Remembering My Mother on This Mother's Day

This year on Mother's Day I won't have my mother with me.  It's the first time in my 56 years of living that she won't be living.  Mother's Day has always centered around my mother and my mother-in-law.  Treating them to lunch and presents.  And although I am a mother, myself, I have always considered the holiday to be for them, to honor them.  So this Mother's Day I painted  something for both my sister and my cousin (Her mother was my mother's sister and passed away one month after my mother did.).  You see, there was this old photo that my sister gave me when one of my children was getting married and I was so stressed out over the planning phase of it.  The photo came in the mail with a little note attached that said, "Hope this makes you smile.  P.S. I think our mother had the best figure!).  And that little photograph did make me smile.  After my mother's death, I pulled it out and remembered just when it was taken.  When I was a little girl, my mom and I used to visit her two sisters in Texas and in the summertime we would always make a trip to the beach in Galveston.  That's where the picture was taken.

The more I looked at this picture the more I wanted to do something special with it.  So I decided to watercolor my version of it and frame one for all of us.

There are other old photos that also make me smile and I am attempting to make my way through painting some of them too.  This year on Mother's Day I want to remember the mother of my childhood.  The mother who drove the white Pontiac that had no console in the middle so I could lay my head in her lap on the way home from church.  The one who never had much in her purse but always seemed to have sticks of Wrigley's Doublemint Chewing Gum in there. Of which she only chewed one half a piece at a time.  The mother who, as the only child at home, I asked to please adopt a little Chinese girl and in the next breath begged her to buy a pair of patent leather go-go boots for herself and dye her hair black because I thought, “How cool would that be?!”  The mother who allowed me to have a little dog when she really wasn't a pet person and he peed on her bedspread quite regularly.  The mother who made and taught me how to make the best stove-top popcorn you've ever tasted, that we sat eating at the kitchen bar out of a huge plastic bowl for dinner. The one who would put out bird feed every day so she could sit in front of the glass door in the afternoons to watch them fly in while drinking a hot cup of coffee.  Coffee, which she introduced me to at an early age by giving me coffee milk with cold homemade biscuits. The one who had the greenest thumb of anybody I know; who could take a twig and turn it into a beautiful, thriving plant.  Who got the greatest joy out of working in her yard from daylight until dark most days. 

I want to remember the mother who often sacrificed to give me things I wanted. The one who took me back-to-school clothes shopping and let me try on all the cute clothes and then surprised me by telling me I could get all of them. The one who always got me what was on my Christmas list...and more.  And taught me who Bing Crosby was whenever she played his White Christmas album each Christmas season while I helped her make Christmas candy. The one who gave me the wedding of my dreams on what I thought was a huge budget but now know was a shoestring one.  The one who taught me to care more for others than myself and include those who were lonely or had no one.  And last, but certainly not least, the mother who took my to church and taught me about Jesus and reading my Bible and praying.  Those things that now give me comfort, knowing that one day I will see her again.

Last year, as my mother and I were sitting in her living room visiting she suddenly gazed in the distance and said, "Oh, how I wish I could talk to my mother."  Her mother (my grandmother) passed away when I was still in my 20's and expecting my third child.  So, obviously, it has been many years since her death.  And I only thought I understood her longing to talk to her mother but I really didn't.  Not until now whenever I so desperately wish for just one more conversation that I cannot have here on this Earth.  Simply put, I miss my mother and this Mother's Day, I choose to remember the mother of my childhood.  The one in the photograph.  With the black hair and swimsuit, showing off her cute little figure.  That's the mother I'm going to remember this year.