By Eilene Lyon
Dad, who took this photo of Mom, did two tours in Vietnam during the 1960s. He was an officer and worked in the Quartermaster Corps. His job over there during the second tour (1969) was to run the PX (post exchange – the store for service members).
Because Uncle Sam considered Vietnam to be hardship duty (even if Dad was having a romperooing-good time), they provided a rest-and-relaxation (R & R) vacation in Hawaii. Mom got to go over there and join him.
Mom really looks like she’s enjoying the visit with these scarlet macaws (not native to Hawaii, by the way). I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that she’s 33 in this photo.
Myricopia 
Lovely photo that is truly a snapshot out of time. I agree that it’s odd to see a parent in a photo when that parent was younger than you are now. It bends the brain.
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Her childhood shots don’t have that effect. However, to me this is pretty much how she looked through her 40s. And I think of how I looked at that age. But I wasn’t married with three kids.
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I think people back then “grew old” earlier somehow; my mom used to say she felt that she did not change much in between her 30s and her 60s.
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I think it especially happened with women who came of age in the 50s.
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I should have added …at least in the U. S.
I imagine it was a little different in Mexico. Did women there achieve the sort of liberties that women in the U. S. had in the 20s 30s and 40s? I think the 50s here was a real backlash that pushed women back into traditional homemaker roles. My mother was not cut out for that, but there were no mentors to help her out of that mold.
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In terms of work outside the house it was pretty much “sure, work until you get married ” until the 70s I think, but Mexican matrons have always had power. During La Revolución (Mexico’s civil war in the 1910s) there were several “generalas”.
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Sounds quite a bit different!
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Your mom looks like quite the adventurous spirit.
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She was indeed! Into her 60s, she traveled around the country by herself, camping in her mini-van. And she went into the Grand Canyon on a burro.
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What a gal!
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Oh that’s neat!
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I don’t think I’ve ever been that close to a macaw!
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A parrot bit me once haha.
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I’ll bet that hurt!
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You got that right!
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Awesome photo! 🙂
I used to breed macaws years ago when i was younger. We still have a Scarlet Macaw, named “Scarlet,” and she is the most loving parrot you could ever meet!
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That’s cool! I’ve seen them in the wild in Costa Rica and Ecuador, but never had a close encounter.
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I feel the same looking at pictures of my mother. Her style has hardly changed from her 30s to her 90s! When I see young mothers and their children today they are usually wearing variants of the same types of clothes. When I was a child I very definitely had little girl clothes and my mother had matronly clothes. I’m not sure when generational styles began to merge, maybe just after my childhood.
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I think you’ve nailed it. My mother dressed like an old lady, even when she was young.
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If she’d been 10 years younger that might well have changed.
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I always found photos of my parents in their youth a bit disorienting. Were they ever young?
That’s awfully good color for an older photo!
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I think that’s the strong point of slides vs. print photos. They don’t seem to fade at all.
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“a romperooing-good time”……an intriguing choice of words, indeed.
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Lovely photo of your mom. She looks very happy and is enjoying the birds. 🙂
I understand, too, about seeing photos of your mother (or father, for that matter) when they were younger than you are now. I’ve loads of my mum from before I was born, and in the years when I was a teen and so on, but it was when I first coloured an old monochrome of her when she was about 15 or 16 that I gasped, “what the…?” and of course that really brings it home that they were individuals in their own right, with their own – often very different – lives. For me, it helps me keep things in perspective.
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It goes double for grandmothers!
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