I am remembering my Mom today with gratitude for her enduring love.
Mother's Day for me this year is a glorious day of celebration. This is the 2nd Mother's Day without my Mom and I am now able to celebrate my mother, my grandmother, my daughters who are mothers, and indeed my own motherhood of my four wonderful children.
Here is an excerpt from the tribute I am writing for my Mom. It remains unfinished, a work in progress:
My Mom learned from her mother practical and industrious skills and under her tutelage became a fine seamstress whose creativity was often displayed in the curtains adorning the windows of her childhood home and on the pretty floral patterned slipcovers that lengthened the life of the chairs on the sunporch. My mother and hers each had an eye for beauty and a flair and finesse for transforming a simple space into a lovely, pleasingly homey and welcoming place with home decorating. Like fine threads of a beautifully woven fabric, every fibre of my mother’s being was intertwined with her mother, as was mine with hers. They were each made of the same fine cloth, basic and durable like linen and as exquisitely delicate as handspun silk. I often see myself in each of them, in their shadows, in photographs gracing the wall, and in memories like emotionally moving pictures, and I like to imagine I have been fairly fashioned similarly in these familiar fine fabrics of theirs.
As a child I had loved to inspect the contents of my Nanny’s endlessly interesting and ever-bulging triple dresser that was always chock full of birthday and Christmas gifts, brightly coloured trinkets bought while on her notorious shopping excursions at Parkway Plaza, and scores of hand-knitted slippers in a wide array of colours that would surely rival Joseph’s coat, and an endless supply of cotton tea towels, again in every pastel of the rainbow, not to mention, from my childhood recollection, millions of Miraculous Medals – ever practical and whimsical at once was she - and yet I thought even then when I was still so young, it was practically impossible that anyone could be so completely rich as was my Nanny! She was always accumulating things, adding to her wooden chest to ensure for her own happiness and peace of mind that she was ever well-prepared to give. Generosity and thoughtfulness could have rightly been Nanny’s middle names.
In my mother’s burgeoning closet I found endless treasures, in her elegant scarves and lacy slips and countless classic purses and hats of all shapes and sizes and fancy gloves and lipsticks in every shade of roses that made dress-up for the-little-girl-in-me a near spiritual experience when magically elevated by stepping into the thrill of my mother’s high heeled shoes where I would hobble toward the full length mirror hiding behind the door just waiting to reveal the princess in the looking glass looking back at me and I would be in that moment looking exactly like my fairy-tale Mom!
My mother’s every belonging held for me a promise that one day I would grow to become a beautiful and sophisticated Lady of Enchantment just like her. Oh how she would laugh at my description now when written in a place of such sweet sentiment that only time and longing will kindly humour, when I had so often in my youth, as a rebellious teenager looking for an idol, given her the false impression that I was never going to be like her! Ah, but the arrogance of youth fast fades and we quickly become the parents we rail against when adulthood replaces one’s aimless search for our own identity in places where don’t we don’t belong and when those once idealized people and experiences send us running back to the security of our mother’s endlessly open, ever wise and all forgiving arms.
After a moment spent comfortable in the protection and acceptance of her love, my mother wisely sent me out into the world believing she had provided the best foundation for me to explore my own path to find my truest self where I would discover my own potential. Slowly but surely I realized that the image of my mother is like a shroud of history placed not only on the face looking at me in the mirror, not only in the way my eyes see the world through hers, but in the soul I recognize when peering deep within. With and without my desire or permission life moved me on and eventually maturity claimed me for its own while refining me with inevitable truths that the aging woman in me has finally found blossoming in my life.
Gratefully I had lots of time to express to my mother the fruits of my maturity when she was living. She knew and understood so precisely the journey of my heart and soul because she had gone through many of the same experiences herself as had her mother when they were both living, and she knew as I know that age is never a requisite for wisdom and nor are any of us guaranteed that life will wait for us to catch up to the truths about ourselves and one another that we need to know, so luckily for us life cooperated. It gives my heart great peace to know that she knew long ago, as do I, that there is no other I would rather resemble than my precious mother.
I also know now that no matter how much I loved to pretend as a little girl in my mother’s room among her many treasures, never was I in my wildest imaginings a seamstress as was my mother and hers. They each made especially for me these wonderfully gifted garments that I wear today, painstakingly sewn over a lifetime with the golden ribbons of their love and guidance, which is their inheritance from mother to daughter, from my mother to me, and from me to mine, and they to theirs. . . The threads of our lives entwined for all time.
Happy Mother's Day!;-)
Lovingly,
Cath1 xo