Bye-bye, June Cleaver

When I heard that Barbara Billingsley had died over the weekend, I paused to indulge in a little nostalgia. And yes, there was some sadness.

If you're on the sunny side of 50, you probably don't know that Billingsley was the perfectly coiffed, aproned TV mom on Leave It to Beaver, a domestic goddess in pearls and pumps who solved every household/Beav and Wally mothering issue in one 30-minute episode.

And now, at the risk of embarrassing myself, I'll say that I liked June Cleaver.

I liked the simplicity of her life, and for some very predictable reasons, I felt a kind of melancholy for all that she represented to a generation of us.

The women in my world who came of age in the 1950s were taught a basic rule of life: marriage/family was the finish line.

I got the husband when I was 21. And June, of course, had her Ward.

When the show began in 1957, I was a freshman in college. By the time it ended, in 1963, I had started my sprint to the finish line - I was married and had a baby. Two more were to come.

My cues about life came from my own mother, a sweet little lady who devoutly believed that young women should always wear slips under their skirts, marry men who had "a future," although that term was never specifically defined, and then settle down to the real business of life: having a family.

So one day I was studying the water imagery in Coleridge and reading Chaucer, and the next - or so it seemed - I was diapering and feeding babies, running a household, and wondering whether something was wrong with me because I sometimes felt lost and isolated and a little bit misplaced.

But then there was June Cleaver, along with Donna Reed, and the Harriet of Ozzie and Harriet, delighting in the presumably endless pleasures of raising kids and an occasional gerbil, planting carrot roots in paper cups, dealing with harmless, amusing kid pranks, and, of course, pleasing husband/daddy.

Yes - very different times. Almost unimaginable times, as my own daughters, who came of age with a totally different script, would remind me.

Forget Doris Day/Rock Hudson romps. Bye-bye, Ozzie and Harriet.

My daughters had Our Bodies, Ourselves, the sexual revolution, and the unshakable notion that they were entitled to a whole lot more than the generations of women before them.

They didn't need to bulldoze their way beyond firmly closed doors. Their horizons were as vast and wide as mine were limited back in the days when late 1950s caution and conformity reigned.

Mary Tyler Moore was out there on her own. Irreverent Roseanne was sweeping away any notions of sweet, aproned mother hens. Designing Women and Dynasty sent out messages vastly different from June Cleaver's squeaky-clean, apple-pie-and-pearls persona.

But then my contemporaries woke up one day to find that we'd missed the party - or were getting to it very, very late.

Sure, staying home with our kids brought sweet rewards . . . sometimes. I wasn't smiling and glossy and perfect, but I have lovely memories of actual milk-and-cookie times with three little girls who spilled their secrets and their dreams at the kitchen table.

I also have remembrances of wondering "Is That All There Is?", thanks to Peggy Lee, who dared to ask that in song.

When I finally found my voice as a writer, I discovered that there actually was enough room for love and work in my life.

Sure, I missed some of the party. So did the many, many of us who came of age with a vague longing for more.

Today, we are the mothers and grandmothers, looking at younger women with a lot of amazement, a little bit of envy, and yes, a tad of sympathy.

There's a frenetic quality to their lives. My daughters have it. The multitasking, always being plugged in, making endless connections that actually disconnect - very un-June Cleaver-like.

You'd have to look long and hard these days for the Junes out there, bustling around their kitchens teaching life lessons in their nylon stockings and high heels, smiling all the while.

June gave us something that may look foolish and hopelessly outdated in 2010. But a little bit of June Cleaver might not be so awful in the lives of today's moms. Her days, after all, seemed happy and sweet and simple.

Do yours?