Rebel Mother Carol and Carl MY MOTHER HAD always been the one to pick me up from nursery school, but one late June afternoon in 1969, a couple of weeks before my fourth birthday, my father arrived first and pushed me into the backseat of his gray Chevy Malibu. I could tell that something was not right by how tightly he gripped my hand and hurried me out of the school building to his car. Standing on my toes on the seat to look out the back window, I saw my mother''s beige VW station wagon arrive behind us just as we started to pull away from the curb. I waved at her. "Daddy, Daddy, Mommy''s coming!" "No, Mommy''s leaving," my father grumbled, turning his head back briefly. "Now please, sit down." My father slammed the accelerator and the car jerked forward, tipping me off balance. My mother, seeing that my father had already taken me, tailed us for as long as she could.

She projected an air of calm, waving cheerfully at me from over the steering wheel, but she must have been anything but. Eventually, my father accelerated so fast that she became smaller and smaller, then disappeared into the distance. "Mommy''s gone," I cried out, tears welling in my eyes. "Yes, that''s right, Peter, Mommy is gone. But don''t worry, I''ll take care of you." That afternoon was my first memory. It marked the beginning of my parents'' war over me. Earlier that day, while no one was home, my mother had quickly packed as much as she could into her car, mostly clothes and books but also a few of her favorite Pakistani pictures hanging in the living room, and moved out of the house for good.

When my father got home from work and saw the empty closet, the first thing he''d done was rush to my preschool. Over the next six years, I would be kidnapped from school two more times--both times by my mother, who would carry me first across the country and then across continents. My father won that opening battle, but he would lose the war. During her devoutly conservative childhood, my mother would have seemed like the last person to kidnap her own child. She was born in 1933 in North Newton, a tightly knit Mennonite community of a few thousand inhabitants in central Kansas, where Mennonite wheat farmers from Ukraine had originally settled in the 1870s. When my mother was a child, most people didn''t venture out of North Newton much; if they did, they were usually visiting other Mennonite communities in rural Middle America. As a pacifist Christian sect closely related to the Amish--though unlike the Amish they don''t reject the technologies of modern life--Mennonites mostly intermarried, spent Sundays at church, and kept to themselves. My mother''s parents, Willis Rich and Hulda Penner, had met while waiting in line their freshman year to enroll in classes at Bethel, the local college where most college-bound Mennonites in the area went to school and where Willis would eventually become director of public relations.

Although they were devoutly religious--going to church, praying before meals, singing church hymns, dressing conservatively--they were also less strict than other Mennonite families in North Newton. As the PR man for the college, Willis made sure to bring interesting speakers from all over the world to campus, and Hulda would entertain them at their house a few blocks away. My mother and her three siblings served the guests at the table, which gave her an opportunity to pepper them with questions. Perhaps it was partly due to such outside influences that, by the time my mother was a teenager, she had become enough of a skeptic to declare herself an agnostic, which I imagine must have rattled the rest of the community. Her parents, though, took it in stride. Mennonites did not dance ("that led to sex") and did not play cards ("that led to gambling"), but Willis and Hulda let their children do both--as long as it was out of sight, behind closed doors. So when the doorbell rang while the kids were playing cards, they quickly hid them under the table; and they could playfully dance around the house, but any kind of dancing in public, including at the high school dances organized for the non-Mennonites from the other side of town, was not allowed. The Rich family differed from the rest of the community in other ways, too.

They were Democrats in a Republican town. Willis''s sister, Selma, whom my mother looked up to as a role model, was an early civil rights advocate and campaigned to integrate the local swimming pool and movie theater. Also unusual was that Willis had gone to Columbia University for a graduate degree in education, and his first job was as a teacher in the non-Mennonite town of Bentley, Kansas. Although there were plenty of Bibles scattered about the house, Willis spent more time reading Norman Vincent Peale''s The Power of Positive Thinking--and enthusiastically quoting from it out loud to his kids--than he did Scripture. Willis was always upbeat and optimistic, which remained true even after he became afflicted with multiple sclerosis and was confined to a wheelchair. During Christmas vacation, 1947, just a little more than a month after my mother turned fourteen, she and a friend had gone out sledding--or tried to, anyway, in the flat Kansas fields. She''d been allowed to exchange her plain skirt for a pair of pants for the sledding, and the curls of her fine, shoulder-length hair poked out of her wool winter cap. It was her smile and her beautiful green eyes that captivated my father, the handsome twenty-year-old Bethel College student who stopped by the side of the road that afternoon and offered to pull her sled behind his shiny black 1931 Ford Model A coupe.

My mother asked my father if he played a sport and he replied, with a grin, "I play the radio." He was not the athletic type, but he did have a car, and it did have a radio. My father, Carl Roland Andreas, started taking my mother, Carol Ruth Rich, out once a week, holding her hand at the drive-in or at the high school and college basketball games. Except for the nearly seven-year age gap, my father seemed like a perfect suitor--polite, responsible, hardworking, and from a good Mennonite family. His grandfather had even been a Mennonite minister married to the church organist. Beyond her pretty face, my father was drawn to my mother''s complex combination of innocence and maturity. My mother, in turn, was flattered by the attention of an older man, especially one who had resisted his mother''s pressure to become a minister. And he seemed downright worldly compared to the other Newton boys; he had traveled to Cuba with his college roommate during a winter break, worked on the railroad in Colorado for a year after high school, and spent the last year of World War II as a conscientious objector in a Civilian Public Service camp in Mississippi, building latrines in poor rural communities.

My mother admired those who defied the draft and had tasted life outside of Kansas. Her hero growing up was her cousin Dwight (Aunt Selma''s son), who spent six months in county jail for refusing to register for the draft and then lived in India for four years before returning to teach at Bethel. Two years after they met, my mother and father got engaged and kissed for the first time. A year after that they were married. My mother was seventeen; my father, twenty-four. Mennonite girls in North Newton often married young, but usually not that young, and usually not to someone that much older. Yet, even as my father''s college buddies teased him for robbing the cradle, most everyone seemed pleased with the match--except for the bride. My mother was already starting to have ideological doubts about traditional marriage as a concept itself.

As my mother would later tell it, as she and my father arrived at their late-afternoon marriage ceremony on Bethel''s Goerz House lawn, she turned suddenly and blurted: "You know what? It just occurred to me that I really don''t know if I believe in monogamy." A bold thing to say in 1950s America, this was downright scandalous in a conservative religious community in central Kansas. "Tootsie, what difference does it make?" my startled father replied, trying to stay calm. "Look over there. There must be five hundred people waiting for us. They all believe in monogamy. They can''t all be wrong. And besides, you want to live with me, don''t you? How else can we swing that?" They went through with the ceremony and then moved into an upstairs apartment near campus on South College Avenue.

While my father waited for my mother to get through school, he took a job as a bill collector and bookkeeper for the local Mennonite Deaconess Hospital. Whatever my mother''s hesitations, the truth was my father was her ride out of North Newton. Originally from Beatrice, Nebraska, a few hours'' drive away, he had no plans to stay in town after college. He and my mother both wanted to go to graduate school, which meant not only leaving North Newton but probably Kansas as well. Many others from my mother''s generation, including her siblings, would also end up moving away, but she was more eager to grow up and get out to see the world than most. Always disciplined and studious, she skipped a grade at Newton High and rushed through Bethel as fast as she could. "I was only nineteen when I finished college," my mother always reminded me. "I did it so I could be with your father.

" Carol and Carl Andreas, May 1951 As soon as she had her diploma, she and my father moved to Minneapolis-Saint Paul to attend the University of Mi.