As jobs go, motherhood can seem at odds with itself; too relentless to be easy but too satisfying to quit.
It’s also endless. The core Mom skills – listening, caring, advising; maybe a little nagging, maybe shutting up – never go away. They’re still needed long after a kid is out of diapers, done with school, out of the house, employed, married, unmarried, unemployed, re-employed, remarried, rehabilitated, whatever. Mom skills are even needed after the kid has their own kids, or their own grandkids.
Once a mother, always a mother.
And even if time and age eventually force a realignment, turning the kid into a caretaker and the mother into a caretakee, the shift is merely physical. The bedrock of the relationship – Mom’s gloriously outlandish love for her children – still flows in the same direction.
All of which explains why this Mother’s Day, we’re talking with people who understand the complex, contradictory job better than anybody: mothers who’ve hit 100.
It’s not as weird as it sounds. At this moment, there are more living centenarians who are mothers than at any time in human history. And the pool is growing fast. If current demographic projections pan out, there’s a decent chance that you, too, could someday be a mother (or a father) and 100 years old or older. By grilling the oldest of all moms for some insight about a job they’ve done for decades, we’re simply tapping an expanding resource.
So, pay attention. Here’s what a few 100-something mothers have to say about their favorite lifetime appointment.
‘Never changes’
Recent news that one of her sons had fallen off his bike sent Mitsuye Yamada into a bit of a panic.
“What happened?” she asked, via a Zoom call, in a voice that implied the next questions might be about driver’s license and proof of insurance.
When her son and his wife described the fall, and held up a dented bike helmet to illustrate how he’d actually gotten lucky, Mitsuye’s panic grew. (Weeks later, she shook her head at the memory of the slightly misshapen plastic. “That looked pretty bad.”)
Then, after she learned that doctors wanted to drill a hole in her son’s head to resolve a small brain bleed – and that he would be hospitalized for a few days to see if his brain would expand in a way that might change or end his life – Mitsuye’s panic flipped into something more primal; more mom-like.
She didn’t cry as she took it all in, but she also couldn’t say a word.
The fact that the son in question is 67 and Mitsuye is 102 did exactly nothing to diminish her concern.
Motherhood, she suggested later, might be more powerful than time.
“It never changes. That feeling of being a mom doesn’t ever go away.”
Which is not to say there haven’t been tweaks.
When Mitsuye and her late husband Yosh raised their four children, from the early 1950s through the late 1970s, mostly in Sierra Madre and Irvine, the era of free-range childhood was in full bloom. Kids could play all day and much of the night, anywhere, without a lot of – or any – adult supervision.
At the Yamada house, TV access was regulated and studying was emphasized, but free play was routine. Often, the oldest of the four kids, a girl, was supposed to keep an eye on two younger brothers. Later, when the oldest hit her mid-teens and eventually went off to college, the two boys were nudged into leadership roles of their own and nominally put in charge of the youngest kid, a sister.
Mitsuye, working full-time as a professor of English and creative writing at Cypress College, didn’t shirk her duties as much as delegate them, taking something of a chief executive’s approach to parenting.
Years later, she had a front-row seat for a very different version of child-rearing.
After her children grew into adults, she shared the Irvine house with her youngest daughter and one of her favorite sons-in-law (full disclosure, he’s one of this article’s authors) while they raised two children, now ages 31 and 26. It was the mid-1990s through about 2018, a time when free-range childhood had been supplanted by something closer to police-state parenting.
For kids of the era, adults were Orwellian and everywhere. The tone was set when toddlers recreated under the banner of adult-supervised “play dates,” and, after that, adult eyeballs were trained on nearly every child and teen activity. T-ball games and T-ball practices; dance recitals and dance classes; soccer matches and soccer tournaments and four nights a week of soccer practices; debates, mock trials, grad nights – no moment of youth went unwitnessed by at least one parent. (It’s no wonder that 21st-century kids have leaned so hard into online living, where parents can be avoided or even briefly, blissfully, forgotten.)
For Mitsuye, all that parenting energy was bewildering and, at times, amusing.
“What would she have to say?” Mitsuye once asked after hearing a parent-to-parent debate about whether a 10-year-old should carry a walkie-talkie while playing with other kids in a park roughly 150 yards from the front door.
Recently, when asked if one style of parenting was better than the other, the woman who spent part of her teens incarcerated in a camp for Japanese Americans suggested the style question missed something more important.
“The kids didn’t know any different, so it didn’t matter to them,” she said.
“And… parents always feel the same about their kids, I think,” she added.
“They love them. That’s what matters.”
Rosie the mother
Jennifer McMullen, 101, is mother to six sons, three of whom reached adulthood and three who were lost within days of their births, between 1946 to 1949.
By then, McMullen had already made history. She’d worked as a Rosie the Riveter, building top-secret airplanes during World War II at the Lockheed Aircraft plant in Burbank. At war’s end, she met and married Mel McMullen, a decorated Army veteran, and in 1950 the couple settled in Whittier.
That’s where they raised their boys, Tim, Tucker and Kevin. She worked outside of the house, too, first at her son’s schools and later as an analyst for the School of Business and Public Administration at Cal State San Bernardino.
The McMullens will celebrate their 80th wedding anniversary next month in New Orleans. At that time, Jennifer also be honored with an American Spirit Award from the National World War II Museum.
For all of those accomplishments and 101 years of wisdom, she shies away from giving anybody tips on how to raise kids.
“Oh dear, I’m not sure I’m good at giving advice as a mother,” she said, pressing a finger to her lips in thought.
“But perhaps I was very fortunate to have very good parents.”
She still remembers her highway worker and farmer father and homemaker mother, and her siblings, and their Ohio home.
She’s old enough that she went to school by horse and buggy. She’s also old enough that she worked, as a kid, in a time when child labor wasn’t at all unusual. She and her siblings would help their mother sell small fruit pies for a nickel each, knocking on doors to sell butter, eggs and berries.
Life was sometimes hard, and money was always precious.
“But we never went hungry,” Jennifer remembers. “And we loved and looked after one another.”
It was this “can-do” attitude, she said, that fueled her early days as a mom in the 1950s. The family lived in a home on Rosehedge Drive in Whittier, where her mother-in-law and Aunt Pearl were nearby to help.
She is quick to point out that if their family life was ideal, it wasn’t because she wielded any secret parenting superpower.
“I remember I tried breastfeeding and I couldn’t do it. So we had formula all the way,” she said.
“And we never had a crazy house. I don’t think I ever recalled that it was hard. My boys were well-behaved kids. They made it easy on me.
“And they had a good father, so that helped.”
She stayed home until her sons were older, and she and her husband threw themselves into family life.
It is, they posit, still possible to do what they did back then – join and then lead the PTA, be a scout leader and den mother, spend summers on road trips, and teach children by example to do the right things and to help others.
Paying attention to your children still yields results. Joining local groups such as the Rotary, League of Women Voters, the Woman’s Club and symphony guilds shows them how to build community.
Another still-useful Mom trick: Instill a little guilt, with a touch of fear of Dad.
“There was a lot of, ‘Oh, I hope I don’t have to tell your dad about this!’ And that worked,” she said.
She still treasures the Mother’s Day gifts her three sons have given her through the years, especially the ones from Tucker, who passed away in 2020.
She doesn’t fret that her four grandchildren have yet to give her and Mel great-grandchildren. She has no control over any of that, and that’s OK.
Her own parents taught her to treat the hard stuff of life as no big deal, and to celebrate all that’s good like it was.
“I’ve been pretty fortunate, finding a good man, being happy and having a good family,” she said.
Her eldest son, Tim, said all the good fortune landed on him and his brothers, having a mother like theirs.
“I don’t think there’s a single superlative enough for my mom.”
Resilience
Hazel Spracklin, born 100 years ago in Linton, North Dakota, recalls a simple childhood. She lived on a farm, walked to school, sang with her family and found things to do to survive the cold winters.
All were skills that she would impress upon her future, six-kid family.
The Wildomar resident’s late husband Robert’s job involved a lot of travel, and the children recall moving frequently, attending as many as five different schools in one year. When they finally settled in sunnier California, in the 1960s, Hazel worked a variety of jobs – in nursing homes, restaurants, construction sites, even a bar – to help support the family.
She also walked with the children to a local church.
“I liked raising a family on the road,” she said. “They kept me busy and out of trouble. And I just tried to keep them under my thumb. Having them all so close together also really helped. …
“I just love them all. And they love me.”
She said faith – she raised her children in a Christian tradition – was a big part of her parenting style.
“The best advice I can give is to teach (your kids) the right way to do things, and bring them up in church, and so they know God and follow his ways.”
She also said eating fresh is her health “secret,” and that when it comes to loving discipline, “no means no.”
As she grew older, Hazel said, her faith in God helped her survive various medical issues, including lymphoma and multiple bouts of lung cancer.
A look at some numbers suggests she also succeeded as a parent. She had six children, who today live all over the country. She also has eight grandchildren, 10 great-grandchildren, and eight great-great-grandchildren.
“When I reached 100,” she said. “Well, it was pretty good.”
Listen up
Maria “Micki” Gutman turned 104 in February.
Long before that, she raised her two children, James and Cheryl, in Pacoima. That’s also where she worked, as a housewife and at Sears, where she says she earned extra money for fun excursions.
She recently offered a few thoughts on parenting:
“The rewards of being a mother are endless!”
“My daughter once asked me, when she was about 12, what is the hardest job I ever had. I told her it was being a parent. And she responded by asking ‘Why, then, did I become a parent?’”
“Because,” she explained, “it was also the most rewarding.”
Micki suggested her ears – and heart – have been keys to connecting with her kids.
“I think the best thing I did as a mother was to always be willing to listen to them when they wanted to talk, no matter what they wanted to talk about. What they have expressed to me, and the relationships they now have with their own children, it still holds true.”
Keeping open communication, without judgment, is a lifetime responsibility, she added.
Her family was, and is, close-knit. And at every family gathering, her relatives have made life, in Micki’s word, “easy.”
“I don’t think being a mom is different now than it was when I was raising children,” she said.
“The outside circumstances change, but children’s needs are the same.”
BFFs
Motherhood isn’t about biology.
Julia Blake, now 100, became a mother in 1970, at age 43, when she got a call telling her a 19-year-old woman was giving up her baby for adoption, and that she and her husband, Ernie Blake, could have him if they wanted. Julia said she and Ernie had been married since 1966, but hadn’t been able to have a child on their own.
That changed when she held Danny for the first time.
“He was so beautiful,” she said, tears welling. “He had this beautiful red hair. And we were so happy.
“It’s a blessing from God that I got him.”
For Julia, having family again felt like a second chance.
She was born in Lima, Peru, and came to the United States at age 25. But by that time, both of her parents had died and a sister had moved away. It was, she says, the “darkest” time of her life.
“I wanted to die when my mother died,” she said. “My mother died when she was 46. She was young, and we didn’t have very much family, so she was the only one in my life. It was terrible. Then my father died, and that was sad. My sister got married, and they went away.
“I was alone.”
That ended with Danny.
Julia, who has lived in Torrance for 60 years, said she has spent virtually every day with her son. And both describe each other as “best friends.”
“She was a very loving mother,” Danny said. “My best friend to this day. We did everything together and we were very close. She taught me so many good morals in life and was my biggest cheerleader. She always taught me that if there’s something that you want out of life, you have to focus on that and you will achieve it.”
Julia said that she is proud of her son and believes the most important thing she ever did as a mother was love him and instill her values in him.
“I gave him all my love, all my good qualities for him to learn,” she said. “To be kind, to be generous, to think of other people. And so he’s like that, he’s very, very kind, very nice.”
These days, their roles have reversed; Danny cares for her.
“There’s nothing left to teach him,” Julia said. “I’m very happy because he’s good to me. He is impacted by the love that I gave him when he was little.”
She gave him something else, too.
When Danny was a teen, Julia decided to track down his birth mother. Having been a mother for many years, she could not stop thinking about the sacrifice that his birth mother had made, and she wanted that woman to know her son.
“I looked for her for three years,” Julia said. “And, finally, I found her. I changed her life completely because she never thought she would find him. She loves me like her own mother, and I love her.”
Now that she has turned 100, Julia feels grateful that her son has his birth mother in his life. She doesn’t want him to feel the loneliness she experienced when her parents died.
“It was such a blessing having him and then finding his mother,” she said. “I always thought, ‘When I die, he’s going to be alone. He has to have someone to love him.’
“Now he does.”