Mary Tyler Mom: My mother was a style icon — but our tastes couldn't have been more different

Last winter, when I was stuck in bed for 10 days with the flu, the only thing that stood between me and insanity was reruns of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show"; I watched miles and miles of them. The classic sitcom is objectively worth watching, but I binged for another reason. For much of my childhood, my mother didn’t just look like Mary Richards, especially when they both had chin-length golden bobs; my mother was Mary Richards, a Waspy, single career woman when there weren’t a whole lot of them.

This made me something of a rarity growing up in the Boston suburbs in the 1970s: a kid with a working mom — not to mention a divorced one. A few years after my parents split up, my mother went to graduate school, to which she wore an orange ruana. After she got her degree and a job, that was pretty much it for her hippie look. She was sufficiently invested in appearing put-together to keep a makeup mirror on our bathroom counter with a sliding bar that changed the mirror’s illumination level from “Day” to “Office” to “Home” to “Evening.” Mesmerized, I would futz with the mirror when I was in the bathroom. I would also inspect the windowsill, where she kept her hot rollers and what I would eventually figure out was her diaphragm.

I was smug about having a mother who cared about looking chic. (One of my classmates’ moms had a hairdo that confused me; I would later learn it was called a beehive.) My mom liked shopping for clothes at Dimensions — a T.J. Maxx antecedent, I can see now, and the place where she bought me my wicked cool dolphin shorts. Her work wardrobe was largely slacks — not pants: slacks — and sweater vests (she and I were always cold) over collared shirts, typically worn with delicate gold-chain necklaces. Then again, there’s a photo of her wearing a devastating pink knit minidress while standing by her office building in Boston, so she may have had the audacity to wear that to work as well.

My mother’s philosophy was to dress tastefully — inevitably, she had a DVF wrap dress — and to wear nothing showy or signifying indulgence, although she made an exception for a pair of Frye boots (whatever those are, was my thinking at the time). I registered that the boots purchase was a Big Deal — she dragged me all the way to Harvard Square to buy them — and it was an Equally Big Deal when she got her ears pierced in her 30s, having waited that long because she was of the generation of Wasps who had to be convinced that pierced ears didn’t make women look cheap.

When she took me to Manhattan to visit her likewise divorced friend Marybeth, my mom told me she would buy me exactly one thing from Saks Fifth Avenue. I knew she didn’t make much money and that I was lucky to get anything at all, so I chose carefully and unimaginatively. When I held up a simple white elastic belt with a clasp, there was no moue of disapproval from my mom, as there would be a few years later, when I was in high school and discovered punk rock, which vaporized any influence she may have had on my style. One time when I came to the dinner table wearing thick black liquid eyeliner, I saw tears of what I took to be disappointment in her eyes. I knew better than to expect her to cheer when I started dyeing my hair Wilma Flintstone red while living in a Greenwich Village dorm in the 1980s, much less admire the dreadlocks I began cultivating while I was out of her sight.

I had just graduated from college when my mom started dating this spectacular guy who would soon become my stepfather. While her politics were always liberal, her taste as a married person seemed to get more conservative — or maybe the world was changing on her. After she met one of my graduate school teachers, she informed me that she was not a fan of the woman’s severely asymmetrical hairstyle. Half a dozen years later, when I wanted to introduce my mom to the musician I was dating, she had a question for me: Did he wear any jewelry? Thinking she meant medallions or Liberace rings, I told her he did not. Later I realized she was trying to make sure he didn’t have any piercings.

I was married to the musician (still am) when she gave me an old flannel nightgown of hers: white and lumpy-looking, with faded flowers. I was mildly piqued, as I detected politics in that gift: since she knew full well that I didn’t like clothes with flowers, she was imposing her tastes on me — I mean, wasn’t she? I declined the gift, saying something along the lines of, “That thing won’t make me very attractive to my husband.” It was among my worst daughterly moments. Whereas I had a husband, she no longer did because my stepfather had died of cancer a few years earlier.

And then in 2010 cancer got her too. When I was going through her clothes after she died so I could clear out her apartment, I didn’t keep a thing — she had four inches on me, so even if I somehow found something I liked, it wasn’t going to fit — but now I’m worried that I passed over that pink minidress. And I wish I hadn’t spurned her offer of that flannel nightie. I never would have worn it, but she didn’t need to know that. And I don’t see any politics now. I see only my mother’s effort to keep me — like her, always trying to warm up — from being cold.