{"id":3004,"date":"2020-12-18T11:09:13","date_gmt":"2020-12-18T17:09:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/?p=3004"},"modified":"2020-12-18T11:43:12","modified_gmt":"2020-12-18T17:43:12","slug":"a-cherished-eyeball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/a-cherished-eyeball\/","title":{"rendered":"A Cherished Eyeball"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

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Family Christmas Letter, 1963<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201c[Elizabeth] is in the 6th grade, no special interests, is good fun and pleasant company.\u00a0 Can\u2019t really think of anything special to say about her\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Family Christmas Letter, 1964<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201c[Elizabeth] is a Beatles fan, likes to work with a microscope and slices up animals \u2013 spreading frog and mudpuppy guts all over the kitchen and has a cherished cow\u2019s eyeball and sheep\u2019s heart in a tub of alcohol in her closet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Looks like I became more interesting in 1964.\u00a0 Yes, I did go through a phase of dissecting pickled mudpuppies that I bought at a very complete hobby shop, and animal hearts gathered from the butcher.<\/p>\n

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However, in my defense I would like to say that my mother embellished her description with her usual dramatic flair. \u00a0No public kitchen display was involved.\u00a0 I shielded my family\u2019s delicate sensibilities by confining my work to my bedroom.\u00a0 I prefer the scientific word \u201corgans\u201d rather than the gorier \u201cguts,\u201d and I take particular\u00a0exception to the word \u201ccherished.\u201d\u00a0 Yes, I had an eyeball, yes, I stored it in a bucket.\u00a0 I do recall the humours in that eyeball, vitreous and aqueous suffused with the penetrating odor of formaldehyde, but no, I did not have an emotional attachment to the eyeball.<\/p>\n

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More intriguing is why my mother reported my peculiar hobby with such delight.\u00a0 This Christmas letter was sent to a vast network of family and friends, some close, many tenuous, who might have feared that this sweet 12-year-old was on a slippery slope towards an unhealthy relationship with roadkill.\u00a0 Why was my mother so excited for me?<\/p>\n

Born in 1927, my mother grew up in an era of women with limited options.\u00a0 College was primarily a placeholder until marriage, with no expectation that women would have a professional career.\u00a0 She graduated in 1949, a few years after her older brother returned from WWII.\u00a0 Their father, my grandfather, set my uncle up as a stockbroker in his company.\u00a0 He slotted my bright and creative mother into a job as a secretary for one of his business friends.\u00a0 She met my father in the summer following graduation, was engaged by Christmas, and married the following March.\u00a0 Their first born, a son, arrived within the year, followed by a daughter (me) and four more sons.\u00a0 Her \u201ccareer\u201d as a secretary was quickly forgotten.\u00a0 On a bank form filled out to create a safety deposit box, she listed her occupation as \u201chousewife.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even as a kid I sensed my mother\u2019s frustration that society undervalued her talents.\u00a0 She wrote little ditties to sing at birthdays and family occasions.\u00a0 One memorable song included the lyrics, \u201cWhat happened to the priceless, precious knowledge that I learned at Vassar college?\u00a0 All I do is wipe out sinks filled with spit and grit.\u201d\u00a0 The chorus consisted of multiple rounds of the words \u00a0\u201cspit and grit.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an earlier Christmas letter she described me as a tomboy \u201cthrough and through,\u201d an identity she shared.\u00a0 My mother was the one who taught me how to throw a ball to save me from the humiliation of \u201cthrowing like a girl,\u201d taught me the arcane rules of baseball like dropped third strike or the infield fly rule, so that I could compete equally with the boys.\u00a0 I climbed trees.\u00a0 I jumped off the roof of our house.\u00a0 My fingernails were dark with dirt.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t play with dolls, and I only read Hardy Boy mysteries, never the companion Nancy Drew books.\u00a0 I was spunky and plucky, qualities she admired.<\/p>\n

In the 1963 letter, she included an excited paragraph describing my older brother\u2019s interest in radios and electronics.\u00a0 Perhaps she could see his future more clearly \u2013 not only wide open with a man\u2019s options, but now my brother could march forward with a marketable talent.\u00a0 I was still a blank slate that year, and my mother might have sensed my uncertain future.\u00a0 As puberty approached, my socially acceptable rough and tumble days were drawing to a close.\u00a0 Society considered the spunk of a tomboy endearing in childhood, but adolescent girls were encouraged to shed that identity and become more feminine.\u00a0 My mother began to replace my unisex wardrobe with gender-specific clothes.\u00a0 I recall a floral print shirt with a demur Peter Pan collar, color coordinated with matching shorts.\u00a0 The zipper ran up the side of the shorts instead of in the front like all my other pants.\u00a0 Dancing school began in 1964 and my mother bought me a dress, stockings, and some sort of \u201cparty\u201d shoes.<\/p>\n

This was my slippery slope.\u00a0 How would I become feminine?\u00a0 Would I follow the expected path and develop an interest in sewing and fashion?\u00a0 Would I spend hours with hair and make up?\u00a0 Would I stop having boys as friends?\u00a0 Would I wait breathlessly for a boy to steal my hat at the winter skating rink, and wear a long tasseled hat just for that purpose? \u00a0What were my mother\u2019s hopes for me?<\/p>\n

I had already shown early ambivalence toward the traditional path to motherhood.\u00a0 In my 1958 yearbook, our class was asked, \u201cWhat would you like to be when you grow up.\u201d\u00a0 I responded, \u201cI guess I\u2019ll be a mother,\u201d perhaps spoken with a note of resignation.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Now, one year later, my mother sees me blossoming.\u00a0 My hobby may have been disquieting to many, but that was its charm.\u00a0 Her daughter\u2019s spunky tomboy spirit wasn\u2019t going to be sucked dry by cultural norms, she was going to dissect things and she wasn\u2019t going to step aside and let the boys do all the fun stuff.\u00a0 My mother went all in on dissection.\u00a0 She drove me to the hobby shop, helped me order pickled animals from the science catalog and got the cow and sheep hearts from the butcher. \u00a0I used them in a science fair exhibit of comparative hearts that was an absolute sensation.\u00a0 In 1964, on the cusp of women\u2019s liberation, my mother sees \u00a0opportunities for me, up in my room, wielding a knife, ready to puncture a cherished cow\u2019s eyeball.<\/p>\n

————-<\/p>\n

[1] Fortunately, roadkill never held any appeal, but I did go on to a career as a pathologist, performing many autopsies and dissecting all sorts of body parts removed at surgery.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0   Family Christmas Letter, 1963 \u201c[Elizabeth] is in the 6th grade, no special interests, is good fun and pleasant company.\u00a0 Can\u2019t really think of anything special to say about her\u2026\u201d Family Christmas Letter, 1964 \u201c[Elizabeth] is a Beatles fan, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-what-i-did"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVc8-Ms","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3004"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3004\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3014,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3004\/revisions\/3014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}