Like so many moms everywhere, mine loomed huge in my formative years, so much so that when I think back to my childhood it’s difficult to separate much of it, much of myself, from her presence. Which is not to imply that she was forceful or dominant—far from it.
Mom, born on this day exactly one century ago in Budapest, Hungary as Zsuzsanna (Susan) Marie Lučić (pronounced “lou-cheech”), was the gentlest of souls. If I could encapsulate the feeling tone of that “presence” I refer to above, what most suggests itself to me is the currently fashionable phrase that she “always had my back.” Not in a fierce way, but tenderly, with a steadfastness that never left me with doubt that I was her very sun and moon.
(The strange thing was that my five siblings also seemed to have internalized the insane notion that it was actually them who held that extra super-special place in her heart…)
It’s quite impossible to over-estimate the importance of this feeling of being loved and cared for so deeply by a parent, and I cringe every time I hear of any child who endures life without it. I have zero doubt my father loved me deeply, too, but he was periodically hard on me through my early years, and in those instances Mom was my refuge.
Even at my tender age, I could sense her holding me closer during those times, letting me know things would be all right, and more importantly still, I, her little Andy, was beloved and all right, too.
Many months of intensive study followed, along with the driving lessons that allowed her to somehow to pass the licensing test, even though every time I stepped into her car as a passenger terrified me.
As I grew into a young man through my high school years, I relished the times when I could get her for myself. That would sometimes be late at night when I’d be rifling through the fridge for something to get me to the morning. She, still awake with the endless chores of a stay-at-home mom with six children, would offer to fix me the classic standby of a hot dog sandwich, the wieners cut horizontally and protruding over the borders of the mustard-smeared bread, topped by Dad’s homemade pickles.
I’d often think and share with Mom about the books I was devouring both in school and out, or articles in the “L.A. Times,” which was a staple in our home that never went unread. She was a tireless and interested listener as I downloaded the roiling currents of my psyche through the thrashings and Big Questions of teenage life. This was partly because she had been well-read herself through her youth and was glad, I suspect, to hear me holding forth, even if it was undergirded by regret at not having pursued more education herself after marrying my father at age 19, bedazzled by his extroverted personality and status as a star athlete who ran hurdles for the Hungarian national team.
***
Mom had come from a cultured background, her parents, Ivan and Emmy, having met at the University of Bamberg in Germany, where her father was pursuing a Ph.D in political science and her mother worked in the administration.
Ivan eventually became an executive with the Bank of Hungary, and the couple maintained an expansive home library, got invited to symphony galas, and hosted parties at which Emmy would play and sing “beautifully,” my mom said, on the home piano.
I once asked Mom about her earliest memory, and she said it was being put to bed at some 3 years old with her bejeweled mother coming in to say good-night, dressed in a long black evening gown, her hair done up, the very picture of elegance as she was departing for the concert hall with her husband.
The photo below is from more or less that time, probably 1928. Emmy had already undergone at least one surgery at this point for stomach cancer, the first when my mom was 2. One of the subsequent six surgeries revealed Emmy had been pregnant with my mom’s would-have-been younger brother. Emmy never got a chance to try for another child, dying at age 34, when my mom was 8.
Since it was considered unseemly at that time for a single man to raise a daughter alone, Ivan soon sent Mom off to boarding school, and she saw him only sparingly the rest of her life. Seven years later, he married what turned out to be the archetype of the wicked stepmother, my mother rarely returning home after that and feeling mostly miserable when she did. Little wonder she fell under the spell of my handsome and (literally) dashing dad just a few years later.
***
***
How does an 8-year-old girl get over losing her mother after a years-long illness? The answer is she doesn’t, really.
She cries to the heavens, sobs into her pillows, ponders, absorbs, adapts, resolves, curls up in a ball, makes what she can of the sadness hollowing out her own troubled stomach. And a decade later, throws herself into a marriage forged in the fires of World War II’s end (alluded to previously here). Seven years of living in various German cities as displaced persons while my dad resurrected his track career and scraped together money from whatever side jobs he could find in a war-ravaged Germany followed. All of which led to both circumstantial and voluntary separations, even as Mom was giving birth to her first three children, me the last of those.
Finally, their emigration “lottery number” came up and the spinner landed on Venezuela. Mom took the story from there in one of the periodic interviews I had with my parents in the early 1990s:
“They finally told us we could go right away, but then we heard stories that they were throwing tomatoes at refugees there and we said, ‘Forget that.’ Then they said we could go to the United States, but we’d have to wait longer. We said, ‘Fine…'”
It has occurred to me a time or two since then that such are the things upon which entire personal, family and community histories hinge. If it weren’t for one unverified anecdote somehow reaching one person 5,000 miles away who takes it as gospel, I may well be writing this account in Spanish, as a citizen of Venezuela (where I’d at least have government-run health care; oh wait, I do have government-run health care, I’m on Medicare!).
Eventually, my parents, my older sister and brother and I (at 8 months) crossed the ocean on a U.S. Navy transport ship, a literally penniless immigrant family relying on the generosity of a couple of distant cousins and my mom’s uncle to settle us first in New Jersey. Mom gave birth to another daughter there, and after three years, they picked up again and headed to Los Angeles, where two more girls were born and Mom vowed she was done with travel for the rest of her life.
All but one of her subsequent, very infrequent “vacations” were an hour’s or so drive away, the lone exception being a single trip to visit my dad’s brother in Monterey.
***
Come the 1970s, Mom, who had never learned to drive and rarely left the house, asked my dad for driving lessons, just as he had done for my older siblings and me. With her first three kids out of the house, Mom decided the lightened parental role would allow her to enroll in a program to become a medical assistant, for which she’d need a car and the ability to drive it.
Many months of intensive study followed, along with the driving lessons that allowed her to somehow to pass the licensing test, even though every time I stepped into her car as a passenger terrified me.
This was a time of blossoming for Mom. Though she was the last thing from a raging feminist, all humans marinate to greater or lesser degrees in the tenor of their times. There was no doubt Mom was picking up the virus affecting an entire generation of women who were eager to flex long unused muscles that would get them, if they so chose, out from under the prescribed identity yoke of wife-and-mother.
Mom took enormous pride in being older than most of her classmates and outdoing them all as class valedictorian. Her natural, easy warmth was a perfect fit for a kind of wise mother role among her classmates, which carried right over into her job at a doctor’s office where she bustled about for the next 20+ years, benign queen of yet another domain.
And with her blossoming, a bursting as well—also not anomalous to her times. Though I’d spent most of my early life under the starry-eyed delusion that my parents were the exemplar for all marriages ever, underneath, various roiling currents had been taking their toll for a long time. Armed with her newfound, intentionally cultivated independence, she told my dad she was leaving him, and moving out to the San Fernando Valley with my two youngest sisters, closer to her job.
Over the next several years, my dad was a wreck, living solo in an apartment, drinking too much and hosting his daughters for sometimes difficult weekends. My mom flourished, losing weight, upping her wardrobe, and occasionally, when I’d come into town to visit, begging off with an impish look on her face because she was “busy” that night.
When I saw pictures of the doctor she was working for go up on her walls, I knew Mom’s essentially romantic temperament, the little orphaned girl dreaming of a Prince Charming who would surely save her days, had kicked fully into gear.
***
***
Mom’s upward trajectory through those next several years seemed like a free-flowing gallop on a frisky young pony. But eventually, the doctor/boss+ setup soured, and the bubble Mom had created around it burst. In its wake, she had too-easy access to medications that dulled her spirits but not her pain, and she tail-spinned, lost her glow, kept the dutiful parts of her life afloat, but sometimes just barely.
My father, ever hopeful to recover family life with his beloved Zsuzsa, sensed an opening, presented himself as ready to fill the hole that had appeared in her life, and they remarried after the five-year split.
They bought a new house, Dad stopped drinking and was as solicitous of Mom as he could possibly be, Mom got off her pills, and they made it work well enough, with a proper modicum of normal life as they both entered the latter phase of work and final child-rearing before retirement. (Although “normal life” did still include Dad’s occasional week-long sulks for unspecified reasons that made all us siblings just roll our eyes and wait him out, as Mom increasingly learned to do as well.)
I had mixed feelings when they got back together, suspecting it at the time as a capitulation for my mom. But the truth is that no one faces perfect choices in this world. Intimate relationships between people and between every person and him/herself are unfathomably complex, ruled by forces over which they often have little control.
Two things we do know: We can never have a complete understanding of any relationship outside our own (though even our own can be elusive), and everyone has their own unique needs, desires and bargains they are willing to make for the larger issue of mutual care. My parents lived almost 20 years more together before Dad passed in 1997, then Mom moved down near San Diego to live out her days with my youngest sister and her husband before her end in 2005.
Both of them survived and thrived much more than not through the tempestuous times and geographies they traversed in their respective 77 and 80 years. Invaded and forced to flee for foreign lands as adults, crossing oceans and continents in absolute poverty, achieving their version of the American Dream with six children who grew to be functional adults, and together for the better and worse, in sickness and health, that they had pledged back in 1944, right till the end.
Though both of their hearts occasionally got them in trouble (speaking only metaphorically there), everyone who knew them could see those same hearts also shined as their greatest assets. That’s pretty much how things work when one exposes the heart, in all its tender vulnerability, to the world.
Strong as Mom and Dad had to be through the Great Dislocations of their life together, they had not even one hard edge between the two of them. Mushy, is what they were—in all the best aspects of that term.
“My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness,” goes perhaps the Dalai Lama’s most famous quote. I think of both my parents every time I come across it. On this day in particular, my mom’s kindness, that deep seat of every true religion, shines especially brightly.
Did it change the world? Of course it changed the world!
How could it not?
***
***
***
See and hit the Follow button at https://www.facebook.com/andrew.hidas for regular 1-minute or less dispatches from the world’s great thinkers, artists and musers, accompanied always by lovely photography.
Deep appreciation to the photographers! Unless otherwise stated, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing
Homepage rotating banner photos (except for library books) by Elizabeth Haslam https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/
Library books by Larry Rose, Redlands, California, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com
All other photos from Hidas family archives
What a lovely and complete rendering of your beautiful and beloved mother. Like probably every parent who reads this post I ponder how my own children will see me after I am gone. I can only hope that their words will reflect such love, and such true and deep knowing.
I especially appreciate that you presented your mother here as a fully human individual, complete with foibles, challenges and triumphs: a real person with a real history. So often we only read the completely positive tributes of an individual….those are of course wonderful, but knowing about the struggles and triumphs is reassuring, even inspirational, as it lends a strength to us when we (so often) need it.
And such lovely photographs!!! She was a true beauty.
“A real person with a real history”—I like the sound of that, Angela! We all deserve to be seen that way. Thanks much.
Happy Birthday to our dear Zsuzsa Neni! I loved the way she said my name with her soothing voice.
I love you Cuz!
Kristóf
Many thanks, my Cuz, I think she enjoyed saying it!
I assume there aren’t too many of your blog followers whose recollections of your parents are now more than sixty years old. I’ve always found it inexplicably strange how a particular memory, often the most trivial, retains such clarity so many years later. I see your father officiating a track meet between Oxy and USC or watching Pete high jump against Belmont. I see Jay’s mom playing the piano to Liberace sheet music, or his dad watching Saturday morning wrestling. I see your mom cooking this huge meal, maybe goulash, before asking you what time you’d be getting home on a particular Saturday night. I remember buying a chocolate donut off a Helms’ truck driven by Bear’s dad after a particularly disappointing UCLA-USC football game. I hope that negatives of my slide show recollections don’t fade away like a Dick Barnett jumper.
I must say this about your ode to your mom. I admire your ability to delve so personally into Zsuzsanna Marie Lučić Hidas’ life; I couldn’t do the same with Editha Mary Hayes Spencer’s life. My ode would read more like a Wikipedia entry: She was born in Oakland on September 29, 1921. She was 12 when her father, a judge in Alameda, died from appendicitis. She graduated from Berkeley with a degree in Fine Arts in 1942. She married my father on September 15, 1947. Their 63-year marriage produced four sons, nine grandchildren and nine great grandchildren. She was a professional artist and published poet. She died on December 28th, 2010 at the age of 89. I really commend you for being so honest in the telling of your mom’s life.
A few of us old buddies have long felt your family’s history, particularly in those years immediately following World War 2, would make for one darn good book; it would be both compelling and inspirational. I also believe this ode to Zsuzsanna Marie Lučić could also be expanded into something equally as compelling and inspirational. Thanks for the ode. It was moving.
You’re right, Robert—my 60-year “followers” are quite sparse in number—am so pleased to have you among them! The various snapshot memories of our lives that you reference are utterly mysterious to me; I suspect future brain studies will be able to pinpoint their exact location, with the ability to stimulate much more than the scattershot images that remain with us. For now, my abiding question is the “Why” of the particular images we do retain, because sometimes the particulars don’t seem to be of any real consequence. Instead, it seems there’s a randomness to what we do and don’t remember. Lots more to probe about that, remind me of it sometime for a future post if I don’t get to it!
Meanwhile, there’s sure nothing wrong with a “Wikipedia entry” for anyone; it most assuredly serves a valuable purpose. For my own part, I knew I wanted to do something to observe my mom’s centennial but when I sat down to it I wasn’t at all sure where it would go. (I actually almost never know quite where my posts will go, which is half the reason I do them.) But as it proceeded, I felt drawn to probe the fullness of her life, to reflect what it actually was, in the complexity that actually marks every life once we get beneath its surface. It’s certainly more interesting to me to go to those places, and I trust readers feel the same way. Glad to hear that you did.
This is beautiful, Andrew :)
This was a delightful read. Love the way you blended details of your mother with your own life.
I wonder if my brothers think that Mother loved them as much as she loved me?
Thank you for this wonderful ode to your mother, someone I knew only as a pal knows, from a distance, the mom of his close friend. Her story is a testament to her resilience and deep sense of how to navigate, negotiate, and endure the sometimes unthinkable cards dealt in a lifetime of so many disruptions and hardships. It is a reminder of the astounding reality that those of us of a certain age have had the privilege of lives unscathed by the hardships endured by those who have gone before us. My memories of your mother are fond ones, and the photos included in this blog have brought her back for me. Many thanks for rounding out her life experience.
Thanks, Kate! It’s always good to hear from readers, whether one sentence or a hundred!
Much appreciated Loren, though I’m not sure I can help with your question…. :-)
I try to frame these so readers know there’s a real person on the other end, and not just some AI program or blank-faced, objective “report.” I think Robert nailed it by citing Wikipedia as the model for that kind of writing, which certainly serves a purpose—but not for blogs! I’m glad that aligns with both your reading and writing style as well.
Thanks, Jay, thought of you often in putting this together, especially when poring over notes from my interviews for hours tracking down little factoids and trying to reconcile differing dates and descriptions of people, places and historical events. Formidable! Thought of you slogging through all that to finally churn out your own family history—Cheers!
Lovely mate – this is such a touching ode to your Mom! I remember way back when that you were conducting interviews with your parents to both more fully appreciate the incredible arc of their lives and be able to share these stories with friends and extended family members in the future (as you’ve so touchingly done for us blog readers as well). Of course, this brings up reflections of my own Mom, Virginia, who was absolutely shaped by her experience of living through the depression and WW2. As the youngest of 3 boys (each 4 years apart, so they could afford to send us to college!) I would look at Mom washing aluminum foil to use it again and think she was absolutely crazy until I was old enough to appreciate how dramatically the 30s and 40s defined her worldview. I am forever thankful that both my Dad and Mom lived long enough for me to realize what wonderful parents they were and to clearly convey to them my deep appreciation for the sacrifices they made to ensure we boys had such a full childhood, including the requirement to play a musical instrument and attend college!
As someone who’s smoothed out a few crinkles of tin foil in my time for rewrapping elsewhere, let’s just call your mom a forerunner to the environmental movement, Mr. Feldman—a pioneer of the “Reduce Reuse Recycle” ethos!
Thanks for this priceless anecdote…
Honor thy father and thy mother.
You passed!