Many daughters, as children, want to be like their mother. Then those rebellious teenage years arrive, and our quest for independence often make us vow to not be like our mother.
That was true for me. Although I always respected and loved my mother, to me, she was so old-fashioned. At times, to me, she seemed cold and didn’t understand.
“Clean your room,” she would tell me; usually adding, “I am never going to visit you when you get out on your own, because I wouldn’t be able to get in the door.”
At the time I was hurt by those statements, even though she was right. My room was always a disaster. Clean clothes in one pile, dirty in another, and other clutter strewn around.
Of course, she did come to visit me when I was out on my own. I always liked it best when I knew she was coming so I could clean up the place. As I look around my house in the present time, I realize that her prediction was correct. Not all the time. I do make the effort and clean the clutter, but I admit at times it does pile up beyond what it should.
Now that I am older, and I have been missing my mother for almost 30 years, I think back to those sometimes stormy teen years, I realize how trivial those disagreements were. When my own children where in their teen years, I sometimes repeated a lot of what my mother said to me during the same time.
The things I do are often the way my mother did them. Making gravy, for example. Oh, I don’t have all of her cooking magic ways. I never saw her follow recipes, and I have no recipes from her. She could turn out a batch of raised bread, along with a side of some type of sweet roll or donuts, in the blink of an eye. Somehow she just knew what to do by eyeing it, and feeling how the dough should feel.
I have never had the green thumb that she did, with flowers, garden and especially the raspberry patch out back of the shed. I enjoy puttering with these things but not with the gusto that she did. When my family was growing up, I had a large garden, and even a raspberry patch, but gradually I let that all slide as they were grown.
I never had a love or a way of tending chickens like she did. Gathering the eggs was part of my duty, and those noisy pecking birds scared me. To her, they were part of the farm. Chicks in the spring, eggs in the summer, and chicken for dinner in the fall and winter.
When I think of my mother, I remember her hands. They were always busy doing something, whether weeding the garden, shucking peas, snapping beans, knitting mittens, kneading bread or plucking feathers. When she was older, I noticed how twisted some of the knuckles were, a testament of her love for her family.
Now at my age, I realize I am my mother, and that is just fine with me. Not a day goes by without my missing her and all the things she taught me.
Proverbs 31:27-28 are fitting: “She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her.”
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