Today’s Mother’s Day, and I’ve been thinking a lot about my own mother, who died going on ten years ago, when I was still far too young to appreciate her. Mom and I had a complicated relationship, but the older I get–and the further I get away from the more dysfunctional aspects of her life (time has a great way of sanding away the bad and leaving the good) the more I see the many gifts she gave me. Here are a few.
Gift: The knowledge that people are more important than money or things, and that family is everything. My mother’s greatest wish for my siblings and I was that we would stay close as we grew up. We all get along very well today, which I think she’d be happy to know.
Gift: Making do. No, better than making do–being truly content with what you have. My mom re-used everything, but not in a sloppy pack-rat kind of way (when she died, her home had remarkably little clutter for us to go through). She simply used everything within an inch of its life, and felt no need to rush out and buy knick-knacks or a new sofa or curtains in the latest style. I don’t ever remember feeling deprived, even though I was acutely aware that friends of mine had more toys and new clothes than I did. Sure, I would have loved a few more pair of acid-wash jeans in Junior High, but not always getting what I wanted did a lot to help me be more appreciative and content with whatever straws I draw in life now. And it’s the memory of her resourcefulness that makes me feel a huge twinge of conscience whenever I’m being wasteful or lose perspective on how very materially blessed I am.
Gift: She wasn’t small-minded. My mom wasn’t college-educated, and she didn’t hang out with an artsy or intellectual bunch. Yet I grew up on a media diet of classical music, Harry Chapin and Fiddler on the Roof, NOVA and Masterpiece Theatre, Sesame Street and Peter and the Wolf in addition to the piles of books we brought home from the library. Mom didn’t read celebrity magazines or tabloids or watch vapid morning shows…ever. We had conversations about history, music, religion. I think my mom recognized that life was too short–and the possibilities for learning important things too endless–to spend much time indulging in petty entertainment, a lesson I would do well to remember more often.
Gift: Body-un-consciousness. My mom never dieted. She never commented on the size of her thighs or butt. More important, she didn’t comment on the way other women dressed or did their hair, or make remarks about my friends’ looks. She didn’t force me to clean my plate or hover over me to make sure I didn’t eat too much junk. She kept the house fairly free of unhealthy food (we weren’t allowed to have sugar cereal, for example) but wasn’t about to tell me how to spend my own money if I wanted to go to the corner store for Little Debbies. As a result I grew up with a remarkable absence of body-image issues. I’m not going to say I never moaned over my flat chest when I was a teen, or that nowadays I don’t notice that everything’s heading southward, but I feel like I’m able to notice these things without letting them take over my life. In fact, I wrote an essay about her comfort in her own skin, which I’ll put up in a separate post.
What gifts did your mother pass on that helped make you who you are today?
These are some lovely and important gifts and after reading your essay I think you are a very generous given everything you went through with your mother. My mom was a similarly difficult person (although her demon was severe depression) and I very much relate to the idea that as I get farther from her death, the more I’m able to appreciate what she did do as opposed to what she didn’t. Like you, I prefer to look back for happy childhood memories as opposed to thinking to hard about what my mom was like at the end of her life.
I think that the thing I cherish most from my mother is the importance of seeing and enjoying beauty everywhere. My mother and I were often in the car together and she was famous for interrupting me mid-sentence and saying “Oh Mara LOOK!” because she had seen some gorgeous flower by the side of the road or the light had changed outside the window. Of course she was usually driving when this happened and would often swerve into the shoulder. But we never had an accident and I like to think that I have that same capacity for observation and moments of quiet joy because she taught it to me.
This is a lovely post and the essay you link to is very powerful.
This and the essay you linked to are lovely. Thank you so much for sharing them.
I am so sorry you lost your Mother so young. The gifts she shared with you are inspirational to me… I hope you had a good Mother’s Day.
Steph