Mothers and Daughters

My dad and mom on their wedding day

Unless you live under a stump and never crawl out, you realize that this Sunday is Mother’s Day. It’s been 15 years since my mother passed away from breast cancer. Since she died I haven’t much liked Mother’s Day. Even though I am still a mother and have two wonderful adult kids of my own, all the ads telling us what to get for Mom always felt a little like a slap in the face, a reminder that my mother was gone. Over the ensuing years I was to find more and more reasons to dislike the commercialization of holidays and the unpleasant ongoing reminders from the advertising world of how much I have lost and how little my life resembles the perfect world their ads try to convince us we should strive for. But capitalism must go on, it seems, whether we want to participate or not. After all, we really can’t live under a stump.

This year there is a little campaign on Facebook to post photos of your mother in honor of Mother’s Day. Of course, I have no digital photos of my mom. She died long before I had a digital camera. But I found her and my dad’s wedding photo and scanned it into my computer. My parents were a very attractive couple.

I just got back yesterday from spending more than a week in Medford helping my youngest sister after she had some major surgery. It was nice to spend so much one-on-one time with her without tons of other things going on. I cooked, did a little cleaning, walked the dogs, planted her garden for her, and enjoyed her company and the warm sunshine and blue skies. Although she is almost 16 years younger than me, we have a good relationship and manage to have fun together, even when she’s recuperating.

In looking at the closeup of Mom today, I realize how very much my sister looks like her: she has her smile and square jawline, although she got Dad’s big eyes, a fact of which I am very envious. I can see my older sister in Mom, too, but not as much of myself. Maybe others see what I don’t; that’s often the case, in my experience. We don’t always see things when we’re too close.

Colleen, Shirley and me at the wedding of our brother's daughter

But looking at the photo of Mom and Dad on their wedding day put me into a reflective mood, thinking about who I am and how they both played such a huge role in the person I’ve become: a role both good and not always so good. Seeing how much my sisters look like my mom also helped me remember that she and Dad still live on through their children, grandchildren and their great-grandchildren. It’s a reminder that, though we all will die at some point, we leave behind parts of ourselves in those we love and we have some ability to influence how positive our impact has been. This helps me focus on gratitude instead of loss.

Me and my own daughter

I think of my mom often and still miss her, even after 15 years. Though their lives were often challenging, my parents loved each other very much and loved their six children as well as they were able. I am grateful for a family that is still strongly connected despite the number of miles that separate us. I am thankful for the blessings, gifts, talents and values that were passed down to me because of my family of origin, and I try to let go of the parts of my life that were less than idyllic. I hope I have been able to provide my children with at least as good a grounding as my parents gave me. But even if I’ve fallen short, I know they love me and will remember me with affection and appreciation just as I do my parents.

In Real Women, Real Wisdom: A Journey into the Feminine Soul, one of my authors, Barbara Underwood Scharff, writes a very moving tribute to her own mother and recalls the blessings of being a daughter and having a daughter. A very brief excerpt from her piece, Motherhood and Daughterhood: Love and Good-bye: "In the kinship of mothers and daughters, what we love is not to be fastened to this earth, but to be believed in. Love and good-bye. We will all someday vanish into the unreachable distance. It is in this mystery that each one of us will someday be entrusted to God in the place where we started and the place where we end."