Remembering When...

Childhood is over way too fast, isn't it? This holiday season is bringing home to me those childhood memories with my mother, and my own relationship with my daughters; the youngest on the verge of adulthood in age, still a child in many ways.

When we share ~ that is poetry in the prose of life. ~ Sigmund Freud.

This year is the first year I have put up a Christmas tree since my mother died suddenly a few years back. My dad passed away in 1997. I have been orphaned pretty much for a few years now. All my sisters live away; I miss them, and I hope to visit them more often now that a financial obligation will finally be over and I will have more money available for perhaps traveling.

All my years of growing up with 2 brothers and 3 other sisters, we never failed to have Thanksgiving or Christmas despite the hardship it often was financially. Mom was a stay-at-home mother, a full time job with 6 rugrats, and my dad the sole breadwinner.  Mom was the one who did all the technical stuff of putting together the bicycles, wiring lamps, putting the sprocket chain on the bicycle or fixing the brakes on it, and whatever else needed done; she was the chief mechanic and bottle washer.  Dad would just get toasty or lay out on the weekends binging with his buddies after working all week; not that he was a bad father per se, just had a substance abuse problem. 

I realized when I got to be an adult just how much my mother really did for us. She was a seamstress sewing us awesome clothes, nobody else had, one of a kind yet trendy, however she suffered physical and emotional abuse in her own personal life at those who professed to love her. I admire my mother's strength through her adversity growing up and then by the hand of my own father who was an alcoholic and abusive toward her at times.  I had a friend tell me just recently that she thought I was the strongest person she has ever known, I didn't know what to say except I felt humbled, and told her she should have met my mother and my father, both of whom raised me bohemian, but I turned out okay.

This year, I pulled out the box of ornaments my mother had lovingly packed away that she had fully expected would be there for her when Christmas rolled back around, but instead she was called back home suddenly, which was a devastating loss for all of us, and her collection of ornaments and decorations were given to me months afterward.  She had nothing of any great material value, neither did my father, but each of them left me with values and strength.  I often wonder if my girls could say that about me.  Time will tell. 

Each year my mother's tree was stunning. She worked for hours and hours on it. She never had a prelit tree but you wouldn't know it. Every branch was beautifully lit and decorated with all her keepsake ornaments. It has taken me three years after her death to be able to open that crate of ornaments and this year "her little Rosebud" (her great granddaughter, my granddaughter Isabella Rose) and I decorated a tree in her honor.  The time was right and it felt good. This year I might be low in money due to having to pay off a financial burden, I'm no stranger to poor, but I feel rich in spirit and thankful, and of course I have the most beautiful tree ever thanks to my mother!