This Mother’s Day weekend has me returning again to my mother’s journal from college days. The excerpt below is from the start of her second year at Eastern Mennonite College in Harrisonburg, Virginia when she was 22 years old. A few months later she started writing very entertainingly and movingly in the same journal about her emerging relationship with another sophomore, Sam Lapp. Between her journals and many boxes of letters, there is a book about my parents that I hope to write someday (unless I convince one of my daughters to take the project on).

My mother grew up in a loving conservative Mennonite home, in a family that valued education. That’s her on the right of this family portrait from the 50s. After high school she worked for her family’s farm and business near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania for a few years before her dream of going to college came true.

She was obsessed with literature and one of her concerns about my Dad, as they began dating, was that he wasn’t that into it. She got over that and he gradually became more of a reader and writer himself. I tend to trace the roots of her feminist leanings to their young married years in the mid-60s when they moved to a more liberal Mennonite community in North Newton, Kansas for my Dad to attend Bethel College. But this journal shows that she was frustrated with gender expectations of her day before then.

September 25, 1959

I’m in a dilemma. There is a current idea abroad which needs rethinking. As a girl I am asked to be efficiently intellectual and softly feminine to satisfy the same people. I must get good grades. These grades, however, may not reach the ears of college men, for there is great danger of being shelved as a “brain”. I must not speak too often in classes - it isn't thought quite nice. So the teacher asks an easy question and we girls look decently blank. What kind of Victorian idea is this? Is this a free country? Not really, its girls are tongue-tied. 

I must not offer an opinion of my own on matters, at least not without asking, "What do you think?" (at the risk of having my opinion changed). So I must insult my intellect by stifling any sign of "brilliance" - a word carrying obnoxious associations, it would seem. 

I've tried so far to be versatile, but I wonder how long I continue to "Jekyll" and "Hyde" in this manner. Some girls have no trouble playing this amphibian role, but it takes a conscious, hard effort to keep my "Mr. Hyde" under cover. What if I wake up some morning, an ugly, yellow-clawed, complete intellect?

Mary M, a dear life-long friend of my mother, wrote a letter to my Dad when he was facing terminal cancer, less than a year after my Mom died. The whole letter, including this short excerpt, was such a gift to my Dad and to me and my brothers.

In the pool of available young men of our time and place, I can hardly conceive of anyone who would have been a good husband for Helen. Her openness to people and to other ways of thinking and being, her assertiveness in addressing issues of discrimination and unfairness, would have threatened any man looking for a submissive wife. Sam, you were a wonderful husband to Helen, giving her space to be herself and respecting her. Your marriage was a beautiful example of two people committed in love to each other. In that togetherness you gave a wonderful gift to your nieces and nephews as you affirmed and accepted them, taking long trips to visit them, the Longeneckers being as important to you as the Lapps. 

I am not as assertive as my Mother was. Perhaps this is somewhat in reaction to her personality. Perhaps it’s in part because, thanks to women of her generation and many others before them, I didn’t face the same dilemmas with the same level of intensity. What a gift to be raised by a woman like Helen Longenecker Lapp.

This photo features a painting by my daughter Greta, based on an engagement photo of Helen and Sam. In the foreground is a stone sculpture Sam made as a Bethel College student, where he began forming his identity as an artist. He called this sculpture Madonna. It’s a beautiful image of motherhood that I’m honored to now have in my home along with Greta’s portrait.