Cover photo from miriamswords.com.

By Allison Maass/Murphy News Service

Mary Lou Judd Carpenter has had a busy life, what with raising her kids, serving on city commissions, volunteering for her church and city, publishing a book, creating support groups for friends and traveling.

“I think of myself as an old wisdom figure,” Carpenter said. “My life long learnings have been not so much in books as in lived in experiences, but I think that is what is so often missing in our culture.”

Carpenter moved to Edina in 1968 and was active in the community right away. She was on Edina’s first Human Rights Commission, was involved in the Junior League, which taught her a lot about the community, and was very influential and active in bringing the A Better Chance (ABC) program to the city.

The ABC program was a national effort to provide children in poverty and violent areas with better high school educations and college preparation, Carpenter said. It started out with eight boys in a house and the program was completely community supported.

“We worked really hard to get the churches to support it and raise the money and buy the house,” Carpenter said. “There have been a number of very successful students that wouldn’t have had those opportunities, and that was before government was doing anything in those situations.”

For Edina, Carpenter has also been involved in a program called Color Me Mankind, has managed a school board election and was involved in the PTA while her children were in school, she said.

“That was what we grew up seeing. If you were sick your mom took you to the committee meeting at somebody’s house,” her daughter, Cindy Carpenter, said. “It role-modeled to me that women had important contributions to make that weren’t necessarily in the professional workforce.”

“I have always been interested in citizenship and bettering the world because that was my parents’ passion,” Carpenter said.

Carpenter is the daughter of Walter Judd, who was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for Minnesota’s 5th District for 20 years. Before she was born, her father was a missionary in China, and when she was 8, her parents moved back to China where her father was a missionary physician. A year after moving to China the communists attacked the town she was living in and her mother, she and her one-day-old baby sister fled to another town, Carpenter said.

Carpenter’s family moved to New Jersey when she was 4 to live with her grandparents while her father stayed in China. In 1939 her mother convinced her father to move back to the United States where he took over a medical practice in Minneapolis.

Not long after Pearl Harbor was attacked, her father was “drafted” to run for Congress, and her family moved to Washington D.C. in 1943.

“That was a really interesting time to be growing up,” Carpenter said.

Carpenter attended a private Quaker school until her parents thought she was becoming too stuck up, so she was sent to public school her sophomore year, she said. She was a cheerleader, sang and played the piano in the talent show. Following in her mother’s footsteps, she attended Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

“I majored in political science because that’s what I knew from my lived experience at home,” Carpenter said, adding “I didn’t really want to learn. I just wanted to fit in and be invisible. I don’t think I took advantage of my education at all.”

She graduated as class president from Mount Holyoke in 1955, moved to New York and started a job with IBM, where she spent three months in a training program with one other woman and 30 men.

“When I finished, I bought into the cultural preference of that time of finding a nice man to marry and to raise good, intelligent children and support him. That was my mission,” Carpenter said. “Although my parents always said you can do anything you want if you work at it, and my college certainly promoted that, I just was more taken by the cultural message.”

So Carpenter said she found a “nice man” to marry when she was 23. He went to law school at the University of Michigan. She got a job with the university’s Institute of Social Research — and gave birth to a son.

After Carpenter’s husband graduated from law school they moved to the Twin Cities area and had two girls. After her youngest child went to college, Carpenter and her husband divorced. She said it was one of her toughest challenges she has had to face in her life.

“That was a hard time for me, but it taught me a huge amount about myself and about my immaturity and my imperfections,” Carpenter said.

Carpenter, post-divorce, sent out an email to 25 formerly married women, inviting them to a get-together of some sort, perhaps a potluck dinner. She said some people were shocked that she even knew that many formerly married women.

“We would then have a chance to talk about things you don’t talk about with your married friends because it sounds like you’re whining, which you are,” Carpenter said.

They called the group the First Nighters because they would meet on the first night of the month, and when somebody got remarried they had to leave the group. Now they still meet up and take trips together.

“We have supported people leaving life and children coming into live,” Carpenter said. “It has been like an unrelated family.”

Another support group Carpenter started was for her friends who had started to show signs of dementia. She gathered a group of people who were close to her friends and invited someone from the Alzheimer’s Association to talk about the experiences everyone had with dementia.

“I say I specialize in making small groups to support people,” Carpenter said.

And Gloria Wallace, a friend of Carpenter’s for many years, agreed that creating specialty groups for people is one of Carpenter’s specialties.

“She is the kind of person who sees a need and fulfills it,” Wallace said.

Carpenter also did a lot of volunteer work and got a job at the Plymouth Congregational Church in pastoral care.

“I did a lot of personal work during that time to try and understand some of differences we had,” Carpenter said. “That really shifted me to instead of being organized and a leader and efficient and all of that, to more intense interest in personal relationships and what shapes people and what kind of experiences you have in our growing up years and how you bring those forward in your life.”

Three years after starting her new job, Carpenter decided she wanted to explore the world. She left her paid job to travel. She has been to all seven continents over the last 25 years.

“It was mainly to learn about other cultures,” Carpenter said.

On one of Carpenter’s first trips she went with a spiritual formation training group to India, Sri Lanka and Nepal for five weeks. They didn’t go as tourists though, “but to understand how those cultures understand who God to be,” she said.

“I am gutsy and I take risks, which sometimes people in my family are uncomfortable with but I didn’t grow up with a lot of fear,” Carpenter said.

Carpenter described herself as a risk taker, but her daughter Cindy said she would more describe her mother as more “ahead in her time in a number of fronts. I don’t know if that is as much about risk as it is pushing forward.”

“She doesn’t hide from life,” Cindy said.

When Carpenter’s aging parents began to need more attention and ended up in a life-care community outside of Washington D.C, she started visiting them to help out every month for four years before their deaths in 1994.

That is when Carpenter was bequeathed all of her mother’s letters.

The letters sat in Carpenters house for 10 years before her therapist asked her what it was like for her living in China, and she said she didn’t know. So she started to read her mother’s letters.

“She wrote so beautifully and so much truth, which most women never said,” Carpenter said.

And when Carpenter’s spiritual director asked her if there was any unfinished business in her life, she told him she had her mother’s letters that she thought were very important that she wanted to do something with. Finally after asking her several times he got her in contact with his sister who could help Carpenter publish the letters.

There were more than 2,000 letters for Carpenter to read through. Daughter Cindy helped her read all of the letters and make initial cuts.

“What I did in the beginning was help her recognize what was important and fun for the family to know and what would be of general interest,” Cindy said.

After eight years and many other helping hands, “Miriam’s Letters” was finally published in 2013. Carpenter has sold a little more than 1,000 copies — and there are 11 copies in the Hennepin County Library.

“I think it is probably the most important thing for me that I have done in my life,” Carpenter said. “I think my children have survived their parents quite well and I am proud of them and I really enjoy them, but they are on their own and this is a very satisfying thing to look back on.”

Today Carpenter still travels, though she does less of it. She is still involved with her church and goes to the Guthrie Theatre and Minnesota Symphony, she said.

“I take advantage of a lot of cultural stuff that I didn’t fully appreciate when I was sort of trying to save the world myself,” Carpenter said.

And if there was one lesson daughter Cindy has learned from her mother “it was to be authentic to yourself and to always be alert to give to others,” she said.

“I don’t know everything and I make mistakes still, but I do have some life wisdom and I am interested in sharing it even though some people aren’t interested in hearing it,” Carpenter said. “It’s a really good time for me because I can be totally who I want to be and I don’t have to meet anyone else’s expectations.

Reporter Allison Maass is studying Journalism at the University of Minnesota.