A creative spirit. Demanding. Operatic. Impossible. Yet love from her was unmistakable, without equivocation, and passionately unconditional.
Life as Irene’s daughter was a warm bath in complete maternal affection alternating with moments of abject loneliness and the terror of having her love withdrawn and being abandoned. When I angered her, it was either her wrath or her withdrawal of love. Between the two her wrath was the preferred punishment. To not be connected to that life force whose heart was as big as an ocean was too much to bear.
My mother was born July 3, in the sign of the mother — Cancer. Fiercely protective, she was singularly focused on nurturing me, my sister and a host of others in her family, her emotional life and ours were constantly on a roller coaster. Mine was a childhood full of parties, singing, and smoke-filled mah joohng games deep into the night. Her laughter was music. Her singing voice soared.
She worked all the time. She and Dad had to. He made a cook’s salary of $5,000 a year. In 1960 dollars, that equaled a $20,000 in today’s numbers. She worked for thirty years in a frozen food factory about two miles from our home in Watsonville, California. Together they afforded to buy two houses, and put me and my sister through private schools and ultimately college. “We will never deny you food or a good education. The rest is on your own.”
We often wonder what would have become of our mothers had they never had us. Would they have had the lives they dreamed of? I remember when I asked her those questions and her answer was her life itself. She loved being at home, being married, dancing, being with her friends and worrying obsessively about my sister and me. Yet, there was always something unfulfilled in her that when I was young, could never fathom. It wasn’t until years later that I found out she was an actress like me, and that she loved performing. Whatever platform separating us as mother and child had suddenly vanished. We had become equals on a deep creative plane. Taking a look at our charts, Uranus and Jupiter at 23 Cancer in the 5th house of family and creativity in my chart was exactly conjunct her Jupiter in the 11th in Cancer in the same degree. We met each other halfway around the wheel.