I get my artistic talents & appreciation from both parents but especially my mother. We always received compliments on how beautifully Mommy decorated the homes we grew up in and they were always neat and filled with arts, crafts, and cultural artifacts, particularly a couple of her high school paintings framed and displayed along with paintings she made of our family when we were small. Then she started building those infamous miniatures A.K.A. dollhouses. Everything from the first mansion built for Lynn, which eventually had 23 rooms, to the country houses for me & my grandparents, to the brownstone for my sister Janet, etc. Later, she branched off into building other miniature buildings i.e. a country store and roomboxes, including those designed just for the holidays, & the latest is a winery.
Family-oriented TV shows were all we ever watched--usually while huddled up together on the couch (whether at our home in New Jersey or in North Carolina w/my grandparents and "Uncle" Donny), whether here in NJ or at our vacation home in NC. It was not unusual for us to sing, dance, and play around the house together as well as sing family songs she taught us during car rides, when not playing some car game that Lynn created. It was truly a Cosby Show lifestyle --without the Cosby couple & dough.
She would drive us to malls, bookstores, and on tours around the city (that's NY for any of you foreigners), including to museums, parks, the aquarium, international festivals, Chinatown, Little Italy, and window shopping walks at Christmastime so we could see all the lovely decorations. We were enrolled in the YMWCA where Lynn excelled in gymnastics, we took art classes at Newark's Museum, Lynn even took piano lessons and I took dance lessons for at least 7 years--all outside of school. We were also in the Girl Scouts (or Brownies)-- which she'd created a division of in our apt. building as president of the Residence Association.
Bedtime rituals included a storybook when we were really young and we never outgrew the good night kisses and hugs, plus "I love you's" after we said our prayers. Our living room was filled to the brim with boxes, wrappings, and holiday decorations on Christmas Day and my spoiled self even asked "Is this it?" one such holiday after opening all the gifts that left boxes covering our entire living room; mom always had us make a list but then bought us whatever "she" wanted us to have, some including educational toys & always including great books. We had a bunch of New Year's Eve implements that we all made noise with together and danced around with right after the annual countdown at Times Square watched on TV --along with a few sips of wine. At Easter, we'd go Easter egg hunting around the apt. we spent most of our remaining childhood in after decorating the eggs-- if we weren't at an Easter Egg Hunt in our family churchgrounds in NC.
While Ma was at work, other than extracurricular activities after school, such as Lynn's cheerleading, we had to walk straight home, check in with her every half hr. while playing outside with friends, and be in before dark. As much as I detested this as a pre-teen and adolescent (since none of our friends' parents were anywhere near as strict and "smothering"), I finally appreciated it by my sophomore year in college--when I became an activist and advocate of parenting skills myself.
Mommy would come straight home from work and start cooking for us--that is, until I (being the youngest)became a teenager and lived off of my own cooking until later at night when she finally arrived home from one of her countless educational/community meetings. Those peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, oodles of noodles, & cereals sure couldn't replace the meals I coudn't wait for her to get home to cook. Thinking back though, she did come up with a couple of rather creative recipes we'd fondly named "Mama's Garbage" (all the leftovers mixed together from pastas, meats, and tomatoe bases) and "Flojjaloppa" (all the leftovers mixed together from the bottoms of our cereal boxes)--but they, too, were delicious. As a matter of fact, even something as simple as a cup of her instant coffee and toast is still to this day second to none--and don't even get me started on her full course hot breakfasts! Back then, much of what she'd throw together was processed food, but in later years and especially since retiring, oh my God...you just wouldn't believe what a gourmet and health-conscious chef she's become! Meals have always been eaten together at the dinner table in our homes--after saying grace. It wasn't until Lynn wrote a high school paper entitled something to the effect of "I Never Knew We Were Poor" that I, too, realized that we'd grown up poor despite a middle class lifestyle & tastes yet were always rich on love.
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