- I am awed.  

And appalled that the United States was (and still very much is) content to let people like my mom and our neighbor and who knows how many thousands of other working women fend for themselves in a system that depended on their labor but was (and still very much is) actively hostile to their basic needs.

Burn The Lifeboats