Chapter Twenty-One
Division of labor in a family in the early sixties held that it was the man’s responsibility to earn enough income to support his family while his wife handled household chores and child care—then considered “woman’s work.” Gerry was a loving husband and father who never failed to support his family, but he wasn’t much help with chores or children. He might have been more helpful had I asked, but I didn’t know enough to ask. I actually enjoyed two of my jobs (music and child care), and I really didn’t mind folding laundry, ironing, or washing dishes, especially when I could time those tasks to coincide with reruns of I Love Lucy. Sometimes I did all three jobs simultaneously. When I held Louise, vacuumed, and commented on a lyric Gerry was working on from the comfort of his armchair, it never occurred to me that I had a right to expect my husband to participate equally in child care and housework. This would have been true even if I hadn’t been earning half of our income.
I found child care at once challenging and joyous. It was challenging to be responsible for a little being with needs to be met ahead of mine, and utterly delightful to have this bright, beautiful, healthy little girl in my life. I loved learning the things I needed to know as a new mother and rediscovering things Louise learned as if I were learning them for the first time. This was equally true with our second daughter, Sherry Marlene Goffin, who arrived on March 3, 1962. But meeting the needs of two little beings made my role as a mother somewhat more complicated. I soon found myself saying things that all parents swear as children that they’ll never say to their children. “Share your toys!” and “Stop that right now!” became part of my daily vocabulary along with “No bickering!” and “Because I said so!”
Propelled by daughter momentum, we acquired so much “stuff” that we were bursting out of our apartment. Gerry’s wish to raise our girls in Manhattan was overridden by practicality. We found a house in a newly platted subdivision in West Orange, New Jersey, took out a mortgage, and moved to the suburbs.
That lighter workload I had envisioned for myself after Gerry quit his day job never materialized. I still had to drive to the city to play songs for artists and producers and sing and play on demos. The commute from New Jersey took at least an hour each way. And while it was possible to bring one child and her gear to the city, it was exponentially more difficult to bring two children and twice the gear.
In simpler times, when extended families lived near each other, older women helped younger women, stay-at-home sisters cared for nieces and nephews, and neighbors looked after each other’s children. In the more mobile early sixties, working mothers had to hire outside help. While we were still living in Brooklyn, several babysitters had come and gone—including one who moved on to a different career. In New Jersey, my need to be in the city with Gerry several times a week made it essential that I find someone reliable to care for my girls. My prayers were answered when we found Willa Mae Phillips. With no biological children of her own, Willa Mae devoted her maternal energy to my children and remained a beloved member of our family from the time she came to work for us in New Jersey until her death in the mid-seventies. The memory of Willa Mae endures every time we repeat one of her down-home sayings. For example, after the entire family had torn the house apart for twenty minutes searching for car keys, a wristwatch, or a missing schoolbook, Willa Mae, having located the item in an obvious place, would hold it up triumphantly, saying, “If it’d been a snake, it would-a bit you.”
There was no shortage of playmates on our suburban street. Willa Mae didn’t drive—indeed, she emphatically refused to learn—but she could walk the girls to play dates. As Gerry and I crafted songs in our music room, Louise learned to write “L-U-L-U” on a chalkboard while Sherry and her playmates, under Willa Mae’s watchful eye, delighted in the antics of Judy Garland and her funny-looking friends in The Wizard of Oz on the big television in the family room.
From earliest childhood Sherry saw the world with the eyes of truth and never hesitated to speak that truth. She could size up a situation, see through complicated explanations, double-talk, and misrepresentation (all euphemisms for the feces of a male bovine), and sum up in one sentence what others might be thinking but didn’t dare say. My appreciation for this admirable quality would be sorely tested when Sherry became a teenager and said things I didn’t want to hear.
“Mom, that haircut’s been out of style for two years!”
Or, “Are you going to wear that??”
Writing songs for our daughters was something Gerry and I could do together to show them and the rest of the world how grateful we were for their presence in our lives. It was Sherry’s candor that inspired Gerry to write a paean called “Child of Mine,” on which we collaborated when Sherry was six.
I know you will be honest if you can’t always be kind
Oh yes, sweet darlin’
So glad you are a child of mine
Later I would write the melody to a song called “Daughter of Light” for which Gerry wrote these words about Louise:
Daughter of light, you’re a welcome sight
To a weary soul
Seeing you just lifts me out of the cold
Fast-forward to 1974, when I featured my Goffin daughters’ vocal performances on Really Rosie, an album on which I collaborated with the noted children’s author Maurice Sendak. Maurice is probably best known for his self-illustrated books Where The Wild Things Are and In The Night Kitchen. His Nutshell Library is a boxed set of four tiny books with poems that I set to music and recorded with Lou Adler. Really Rosie holds a special appeal for me first because I had the rare privilege of collaborating with Maurice, second because I acted the roles of Rosie and the narrator in a companion TV special, and third because that album is a permanent record of Sherry and Louise at twelve and fourteen.
I never imagined that in the eighties Louise would move to London and bring her beautiful spirit, musical talent, and successful career to fans on both sides of the Atlantic, or that Sherry would marry a New York–based studio musician and move to a suburban neighborhood where, after several years of driving her children to various activities and finding insufferable the music then designed to appeal to young children, she would create a collection of CDs that appealed to both children and parents. Sherry would make SugarBeats.com such a successful enterprise online that I would be inspired to start my own label, Rockingale Records.
However, before Sugar Beats or Rockingale, there was Dimension Records, started by Al and Donnie. Which brings me to the babysitter who changed careers.