Alyce Wilson's Blog: Dispatches from Wonderland - Posts Tagged "essays"
Erma Bombeck, My Idol
Many years ago (is it really decades?), I read Erma Bombeck's newspaper column faithfully. I laughed at her sagas of lost socks, mercurial teenage children, and fractured domesticity. At the time, however, I knew of such things only second-hand. Without direct experience of parenting, I laughed mostly because I found her turns of phrase to be funny, or because I recognized my mother in Bombeck's imperfect but affectionate mothering.
Now, these many (many, many...) years later, finally the mother of a toddler myself (I've been busy, OK?), I reread some of her work in two collections: Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession, and Forever, Erma: Best-Loved Writing From America's Favorite Humorist. I wasn't prepared for what I would discover.
Bombeck's writing, as I rediscovered it, had many more dimensions than I'd remembered. Far from being merely lighthearted, it was also wise, and at times even heart-rending. In Motherhood, for example, she took a newspaper column and expanded upon it, sharing the letters a mother left behind for her children to read after she'd passed on. In them, she labeled each one her favorite child and told them not to tell the others, to save their feelings. I have to admit, I teared up and had to run and hug my toddler.
She faced head-on the hypocrisies of motherhood. At a time when mothers were expected to either be like Donna Reed or have the decency to shut up about it, she not only fessed up to her faults but reveled in them. She normalized the normal mom, and for that she was rewarded with millions of faithful readers who plastered her columns all over their refrigerators.
As I read through her columns and essays, I became aware of something else, as well. All these years, unconsciously, Bombeck has informed my writing. While I never analyzed her work in a writing class, I must have internalized her tendency to make serious thoughts more palatable through the use of humor. I learned to make emphasis through using short sentences, and to allow readers some space to draw their own conclusions. Rereading her work, I was astonished by how much I'd learned from her, without even realizing it.
My gratitude is too big to fit on a refrigerator.
Now, these many (many, many...) years later, finally the mother of a toddler myself (I've been busy, OK?), I reread some of her work in two collections: Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession, and Forever, Erma: Best-Loved Writing From America's Favorite Humorist. I wasn't prepared for what I would discover.
Bombeck's writing, as I rediscovered it, had many more dimensions than I'd remembered. Far from being merely lighthearted, it was also wise, and at times even heart-rending. In Motherhood, for example, she took a newspaper column and expanded upon it, sharing the letters a mother left behind for her children to read after she'd passed on. In them, she labeled each one her favorite child and told them not to tell the others, to save their feelings. I have to admit, I teared up and had to run and hug my toddler.
She faced head-on the hypocrisies of motherhood. At a time when mothers were expected to either be like Donna Reed or have the decency to shut up about it, she not only fessed up to her faults but reveled in them. She normalized the normal mom, and for that she was rewarded with millions of faithful readers who plastered her columns all over their refrigerators.
As I read through her columns and essays, I became aware of something else, as well. All these years, unconsciously, Bombeck has informed my writing. While I never analyzed her work in a writing class, I must have internalized her tendency to make serious thoughts more palatable through the use of humor. I learned to make emphasis through using short sentences, and to allow readers some space to draw their own conclusions. Rereading her work, I was astonished by how much I'd learned from her, without even realizing it.
My gratitude is too big to fit on a refrigerator.
Dispatches from Wonderland
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