A Talented Mother

Aurelia Schober's classmates read, sort of sub rosa, the pop-psychology book The Nervous Housewife (1920) by neurologist/psychiatrist Abraham Myerson. In it he told an open secret:

One of the commonest and saddest transformations is the change of the gay, laughing girl, radiant with love and all aglow with the thought of union with her man, into the housewife of a decade -- complaining, fatigued, and disillusioned.

No one had ever put it quite that way before. I thought of Aurelia, her college class's valedictorian, yearbook editor, German-language actress, voted by her peers "Most Studious," with a dashing Austrian boyfriend who was one of the century's greatest engineers, and in her sophomore year her headshot was published in The Boston Transcript:

Aurelia, 19, in The Boston Transcript, 12 January 1926.

Much of Aurelia's creativity and spunk got shell-shocked and died during an almost-nine-year marriage to human land mine Otto Plath, a behavioral scientist, at home a thrower of tantrums and a monocrat. The lasting effect on Aurelia was perpetual anxiety, which is creative imagination backed up and soured. I believe that from her marriage and husband's needless death Aurelia had PTSD: The day after his death she signed a contract drawn up by her eight-year-old daughter never to marry again.

 

Then Aurelia had to support her children on a single woman's salary. Good thing she had prepared herself with a master's degree and let her parents live in so they could do childcare. She was then anxious to support her children's education and growth in every possible way.

Aurelia Plath seems to have used a surviving part of her dramatic talent and resonant voice to read aloud to family and friends Sylvia's and Warren's letters from college. Her children knew their letters were shared, and wrote accordingly.

 

Aurelia also used part of her talent for her 29-year university teaching career: Teaching can feel like performance, and the show must go on whether your stomach aches or your daughter killed herself. In retirement she edited and published a bestselling book of her talented daughter's letters and recited her talented daughter's poetry on video.

Abraham Myerson (1881-1948), who thought socio-cultural pressures triggered addictions and mental illness, published other books for laymen such as The Foundation of Personality, and one of his dozens of papers appeared in The American Journal of Insanity, later renamed and still known as The American Journal of Psychiatry.