Ditto DeB. 

And even though I am not a Republican, and wouldn’t become one if paid to do it….I admired Patti during the Reagan Administration for standing up to her father’s ‘Evil Empire’ characterizations etc….while many of us worked people-to-people channels of diplomacy like Beyond War.

I also totally respect Ron, Jr. And I met Nancy Reagan briefly at Charlotte Swig’s wedding to George Schultz at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. She was lovely and very sweet.

Patti looks great and I hope her book does well. It’s so true that our mothers are in us. I love mine more than words can say and the thought of her off this planet takes the breath from me. 

I love this quote….

"Our mothers stand behind us at the mirror, trail our footsteps, tap on our shoulders. If you burrow under the surface of any woman you will find what her mother thought about her.” 

I’ve posted this before long ago when we were all taking about our mothers and how we were either like them or not:

Clever men create themselves, but clever women, it seems to me, are created by their mothers. Women can never quite escape their mothers’ cosmic pull, not their lip-biting expectations or their faulty love. We want to please our mothers, emulate them, disgrace them, oblige them, outrage them, and bury ourselves in the mysteries and consolations of their presence. When my mother and I are in the same room we work magic on each other, I grow impossibly cheerful and am guilty of re-imagined naiveté and other indulgent stunts, and my mother’s sad, helpless dithering becomes a song of succour. Within minutes, we’re peddling away, the two of us, a genetic sewing machine that runs on limitless love. It’s my belief that between mothers and daughters there is a kind of blood-hyphen that is, finally, indissoluble.

Thanks to Lesley for giving us a private interview, I never saw the other one. I come away from its reading thinking that Patty’s parents gave her (and the other siblings) only what was left of the full meal of love between Ron and Nancy––little scraps, tiny morsels thrown out here and there. That she, Patty, has managed to come full circle with all this is admirable.

What an insightful offering, thanks Wow.  (I will be sending this link to several "sisters.")

And to phyllis Doyle Pepe, as always I am enriched by what you have shared with us here. 

"Our mothers stand behind us at the mirror, trail our footsteps, tap on our shoulders. If you burrow under the surface of any woman you will find what her mother thought about her.” 

 yep… i cried reading that quote. i can’t wait to buy the book for myself and my daughters.

I’ve made some changes in myself in the last few years in terms of my parenting. i had my oldest daughter the day before i turned 19 years old. i was single and i’d been barely parented myself. so to say i made some mistakes… well hell yes i did. very recently i wrote both my daughters an e mail telling them that if any of the negative things they feel about themselves or tell themselves comes from my voice in their head that i am horribly sorry. Then i told them all the amazing and wonderful things i believe about them. my oldest daughter cried and told me that it helped her a lot in terms of something she was struggling with and my youngest… typical of her wrote back "where the hell did that come from?" lol! but… the youngest understood as well and we talked about it later. and I think i atoned for some things. i don’t want my voice in their head to be the one that causes them any pain.  

There is so much I could write after reading this, but I must hold back. I will say, this is the most well put together interview I have seen on this site, by far.  You drew on the important questions and got honest, important answers.  I, too, had to cut loose at one point from the attempts I made to have relationships with my parents after hitting that closed door of exclusion.  The letting go was hard, after trying so hard to make it work and face defeat.  The irony was that my mother: a strong, independent, talented woman developed Alzheimer’s, and then she and my father needed me.  Luckily I lived blocks away, and I became her caregiver. 

I won’t linger on the heartbreak of Alzheimer’s only to say it is one of the most difficult things you can handle in seeing someone you love disappear with everything that constituted their personality and soul.  Ms. Davis’ father lived through the final levels assigned to Alzheimer’s. My mother had what is called Early Onset Rapid Progression.  I don’t know which is worse.  To be given time to achieve a peace (with the alternate hell of having someone you love not know who you are,) versus losing them by the week in a very short period of time. 

Yes, my mother came to me for protection, and comfort and care, but that person (sadly) wasn’t my real mother.  Rather than focus on that sadness, I will say tell two quick stories. The day before my mother went into a coma, which lasted a week until death (and I never left her side,) I had taken my mother out to buy her new undergarments, because I thought she had lost some weight, and just as a treat.  I brought in a professional at the store to measure Mom, and she was so afraid "someone would see." She got lots of pretty things that day.  Walking out of the store, and knowing my father wanted to take my mother to a social engagement coming up, I saw a suit on the rack that just said "her." Color, cut, everything.  We were both tired, but I grabbed the suit and some blouses in three sizes, and back into the dressing room we went.  What tickles me, on reflection, is that despite the Alzheimer’s, she hadn’t lost her feminine side.  She told me, "Oh I don’t wear those," (meaning the larger sizes,) and she was right.  But it was perfection.  So I bought her that.

When we got home, I laid out everything on my parent’s bed.  Dad was in the den.  I said, "Do you want to do a fashion show?," and she beamed, so Dad was shown the suit and agreed…"perfect."  I fixed her a snack.  I went home. I called her that night to say "I love you," the next morning, early, the coma.  I have to pause to even write this, the pain still there.  I wound up burying her in those clothes.  I had to return to the house from the funeral home and remove the tags.  Yes, a strange miracle that it happened that way, but still. It tore at my heart.

As a final comment on your interview, I agree.  With time you reflect back and always see the lessons learned from your mother: how to prune an azalea, how to care for silver, how to share with others, how to stay open to love.  It goes on and on.  You lose your mother, but she is constantly teaching you.

Thank you for this incredibly well done interview, and "yes," I will definitely be reading the book.

I commend Lesley Stahl on this truly fine interview. I find that I am easily captured by stories about the Reagans. Since the family became known to me, of course I much admired the President, who in my eyes, was one of the most impressive human beings I have known. Mrs. Regan, being the devoted and constant wife to this great man had to become enamored of my feelings. Their children were not as easy to accept because they simply did not properly reflect the qualities of their parents and consequently were always kept distant to my having to decide whether or not to accept them as the children of this great couple. They seemed so undisciplined and tended to assume quite radical behavior patterns which definitely undermined the strength of the family unity. To this day, I remain somewhat unconvinced and still unsure about the younger son and this daughter. Seeing their reaction at President Reagan’s funeral softened my judgment about them. I perceived a very strong love for their parents which I either never noticed before, or possibly they had never publicly displayed before. An article such as Lesley has written here helps greatly to expose what apparently are very deep and serious feelings of love the children actually have for their parents. Such expressions of genuine love and appreciation within a family help greatly in permitting continuance of the admiration and respect we want to always have for this great American President and his family.  I sincerely thank Lesley Stahl for this very fine article.

Thank you Leslie for a lovely interview.

I never liked the Reagans but I especially disliked Nancy Reagan.  I remember how terrible she was to her children.  They were terrible to Ronnie’s adopted son and his family.

I think Patti is to be admired, being able to forgive such an abusive Mother takes a lot of courage.  No matter what happens now, she can never recover the love that was lost while she was growing up.  That has to be so painful. I was glad to hear her say that everything is not all roses now.  If she had I wouldn’t have been able to believe a word she said.  A person can forgive……..but one never FORGETS.

I feel so luck to have been blessed with a loving Father and Mother.

Our house was so filled with love it was over whelming.

My Father adored my Mother and she adored him.

In looking back, I loved that one time she said to me "Dona your Daddy is the most important person in the World to me.  I Love all three of you children with all my Heart, but Daddy came first………and because of that love we had you children. To grow up in a house where both Parents adore each other is so wonderful.  I talk to so many people who never had that experience and I feel sad they missed that kind of love.

I don’t understand obsessive love that can’t even allow their children inside………

The only time I ever had any feelings about Nancy Reagan other than disgust was watching her at Ronnie’s funeral…….her pain was palpable.

I’ve had that kind of pain in losses in my own family and finally felt sorry for her.

Thank you again Leslie………Your interview is more like the kind of threads we had here on Wowowow in the beginning.