BY JOELLEN COLLINS
This past weekend was flooded with memories, partially due to it being Memorial Day weekend, a special time to honor so many men and women who have sacrificed to preserve our liberties, but I’m also in the process of cleaning out my closets and my cupboards and reviewing some incidences in my life that I had either forgotten or have glossed over or put aside for another time, some wonderful and some not.
This last weekend I had another chance to analyze my generation of women when I observed the outpouring of love towards Tina Turner, and then watching on HBO the documentary about Mary Tyler Moore. Those women lived lives that many of my generation would have craved; they were celebrities, they were the kind of drama queens I adore, and they gave me great pleasure in my life.
Thus, I naturally compared my experiences as a woman of the same era, and as one who both honored and occasionally violated the expectations for our generation. I have also been reviewing events that framed my life because of my gratitude for being adopted by the Johansons and Giffords of California. I have occasionally written of their guidance and my good fortune as a member of this family. Still, I worried about making a fuss or about not being a good girl who would have deserved them. I have seen the world change so drastically since I was a child in San Francisco, a teenager in Burbank, and a lifelong teacher who expected to be the perfect mentor. Of course, I wasn’t. Add that to my being married more than once, or that I often decided to take great leaps of travel to then unknown parts of the world as a volunteer or on a modest budget, my mother-in-law hating the “wheels on my feet.” I did not act like I was supposed to.
I had more in common with Mary Tyler Moore, at least from the television image she portrayed of an eternally optimistic, sweet, loyal, and yet adventurous woman as she matured in her roles on television. She also, of course, had great talent for other acting venues and experienced in her life many of the things that I did: sadness in her family, addictive tendencies, and loving her life and yet always haunted by thinking that she perhaps should just be a happy housewife.
I also wish, though, that I could have more fully experienced the passion for life and the bravery that Tina Turner had. She suffered more than I ever did, like public rejection and disdain when she left Ike Turner, but she continued to be the totally exciting, gifted singer and personage she was, even into her dying years. I would like to place myself somewhere between those two women because of the examples they were. They became unashamedly truly themselves, perhaps the reason I admired them so. While still a representative of my generation’s idea of a “good” woman, perhaps I can forgive myself for trying to be who I truly am.