Coop’s Childhood Part 6 – Childhood’s End
May 4th, 2014 at 16:48
My mom rose to the occasion after the divorce with my dad. Though she continued to have a great deal of unresolved anger towards him, and ongoing worries about paying the bills, plus other disruptions in her life, it seems it was perhaps the first real opportunity in that life to be truly on her own, and not pulled and tugged by parents, fiancée or spouse. She was beginning to learn to navigate as a completely autonomous person, including as a single parent, and I was just beginning to become sophisticated enough about this sort of stuff to notice, now that I had started to move her down from the former pedestal I had previously elevated her to.She was getting enough in child support each month from my dad so she could barely, just barely, pay the bills if we lived frugally. And though some of the couples that had befriended her based on her status as a professor’s wife now distanced themselves from her as a divorcee, her irresistible extroversion and heart on her sleeve emotional honesty was beginning to win her a new community of friends and comrades. Our little household, now three instead of four, was definitely becoming the “Jane Roberts Zale Show”, for better or for worse.
It was now the summer of 1966. In May Martin Luther King had made his first public speech against the Vietnam War, a conflict that was mobilizing the activist segment of my Baby-boom generation and was roiling the progressive intellectual elite that my mom was angling to connect with as well. In June, the Supreme Court’s decision in Miranda v. Arizona now required police to inform suspects of their rights before questioning or arresting them. Later that month the National Organization for Women was founded in Washington DC by Betty Friedan and a handful of other women. In August The Beatles held a press conference and John Lennon apologized for saying he was “more popular than Jesus”.
With summertime came my annual liberation from school and the return to my more natural state of running my own life including planning my own day. Since Coop’s Childhood Part 6 – Childhood’s End | Lefty Parent: