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Afterword A Presentation at Elizabeth A. Little’s Memorial Celebration, September 12, 2003 Ruel Little Birth Order Because I am the youngest, I am always the last one. My father informed me a couple of days ago that he didn’t want to use birth order for our readings. That is why I am going first. What I would like to say about my mom is from my perspective as the youngest. I trail my next sibling Tom by three years. So in some ways I had mom to myself for the years before the empty nest. For much of my life, though, I didn’t think of mom as a person. I thought of her as my mom. I expect this phenomenon is probably normal, but in my formative years, while I was learning about myself, I knew little about my mom. When I was about fifteen, my mom, with newfound time and probably energy, focused on a new career. She went back to school; she turned my bedroom into an office; she began to talk to me about the advantages and disadvantages of radiocarbon dating. (I might add here, she spent much less time talking to me about dating itself.) Yes, this was the mom who got me dressed and fed for school. This was the mom who was the assistant teacher in my fourth and fifth grade classes. She was the one who skied with me, because I wasn’t old enough to ski with my siblings. Now she was going to school part time. On top of that, she took an apartment in Amherst so she could take evening classes or classes on consecutive days. To be honest with you, I didn’t even know where Amherst was, and I made no attempt to find out. 211 212 Ruel Little I vaguely remember talking to her about the apartment and sleeping nights away from home. She asked me how else she could go to classes with a 2½ hour drive each way. We didn’t discuss whether she should go to school or not. Mom knew what she wanted for herself. It wasn’t going to be my choice. Was my mom changing on me? How come she wanted to go to school and not be my mom? She already had her PhD. Was this her way of giving up motherhood to leave the family? Take a U-turn back to who she was before she was my mom? I needed to know mom would be there. It wasn’t that my mom was changing. It was that I didn’t really know my mom. So I tried to get to know her. Not consciously, but I accepted her new pursuits without making a fuss. She wasn’t like other moms I met. But strangely, that surprised me the least. She just became my mom the archeologist. As time passed, I got married and had a child. That is when I first realized, as her youngest child, that my experience was destined to be thirty-eight years after her experience. I noted how she was, in many ways, just like I am, or, more correctly, I like her. I began to remember traces of what she taught me about herself as a parent. These traces started showing up like stashes along a trail. Talking to mom directly didn’t give too many clues to the mysteries of what she experienced as a parent. Mom didn’t give you answers about life in the present. She is a wonderful role model, but she didn’t repeat herself. When my first child was about three years old, mom and I didn’t have lots in common, by any means. She was still working hard at her then well-established passion, the passion she created from embers when the kids left home. What connected me to my mom was a set of pictures of her and my father with their three-year-old son (my brother Jack). At that time my parents only had one child and all the things that come with being a new family. I saw in the snapshot that her life in the picture was the same as mine. I realized that she had come down this path before me and that she faced the same challenges and rewards that I have. I realized her high school friends were like my high school friends, something I could never understand, because I could never imagine...

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