Writing about my mother has proved difficult.
I should say up front that her impact on me and on our whole family was enormous and lasting, and that we loved her greatly.
For her part, no one would ever love us more.
But the former Mary Louise Schuyler, daughter of John and Margaret, was a complicated person in life and no less challenging in death.
We will be parsing out her many gifts and puzzles for the rest of our lives.
Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, and lately of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Weezie was not, in fact, the Southern Belle that many imagined her—and she sometimes pretended—to be; but was instead a woman of considerable global experience, having lived in Germany, Alaska, Panama and many places in between.
Weezie held broad and often contradictory opinions. She could be both stubborn and funny in the same breath. She was an indomitable and sometimes frustrating spirit, but always a blessing.
Mom was a striking lady to behold: elegant even in a t-shirt and sweatpants, and stunning when dressed for an evening out. She was a woman of porcelain complexion and patrician ancestry. Like her mother, she was a Daughter of the American Revolution and a Colonial Dame.
Her great, great uncle—no kidding—was Alexander Hamilton.
Like so many of history’s singular personalities, Mom was never meant to be comfortable in her own era.
Born in the first years of the Second World War, she would be too old, by the 1960s, to run off to San Francisco and lead a teenage riot.
Likewise, she was too late to be a righteous suffragist, embarrassing men of stature on the street.
But Weezie was a quiet radical all her life.
A self-described “tomboy,” and “tall for a girl,” she reveled in memories of besting the neighborhood kids at climbing trees, swimming creeks, and shooting hoops.
In fact, beating the boys at their own games was something she never quite stopped doing.
Raised in a smoke-filled, Mad Men world, Mom was the first woman to earn a Master’s degree from The Citadel, one of America’s oldest and still male-dominated military academies.
She corrected the grammar of software engineers as their lone female technical editor.
She steered a start-up charter school through a miasma of toxic masculinity.
She stood up to Dad, an Army brigade commander and decorated combat veteran, more times than anyone can remember—except maybe Dad.
And she raised two rambunctious boys to be polite, respectful men, a task at which, by the end of her life, she was nearly successful.
Weezie was of course constrained in many ways by traditional gender roles and societal rules, but she broke as many of them as she could.
She was a feminist in the sense that she would never let herself (born female just by chance) be denied a thing she felt deserved.
In her life as an “Army wife,” she would become the consummate hostess and homemaker amid a strict hierarchy of military matrons. She dressed my brother and me in little suits to serve hors d’oeuvres.
But whenever it snowed, she let us skip school and wander like wild bears in the woods. She raised baby screech owls in the bathtub. She toured Europe in a VW camper, long before TikTok would make that trendy.
Weezie Mullenix was the original influencer, and we are all still trying to keep up with her.
March is Women’s History Month. Mom would have been both proud to be counted among history’s remarkable women, and also deeply resentful of the faint praise intended by a one-month recognition.
What I believe my mother’s life to have represented is the notion that all people, whatever their gender or ancestry, are better than our estimations of them; larger than our categories for them; and greater, even, than their expectations of themselves.
On behalf of my brother and my father, and everyone Weezie knew for her more-than 82 years: Thank you, Mom, for your high expectations.
—Matt Mullenix
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