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By Bonnie Jean Feldkamp

(Editor’s Note: Bonnie Jean Feldkamp's essay about Erma Bombeck in Fast Famous Women is reposted here by permission. For the Erma writing community, she also offers a behind-the-scenes view of the editing process for books in the Fast Women series, edited by Gina Barreca and published by Woodhall Press. )

My mom died in a car accident when I was 7 years old. All of her secrets and womanly advice disappeared with her.

Erma Bombeck showed up in my life right on time. My daughter had just been born and I was figuring out what my life was going to look like. I desperately wanted to get this motherhood thing right. Erma was there to show me there was no such thing, and then together we laughed. Her columns were syndicated from 1965 to 1996, but I found her books in the library and many more of her columns on the internet.

Her voice shrugged off perfectionism, and her stories of motherhood made me feel as if I had stolen a glimpse into the secret world I’d been longing to understand. Erma showed me what womanhood in the 1970s and 1980s must have been like for my mom.

Erma served on President Carter’s National Advisory Committee on Women. Jimmy Carter was the only Democrat my father voted for, which means my mom likely did too. Erma Bombeck joined Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem and Liz Carpenter for two years to champion the Equal Rights Amendment. The words in the ERA, Erma said, “may be the most misunderstood words since ‘one size fits all.’”

The ERA failed to meet the requisite number of state ratifications by Congress’s deadline of June 30, 1982, so it was not adopted as a constitutional amendment.

While Bombeck traveled the country championing equal rights, my mother, with three biological children and three foster children, traversed our neighborhood, volunteering for the 1980 census. I’d like to think they shared a certain grit. Fortitude seemed part of their DNA, and both Erma and my mother used their talents to make a difference in their respective communities.

I, too, yearn to make a difference in my community, and like Erma my medium is newspaper columns. As the opinion editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, I write the stories of our city through the lens of everyday people. I tie personal experience to current events, hoping readers will empathize, relate and care. I want our children to know where they come from, and these stories, like my mother’s, matter.

When my mom died, the photo of the smashed-up Toyota she was a passenger in made the front page of our local newspaper. Her story had been reduced to a cutline — just her name mentioned in the caption under the photo used to illustrate the dangers of ice on winter highways. Mom deserved better, and in some ways Erma’s columns gave her story — the story of every ordinary woman — a voice.

Erma’s columns detailed the struggles of motherhood in her generation, and she did it with wit, substance and the sense that we were in this together. Before “mommy bloggers” there was Erma. She wrote about defrosting frozen ground beef under her arm for a last-minute dinner and about losing her glasses because she shoved them in a book somewhere to mark the page. I could see my mother in these details, and I could also see myself. That was the magic. We all roared with laughter because we could relate. Erma’s humor wasn’t the biting sarcasm of today’s social media. Erma’s humor had heart. Her columns about loving her stepfather and losing a child late in pregnancy are gut-wrenching, poignant and brave.

Most important, her words offered the belonging I so craved. We’re in this world together, after all, and Erma Bombeck knew exactly what that meant.

— Bonnie Jean Feldkamp 

Bonnie Jean Feldkamp's award-winning syndicated columns are distributed in newspapers across the United States via Creators Syndicate. Her writing ties personal experience to current events to help readers empathize, relate and care. She’s been writing, publishing and mentoring writers for more than 20 years. Feldkamp is the former community engagement and opinion editor for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Louisville Courier-Journal as well as the former media director for the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. Her TEDx Talk “Contempt Versus Connection in Online Communication” aims to encourage productive discourse and foster commentary with compassion. She has taught workshops at the Writer's Digest annual conference, Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop and various universities.