How to Dissolve a Woman

The personal cost of “having it all” before women were allowed to want anything else. 

When I was 11, I watched my mother dissolve. The year was 1964, and I’d become accustomed to the sight of my mother retreating to her darkened bedroom where she would crawl beneath her bedclothes, and of her vacant eyes at the dinner table, a condition made worse by the Valium and Miltown, freely dispensed at that time to thousands of “hysterical” women. 

From an early age, I sensed, but didn’t understand, my mother’s unhappiness. I cried every morning when she dropped me off at nursery school through second grade because I couldn’t trust that the mother who picked me up at the end of the day hadn’t shifted into an orbit that excluded me. I assumed her sorrow was my fault and, therefore, my responsibility to fix. I danced around her like an organ grinder’s monkey, trying to get her to smile. But I wasn’t a natural entertainer. The jar I held up to collect her unhappiness remained empty.

After a disturbing playdate with my next-door neighbor, at which my friend hid in the closet and demanded I leave, I ran home searching for my mother’s solace. The last place I looked was the bathroom, where I found her staring at herself in the mirror as if she didn’t recognize her own face or mine. 

Ultimately, my mother was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. I have no memories from that period except for a dream in which I went to visit my mother, but I had to stay in the parking lot. My mother could look down at me from a window and I could look up at her, but we couldn’t touch.  

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When my mother married at 18, she worked hard at meeting the expectations of the era. By 22 she had produced two children. She got a nose job to look more like June Cleaver and Harriet Nelson, television’s housewives. Dinner was on the table every night at 6:15 when my father came home from work. She saw that my sister and I had our three glasses of milk a day, wore sensible shoes, and were chauffeured to our music, dance, and Hebrew lessons. The floor of our front hallway glistened from weekly buffing, beds sported perfect hospital corners, and the household budget was managed with the frugality determined by my father. 

No one noticed her fading away.

A symptom of my mother’s depression was withdrawal from her sisters and parents and all members of her extended family—who, she felt, were complicit in keeping her stifled—so I became isolated from them as well, and any support they could’ve provided. My older sister was angry and escaped home whenever she could. My father was bewildered by his crumbling family. He was a gifted scientist who provided for us, but he had become the man of a broken house. He, too, did his own disappearing act, retreating to his study, testing hypothesis after hypothesis to explain what happened to his wife.

Amidst this isolation, I would get peeks into the homes of my friends whose mothers weren’t just a physical presence but a participatory one. They made me a bit queasy, as if they were a rebuke of my own mother. I never heard muffled sobs behind closed doors in darkened rooms. I assumed these mothers were happy. 

I was most likely wrong.

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My mother’s recovery required intensive therapy and was, in a way, as destabilizing as her descent. She finally became a college student and her single-minded drive kept her out of reach once again. Her first degree led to a master’s degree and a job as a psychiatric social worker. She began bringing home books like The Joy of Sex, Our Bodies, Ourselves, and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. It was through Friedan that I learned the term “Housewife Syndrome” to describe the many women of the 1950s and ‘60s who’d lost all sense of purpose in their quest to be perfect wives and mothers. 

When I went away to college, my mother’s recovery was still so new. Would her orbit shift once again when I wasn’t keeping watch? It didn’t, but I required constant proof that she was still strong, eventually falling into my own depression because I was unable to separate from her.

My mother never resented having children. What she rebelled against was not having choices. I went back to work after my first child but was able to opt to stay home when I had twins. Those first few months I was flooded with relief. No decisions. No balancing. No split identities. Then came the paralysis, sitting and staring at the walls or crying in my bed. My mother died from breast cancer before I became a mother, but I could still hear her. “Is this the mother you want to be for your children?” she would have said. “You need an outward-facing life.”

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It was only at this point that the rage began to build, not for me but for my mother. Forty-three years after her death, in nearly every conversation my sister and I have, we still wrestle with our anger over how briefly my mother was able to live the life she chose. Only when I felt my own rage could I see that what I thought was sorrow was really her anger. Even in good mental health, my mother never told the full story. She’s less mystery now and more cipher, probably one I’ll never fully decode.