Barbara Mellen with a photo of her daughter, Jennifer: "I knew right away, this is what I had been waiting for."

my life than when I was pregnant," she
says.
Jennifer Lynn was born June 9, 1972.
"I knew right away, this is what I had been
waiting for," Mrs. Mellen says.
Jennifer was an easygoing baby. Like
her mother, she was a night owl. She liked
to stay up late, then sleep until 11 a.m.
As Jennifer grew, Barbara watched her
daughter become strong and strong-willed.
"By the time she was 12, she was a fem-
inist and she was outspoken," Mrs. Mellen
says. Jennifer could barely tolerate hear-
ing men address women as "honey" and
"sweetie," and she wouldn't tolerate par-
ents speaking harshly to their children.
When still a girl, she saw a mother

screaming at her son; Jennifer marched
over, reprimanded the woman and told
her, "If you ever do that again, I'm going
to call social services."
"She stood for what she believed in,"
Mrs. Mellen says. "I was proud of her for
that."
Jennifer was passionate about many
things — social justice, her boyfriends
(which she had consistently from the time
she was 14) and above all, Israel.
Jennifer visited Israel twice. The first
trip was with her parents, the next with
a youth group. During that second trip,
when Jennifer was 17, she became ill with
chicken pox.
"I told her to come home right away,"

Mrs. Mellen says. "But she would have
none of that."
What Jennifer did while sick Mrs.
Mellen recalls as both poignant and power-
ful: Her teen-age daughter began caring
for herself the way her mother would. She
went to admire the art in the hotel lobby
and she drank cup after cup of tea.
"She was learning how to incorporate
another person within herself," Mrs.
Mellen says. "She was doing the things
she thought I would tell her to do, and then
she didn't feel so alone."
After graduating from Andover High
School, Jennifer attended U-M. She was
happy there, though she liked keeping
close to home, too.

She moved from her room upstairs in
the Mellen house to one on the lower level,
where she could play her music as loud as
she liked. On the wall she hung a picture,
still there, of two girls, one with dark hair
and one blonde; it reminded Jennifer of
herself and a best friend. She designed the
canopy for her bed, for which she selected
a pink, ruffled, very feminine spread. She
kept a few stuffed animals on her bed, and
lace potpourri sachets, in the shapes of
bears, on her dresser.
Jennifer had so many plans, her mother
says.
For a while she wanted to be a rabbi.

BARBARA'S STORY page 34

