![]() ![]() This desire to clasp him in unending maternal embrace may have accounted for her refusal to surrender her tight control of the family’s considerable wealth. He was her only son, and she adored him but seemed determined to keep him her boy forever. ![]() Sara cast an authoritative shadow over household operations, child rearing, and, worst of all, over Franklin. It was a marriage under constant surveillance by Franklin’s mother, the omnipresent Sara Delano, a live-in mother-in-law out of a Gothic soap opera. There had been six pregnancies in the marriage’s first twelve years sex, she later told her daughter Anna, was an ordeal to be borne. Until then she had been bound to a stifling marriage in which her life was spent in unobtrusively loyal service to Franklin’s gaudy ambition and in childbearing. ![]() Yet as her subsequent history persuasively testifies, it was also her liberating moment, a life-changing event that opened a world of glorious possibilities for a woman not too timid to explore them. Long afterward, Eleanor told her friend Joseph Lash that the discovery was devastating, that the bottom seemed to have dropped out of her life. In 1918, during the fourteenth year of their marriage, Eleanor Roosevelt, age thirty-three, discovered that Franklin, age thirty-six, was in love with her young social secretary, Lucy Mercer. ![]() President Franklin Delano Roosevelt with his mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, and his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, Hyde Park, New York, November 1940 ![]()
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