Dad immediately put his arm around Mom and said, good-naturedly, “I’m her husband, and you don’t want me in the picture.” Mom laughed off the woman’s faux pas with an improvised joke about being a cradle robber. The woman, flummoxed, dug herself in deeper with an extended apology before slinking off. That was that. But I was mortified for Mom and, in the moment, mortified that my mom could pass for a grandma.
I am ashamed of these feelings now. I am also ashamed of how we teased Mom, and of the part of myself that thought she was to blame for her health woes and anxiety. Knowing what I know now, I am in awe of her fortitude. She underplayed the extent to which that New York City street accident, suffered when she was only seventeen, shaped her adulthood. Yes, she made what the doctors called a “full recovery,” but realistically, she was never the same physically afterward. The accident affected how she carried her babies, gave birth, went about her day, and raised her children. OCD or no OCD, she had every reason to be fearful of her kids getting badly hurt—because she had gotten badly hurt.
I SHOULD MAKE it clear that Mom was not a complainer. A chronic worrier, yes, but never a moaner or a groaner. Quite the opposite, in fact: she was a glass-half-full person, an acolyte of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. Her default mode was cheerful pragmatism no matter the reality. Let’s not forget that, while Dad had the will and the gumption to dream of riding into Hollywood on his horse, it was Mom who had the actual horse sense. She was the one with a head start in show business and a practical knowledge of how to go about getting into it. It was her can-do spirit that propelled Rance and Jean Howard forward.
In 1984, when I directed my third feature film, Cocoon, Mom made her first tentative noises about returning to acting, having forsaken it three decades earlier to focus on her family. I put her in the movie as a key extra, a background actor who has no dialogue but appears in a lot of scenes. True to form, she charmed everyone in the cast. She had some heart-to-heart conversations with Maureen Stapleton, Jessica Tandy, and Gwen Verdon in which they, for all their success, voiced regrets about their life choices. They all expressed to Mom that they envied her for having spent the amount of time she had with her children. There is no one correct way to achieve work-life balance, of course, and the conditions for doing so as a working actress in the twentieth century were brutal. But Mom was buoyed by her talks with Maureen, Jessica, and Gwen. “They made me realize that, for me, I did it right,” she told me.
Mom opened up to me further in 1988, on the eve of what would be the first of her three heart surgeries. We were talking in her hospital room, whose every surface, from her bed to her tray table, was covered in ledgers, notebooks, and boxes of receipts. She was feverishly working against the clock to get her and Dad’s books together for tax season. There was an unspoken subtext to her urgency that frightened me. She was clearly concerned that she might not make it through the surgery. If she died, though, Dad could at least take solace in the fact that Mom had filed that year’s returns and left him a road map for how to do the filing himself in the future. Typical Mom—she was more worried about Dad’s having to do the taxes than her heart.
That evening, though, Mom moved the conversation in a direction that was, for her, unusual. She spoke about her youth, which she was seldom inclined to do. With sobering candor, she described the ill health that had followed her around from the New York accident onward: the constant pain, the onset of arthritis, losing her teeth, getting hooked on cigarettes because of that ill-informed doctor in Duncan. This was all related matter-of-factly, without an ounce of self-pity. And then she said, with a smile and complete sincerity, “But I had a wonderful childhood.”
I’ve turned this conversation over in my head for years. It made me recognize that, for all of Mom’s optimism and charisma, her adult life had held its share of disappointments. I didn’t understand this when I was young, because I was just a kid and she wore her setbacks and ailments lightly, at least for her kids’ benefit. After our talk in her hospital room, I came to realize that it wasn’t her family life with us that she leaned on to make her feel grateful and fortify her will to keep going. It was her memories of an idyllic time unviolated by struggle or physical pain: her childhood.