The Mom Who Was Magic
Here's to all moms who are magic everywhere. You may not know you are magic, but you are.
My own mom has been gone seven years now and although she and I certainly had our less than magic moments there are certain things about my mom that will always remain as magic in me.
My mother had one of those lives that turned on a pivotal moment and from that moment on nothing was as she thought it would be. Her heart was broken in so many places she wasn't at all sure how to put it all back together but she did. Within the same year she was told her sweetheart was not allowed to marry her because he was the nephew of a Catholic Cardinal and she was a protestant, her father who was her personal hero and number one fan up to that point left her mother and the family to move in with his new secretary and girlfriend, never to be seen by them again (he died suddenly several years later) and she had to leave halfway through her freshman year of college at the dream university she had studied for years to get into because her bereft and now bankrupt mother needed her at home (refer back to father leaving family....)
My mother met my father a few years later (people still referred to it as a rebound), married quickly and I was born exactly nine months and one day later (a fact my grandmother never quite got over!) She was 21.
My own dad left when I was 9 and my mother was a single mother through most of the sixties. She was tough, she was scared, she worked her buns off and she made sure we were 'well brought up' and educated. My mother was a small woman but you didn't mess with her. When she was angry mountains shook, oceans trembled and volcanoes stirred. We tried to hide. Sometimes that worked, mostly it didn't.
When my mother was good, though, she was the best. She read us stories endlessly and told us stories of her own growing up, her family, her dreams....after my dad left she had boxes of memorabilia she would pull out of the closet and we knew well the stories and dreams of her real first love, her father whom we would never meet and our own father's family. She always wanted to be a writer but never sat down to do it. She was too busy working, too busy taking care of a family, too busy volunteering throughout the community but the stories still came out.
After my mother died I knew I wanted this little white vase. My mother broke her leg in a toboggan run when she was twelve, the story goes. A young man brought her this vase with violets in it and she kept it by her bedside. A family friend came by for a visit with her son, one of my mom's best friends, and upon seeing the vase and the flowers and getting the scoop she turned to her son and growled, "Donald, are you a man or a mouse?" She cuffed his ear and the two left. About a half hour later Donald reappeared with a puzzle which he shoved onto the table. "Here," he said. "My mom wants you to have this." Don and my mom remained friends all her life and I can still hear them laughing uproariously every time I look at this vase. She put violets in it every year and it epitomizes something about my mother for me.
The book is one I just found used and bought at Amazon. I am so excited to find this lovely, wonderful book. In my family we were huge Paul Gallico fans. We loved "Thomasina" and "The Silent Miaow" the best and when my mother found this book in the library I must have been around 14 and my sister 11. We all wanted to read it first so she decided to read it aloud to us. It is the most wonderful, magical story and one of my favorite memories of my mother, my sister and me. We were all simply transfixed by this book and if memory serves me we actually read it aloud more than once. My sister was so excited that I had found this book that she was going to try and find another. We were way too old in today's world for reading aloud but for us it was a truly magical family moment in a time of political unrest and turmoil.
The book just arrived....in time for Mother's Day!
When I look at this vase and this book I can remember the magic that was my mother and marvel at the life she made in spite of all her brokenness and all her illness. She was diagnosed at 42 with a vigorous and life threatening cancer which she barely survived but then continued to thrive for another 25 years. She was quite a lady. Thanks, mom, for all you gave me. I haven't forgotten....
