We’re knee deep in the Mad Men series – the characters, the plot, the times – all just have captured our imagination. But it’s Betty that holds me spellbound. She looks and acts so like my own mother – a beautiful woman trapped with only smoking and wine to douse her overwhelming desire to run away. My mom ran away but as I remember as a young child, she was brought home, in the arms of my older brother, and me hiding behind the bedside table in my parents’ room scared because in her absence my father had convinced me she was a witch who was going to hurt us. Lovely memory, eh?
I was sitting at the table this weekend talking to a single mother – we had many overnight guests the last week – and she was telling me the struggle to survive a full time, demanding job with raising a young child. She said there were many times she dreaded the weekends when she would be alone with her baby. She said, “I know this sounds terrible, but I think it is better to talk about these things openly than keep them inside.”
We talked about the women on Mad Men, the women of the 50s like my mother, and we talked about the nurses I have met over the course of her five month hospital stay who were mostly all single moms. On one hand, you have the woman as victim of the times, stuck, with children, anesthetizing herself to get through the banality of it all, and on the other you have the woman as survivor, stuck, with children, struggling everyday to make it all work. Can I tell you something – both suck.
But what this woman at my table was telling me is it hasn’t changed all that much. We haven’t caught up to where the Mad Man series is now but what I understand is that Betty gets involved in social causes, which is good because right now her life looks like hell. My mom is in the hospital where all that anesthetizing caught up to her. The nurses that were all single mothers are still working their normal long shifts.
What women in the 50s didn’t know is that half a century later life changed for women but it didn’t change all that much. A woman has more options but a mother still has few.