Searching for Marmee

Cozy Christmas Reading on Little Women and the Power of Stories

Merry Christmas from my family to yours!

I’m grateful for each of you who follow my writing through this Substack. In case you needed some cozy reading to go along with your plum pudding today, here is one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever written about Christmas Day, Little Women, my mother, and the power of stories.

I don’t recall what I wore on December the 25th, 1994. Was it cold enough in Florida for scarves and coats that winter? But I vividly remember waiting with my mom in a serpentine line outside the movie theatre on Christmas Day with my nine-year-old heart beating wildly in anticipation to see Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy come alive for us on the big screen. 

A few weeks before the 1994 film version of Little Women premiered, my mother, Margo, gave me a battered and well-loved copy of the novel and she told me the story of her first encounter with Little Women. Her school librarian had described the plot to her and eight-year-old Margo borrowed a copy and started a lifelong love affair with reading. And what a gateway book! Who wouldn’t fall in love with the March family in Little Women? 

As a bookish “dreamer” born to outgoing parents who loved sports and social events, Jo March’s unconventional awkwardness and experience as an outsider gave little Margo a comrade in arms. And Jo’s future with Professor Bhaer gave my mother the hope that she might be loved by a good man for exactly who she was, quirks and all. It was a dream that happily came true when she married her high school sweetheart, my father, or as she likes to refer to him as “my Professor” because he taught at a university and embodies all the absent-mindedness of endearing Friedrich Bhaer.

In our home, the characters of Little Women were constantly referenced. The 1994 film starring Winona Ryder? It was sacred in our family.

Winona Ryder was Jo. Sure, she was much too pretty to be the awkward heroine but she played Jo so well that we forgave Winona for her extraordinary good looks. Trini Alvarado’s Meg was perfection. Claire Danes’s death scene as Beth made us weep every time. And Kirsten Dunst’s Amy! How brilliantly she made the silly, self-centered baby of the family so annoying and still lovable. The casting of “old Amy” was questionable at best, but discussing its failure ad nauseum was a beloved and obligatory viewing ritual. Christian Bale made us truly wrestle with the question of whether he and Jo could ever make it together.

And Susan Sarandon’s Marmee was wise, patient, strong, dependable. Marmee was the anchor of the whole shebang.

Quotes from the film were part of daily parlance in our family (partly due to the fact that we owned all of 10 movies so Little Women was in frequent rotation). If we were gobbling down dessert, my older brother was sure to say “Sally Moffat! You won’t be able to draw your laces!” Or walking past the bathroom where I was applying mascara, he would remark pompously like John Brooke, “Over the mysteries of female life there is drawn a veil…best left undisturbed.” 

If you didn’t grow up obsessively watching the 1994 Little Women and these references are going over your head, my apologies, the point is that we did watch it obsessively. It was part of us.

Little Women was there for us even in the darkest of times. When my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, I was living almost 1,000 miles away from my childhood home and was a new mom myself. During most of my mother’s treatment, talking on the phone was the best I could do to support her. I sent a copy of Little Women on audiobook for her to listen to when she was in bed recovering.

When my mother found herself grieving at losing her hair from the chemo, she called to say “I feel silly getting so emotional about this! I’m not usually vain!” “Mom,” I told her, “you’re like Jo after she sells her chestnut locks to buy the train ticket!” “MY HAIR!” we wailed in unison over the phone and laughed and cried, miles apart but brought together once again by our friends the Marches.

But it wasn’t until I was a grown woman that I started to understand why the story meant so much to my mother. I realized that for Margo, Little Women wasn’t really about relating to Jo March. For my mom, Little Women was all about Marmee.

The day my husband and I found out we were pregnant, we called our parents to let them know the good news. My mom’s first response was “I’m going to be called Marmee! Tell Carole she’ll have to pick something else!” Thankfully, my sweet mother-in-law had no designs on “Marmee” as her grandmotherly term of endearment and a potentially dramatic family conflict was avoided. An email from my mother came in later that day–from a new email address: “Marmee.” 

Becoming a mother helps you see your own mother in a new light, as her own person, not a being who exists only in relation to you. When I found out I was pregnant for the first time, in trying to answer the question, “who am I?” in light of the fact that a child was growing inside me, I inevitably turned to the question, “who was she? Who was she before there was a me?”

I thought about the bookish eight-year-old Margo, insecure and quirky, who fell in love with Little Women. My mom is quite the Jo. She had a responsible, maternal Meg of an older sister and a lighthearted baby sister (named Amy, in fact) as well as something the March sisters never had, save in their neighbor Laurie: a brother.

Her siblings grew up with camping trips, board games, and at first, life matched the picture perfect family of the Father Knows Best TV show that my mother loved watching as a little girl. But pain and addiction crept in. Like so many other men of his generation, my grandfather’s experiences in WWII were followed by alcohol addiction that was not overcome until his children were grown. In addition to the pain of her husband’s alcoholism, my grandmother was fighting her own demons with a mental health condition that was misdiagnosed repeatedly. Medication she should never have been prescribed stole away the mother her children remembered.

While I know my grandparents deeply loved their family, their home was no longer the safe harbor my mom and her siblings recalled from their very early years. My mother stopped watching Father Knows Best, because the shiny picture of family life it presented had turned out to be a lie. But in the March family, she found a beacon of something hopeful. Like the March girls, she and her sisters banded together to survive as dark reality.

And although she was hesitant to have a family after the childhood traumas she suffered, the March family offered the reminder that something different from the darkness was possible.  When she finally embraced the idea of motherhood, she went in guns blazing. Her kids would feel safe. Her home would be peaceful like Marmee’s. She would provide all the things she had lost.

Margo and her Professor (who grew up in a broken home, abandoned by his father) succeeded at creating the home they never had. Although my brother and I knew our parents weren’t perfect, we knew they were doing a damn good job. But looking back at my childhood as a parent myself, I know our home life was nothing short of miraculous. Instead of perpetuating trauma, my parents’ experiences motivated them to do the hard work of breaking cycles of abandonment, marital strife, and addiction. 

Margo’s dad, my grandfather, eventually achieved sobriety and my grandmother finally received the mental health treatment she needed later in life. Because of this, my memories of my grandparents are all happy ones: making blueberry pancakes together, Christmas morning with a gaggle of cousins and my grandfather’s breakfast casserole, feeding seagulls outside their Florida home. Something was found that had been lost. Something broken, if not fixed, was at least forgiven. 

My grandparents did not live to meet my first child, but, like them, I have three daughters and a son. My parents succeeded at giving my kids, their four grandchildren, the gift of an untraumatized mother. I guess it’s time to forgive them for not giving me the baby sisters I persistently requested. 

I owe a debt to Little Women for inspiring an awkward eight-year-old little girl finding solace in the school library that a happy home was possible. But it was my parents who made that home a reality. Despite how meticulously they smoothed the path for me, I don’t think I can ever live up to my parents, pouring their hearts and souls into building a home that wouldn’t let their children down. Anything I get right for my kids is thanks to them. My failures will be mine alone.

On Christmas Day, 2019 I stood in line with my mother and her granddaughters to see Little Women made for the next generation. Our 34-year-old, 6-year-old, 8-year-old, and 67-year-old hearts beat wildly to meet our friends Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy on the big screen—25 years to the day from when my mother and I saw the 1994 film. The story is in our bones, showing us the light when life is very dark. That is the gift of a good story. But my daughters and I will never have to long for a Marmee.  We already have one of our very own.

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If you’re looking for more of my writing about the classics, check out my book Jane Austen’s Genius Guide to Life: On Love, Friendship, and Becoming the Person God Created You to Be.