by Talia Murphy

Created on: April 15, 2008

I wish I could travel back in time and relive the '60's. Not because it would make me young again (and of course THAT would be nice), but more so because I feel like I just wasn't paying attention. Maybe that's the way it is when you're young. Everything is fresh, so it's easy to be immersed in each new moment. Back then, I was a "good girl" and what I mean by that is that I didn't question any kind of authority or deviate from what was socially correct. To be honest,I remained that way until I was an adult, getting a divorce after 18 years of marriage. It never occurred to me that I could or would be anything else BUT that.

Embarking on a new path, I threw caution to the wind and became more open to a wider variety of people and new experiences and began taking a few risks. That's actually when I became a real person, or maybe I just became myself. They say you never skip any stage in life without going back to it. In the 60's I didn't engage in any protests against the war, although I felt the whiplash that was going on around me. I wasn't a "flower child", nor did I smoke pot or go bra less. I was working at 20 and getting married shortly thereafter and raising a family.

When I was growing up, "Father Knows Best" depicted most families at that time and my sister and I came home every day and watched "American Bandstand", listened to Elvis and later the Beatles. Girls were taught to follow certain role models and act in circumspect ways. My mother had a high regard for social manners and a real desire to teach her girls how they "should" behave. As admirable as that is, it is also very limiting. She couldn't help it, it was how she was raised in a small town in South Carolina. It wasn't so much what she learned from her mother, who hardly had the time or interest after having seven children, but by the three older single sisters that lived next door.

These women were the aristocracy of the town my mother grew up in and they were educated women in an era that had few educated women in a town that small. Their father owned quite a large farm that grew tobacco. The sisters were well schooled in the finer things in life and were all intelligent, musical and artistic. I wonder now what they would have become had they been my age during the '60's.

Their influence made my mother the person she is and when she reflects on those memories, also realizes how much love and attention she received from them. That love and attention has continued to impact her life and those

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>