Christmas Cheesecake?

Watch it, you sleazebags. That's my momma (Christmas, 1969).

Ever notice how, if there's a news show or documentary about '69, there's all this hippie crap and "it was a time of upheaval" and blah-blah-blah?

You never see that in our family photos. There's no indication of anything upheaving anywhere. This attractive young woman does not look like she's about to build a bomb or set the student center on fire. Ask my parents about the events of the '60s and they'll say "I was busy." And they were.

My mother was (and is) a curiosity: Catholic school girl who went on to get a math degree (but hated math) and to have a computer career (and hated computers?) way ahead of her time. She was a career woman, but she made a lot of my clothes for the first 5-6 years of my life. I never had a piece of store bought bread till about then, too, since she baked, cooked, cleaned, washed, etc.

Though she would consider herself a feminist in the '70s (down to the whole fish/bicycle thing), she'd have been the first to warn any woman who wanted to "have it all". She had it all, and it was a lot of work. And a lot of it worked out in a less than optimal fashion.

Still, I've come to be impressed by my parents ability to raise children that survived at all. My mother was an only child (with a mysterious backstory that includes adoption) and my father had a younger brother he didn't associate with much, and they were both part of that nuclear family culture which assumed that big, close-knit families could be replaced with books by experts.

Of course, my generation was even worse, with the extended family being a distant memory of the previous generation. But we, at least, have the advantage of knowing that the experts are full of it.