My mother, Louise Oberbeck, was a contributing writer to the local newspaper, The Monterey Peninsula Herald, where she wrote funny pieces revealing our family life in intimate detail to all of our school chums and their families. You couldn’t help but laugh and she poked more fun at herself than at anyone else. Still, many of her funniest stories had to do with our school and family life and her best attempts to mother in whatever way the PTA, or scouts or teachers had requested. Her funny poems about romance won awards and were published in the local literary journal. I admired her efforts and her work. When she turned 80, I made a scrapbook of all her published pieces.
Growing up we went on long car rides, and Mother would read to my father, brother, sister and me. She could also “spin a good yarn,” often out of whole cloth. When my father had sabbatical we went to Europe for three months, where, not to miss out on long car rides, we bought a car and we three kids neatly folded over each other in the small back seat to listen to mother tell stories of our dog Buttons whom we’d left at home to have puppies. Buttons had a romance with Don Juan from San Juan, since she was boarded in San Juan Batista, and then had many trials and tribulations with her three children: Zippers, Snaps, and Bows.
I wonder sometimes if I have always been following in my mother’s footsteps. So perhaps turning to my own writing was always embedded somewhere in my mind. I loved and admired my mother, though I was shocked when at the end of her life she told me she thought I hadn’t respected her. How could she have missed sight of her oldest child doing everything she did. Mother sewed all of our clothes, so I learned to sew; she was a knitter, and she taught me to knit; she was President of the Carmel Women’s Democratic Club, where I went with her dutifully, content to stuff envelopes all day. She didn’t go to church, but when I pestered her to go she finally, in exasperation, suggested I go to the Unitarian Church, which I have been attending ever since.
Sometimes I wonder if I can’t learn a new trick, but only do as mother had done even when it’s time has clearly past, I carry on her work, it’s tradition. I began to write when, like my mother, I finally had time after I retired. Unlike my mother, my luck came in helping to form the Houston Writers’ Group. My good friends there have helped me to develop as a writer and given me the confidence to write and to publish. My first effort at publishing was the Phebe Force Blog about my husband and my move back to my hometown of Monterey where we rebuilt my mother’s house at the start of our retirement. I have had one biography published since then of Margot Adler in the UU Dictionary of Biographies, and am now working on a second biography of The Rev. Annie Margaret Barr who studied with Gandhi in India before moving permanently to Northeast India to help an indigenous Unitarian movement in the Khasi Hills. I hope to have it completed this year.
Houston Writers' Group 