OUR FAMILY TREE was just a sapling when my parents, John and Elinor, bought a tidy four-bedroom brick Colonial for $30,500 in 1957. I was 6 months old. It had shutters the color of Georgia clay and three windows facing the street on the second floor. When I was a teenager, the middle one would be aglow until I came home at exactly 11:50 p.m., just before my curfew. Our house exuded a modest solidity that also described my family.
Emily was 10 years older than me. She always seemed to be racing around with important things to do—studying for exams, going on dates and college tours. Clara was born three years after her. She was named for my maternal grandmother, but my father didn’t love the name, so we all called her Kiki. She and I shared a room; Kiki would comb my hair, put it in pigtails, and treat me like a little doll. I remember watching her rush off to a football game in her cheerleading uniform, tossing her pom-poms and megaphone in the back of our dad’s Sunbeam Alpine convertible （his one midlife indulgence）， thinking, I want to be just like her.
Johnny came next. When he was 5, he stuffed pebbles up his nose; my mom had to take him to the hospital to have them removed with giant tweezers. We were partners in crime, getting into pillow fights—one of which brought down a ceiling light, shattering it into a million pieces—and giving each other wedgies, which we called “creepers.” Sometimes he’d pin down my shoulders with his knees and let a loogie drip dangerously close to my face before sucking it back up. “Stop roughhousing!” my mom would scream from downstairs.
No one seems particularly surprised to learn that I was the baby of the bunch. My parents would put my infant seat on the dining-room table so the whole family could stand around and watch me—my first audience. Later, my sisters would entertain their suitors by instructing me to do a cartwheel and the splits on the living-room floor or sing “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas” while they accompanied me on the piano. I was more than happy to perform.
In summer, over corn on the cob and sliced tomatoes at the glass table on the screened-in porch, I’d hold court, telling a bawdy joke or making a racy comment; my mom’s eyes would turn into tiny crescents as she laughed so hard her shoulders shook, barely making a sound except the occasional snort. Attempting to maintain some dinner-table decorum, my father would suppress a smile and say, “Elin-ah! Don’t encourage her!”
OUR MOTHER WAS the ultimate protector and defender—a homemaker in the most concrete sense, always doing for us, pulling for us, waiting for us to come home. She’d tell me, “Everyone needs a cheerleader. I’m yours.” She was sturdy in every way. When I was little, I’d spring up and wrap my legs and arms around her and hold on like a koala bear in a eucalyptus tree.
After two years at Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans, my mom moved to Chicago and lived at the Three Arts Club while working as a cartographer at Rand McNally and doing layout for Coronet magazine. All of which seemed pretty exciting to me. My dad was nearby at officer candidate school; they met at a tea dance in 1943. My mom thought he was dashing in his navy whites; he thought she was “a dish” in her red paisley dress. While she waited in Chicago, he did a tour of duty on a naval destroyer in the Pacific, once operating a smoke machine to hide his ship from kamikaze pilots. Less than a year later, they were married, and his life became hers.
The mothers I knew growing up didn’t have careers, with the exception of Christine Hughes’s mom. （Dr. Hughes helped us with our sixth-grade science-fair project, which entailed pumping cigarette smoke into a fishbowl to show how nicotine would cause a goldfish to lose its equilibrium, sending ours into an aquatic barrel roll.） My mom’s job was us—fixing our breakfasts, packing our lunches （sometimes including little notes like Don’t get stuck in your peanut butter sandwich!）， driving whatever I’d forgotten （my purse, my sweater, my homework, my permission slip） to school, bringing me to piano lessons and Johnny to guitar. My mother was the family concierge, making sure we all had what we needed.
She’d always say, “Let ’em know you’re there.” The woman who ran our household like a boss, but had neither the opportunity nor the self-confidence to let the world know she was there, wanted more for us.
Not that my mom and dad were helicopter parents—I was given plenty of freedom to roam and make mistakes. It was the ’60s and ’70s, when you could hop on your bike in the morning and not come home until dinner. （My dad would holler “Katieee!” on the front step, while Mr. McMullan had perfected a whistle that signaled my friend Janie to head inside.） But if there was any hint I was seriously veering off course, my mother would swoop in.