Reflections on Motherhood, Perfection and Forgiveness

As some of you know I took an emotional plunge this spring and entered my novel, now in its 8th revision and NOT really ready for pitching to an editor, in Amazon's Amazing Breakthrough Novel Contest. Theoretically they accept 10,000 entries though they don't say how many actually enter.

The first phase eliminates all but 2,000 entries. The second phase eliminates all but 500. This is where my novel landed and I was pleasantly surprised. True confessions---I wanted to get some feedback from total strangers, specifically to the plot's potential and generally to my writing...which I know is amateurish at best. My writing is, however, improving and I do see light at the end of the endless tunnel.

Anyway, one thing this little exercise taught me was the power of the written word to reach people in ways I never expected. My novel contains a fair amount of pretty uncomfortable issues--alcoholism, child abandonment, homosexuality and incest. I did not set out to address these issues --my characters took me there and I did not think it fair to deny them their soap box. You might think this is strange but if you are a writer you will have a better understanding of this phenomenon.

The biggest reaction came to the alcohol and incest issues--mainly because the excerpt printed on Amazon contained such scenes. I was taken aback by how many persons have had experience with both of these human problems.

So, what is motherhood? And more importantly, how does it fail those it is supposed to nurture? There are as many answers to these two questions as there are mothers and children.

The bottom line is that even mothers, human ones that is, are human--yes, children, I hate to be the one to reveal such an overwhelming truth, but we are. This is not to say I am excusing what horrific or less than horrific failings most of us have as mothers--it is to say we need you to forgive us.

We need our children (and this can be extended to the most generic relationships) to accept us for what we are, make peace with us, and move on.

I think this is the essence of Mother's Day.

As a florist, which I was for 35 years, Mother's Day is by far the biggest holiday. Everyone has a mother. Children may only sneak out from under the woodwork on the second Sunday of every May--but they do sneak out. Let's be honest, some are driven by social pressure more than anything else. And, these were the customers who, I can admit now being retired, as a florist I looked upon with no small amount of skepticism.

But much of the country, in a collective quest for inner calm, recognizes their mothers and Mother's Day regularly and with a sense of compassion and affection and perhaps only a pinch of resentment over the eighteen or so years of putting up with our shortcomings.

I am not saying go out and buy your mother flowers, although that would help out the few remaining shop owners I knew. What I am saying is, if you feel that pinch (or more) of resentment, take a good hard look at it. You'll have to look inside to find its source and when you do, toss a rock at it. Surely, as your mother's child, you're perfect and will not miss your mark.

Then, when you feel a little better take another look inside. You might just find something about yourself that isn't so perfect either--you have no idea how it got there, but it did.

Then tell yourself that's okay. "If it's okay for Mom to be imperfect maybe its okay for me too."

And before you move on with the rest of your day, pick up one more rock, maybe a little larger this time, and kill two birds with it...the ones named 'Mom's Mistakes' and 'My Mistakes.'

Happy Mother's Day!

Monday Musings--Favorite Shoes

Since today is Monday, and not everyone is ready to jump right in to the work week on Mondays, I thought I would pose an exercise that might humor us, divert us from the news of the day, or perhaps give pause for reflection.

My question is: What is your favorite pair of shoes?

It is a fairly open ended question. They can be any pair you have owned but, as in my case, not necessarily have worn. They can be your ballet shoes when you were five years old, your Wellingtons, your saddle shoes (some might be dating ourselves here), your riding boots or whatever else you choose.

Then, tell us the story. If they are your favorite shoes, surely there is one.
Here is mine:

Grandma's Booties

I had two grandma's. Some people have none, some have half a dozen. I had two and my favorite one was Grandma Hilvers, my mother's mother. She lived in the same clapboard house on the first rise west of the Mississippi, where my mother grew up, in Dubuque Iowa.

Allow me to divert a minute. Two weeks ago, one of my brothers queried the rest of the family as to whether they remembered where that house was. Seems he recently met someone at work who hailed from Dubuque and the question arose. No one could come up with the answer despite spending at least a dozen summers there growing up. Two hours later the answer just popped into my head. Go figure. Hadn't written that address on an envelope in probably thirty years.

1460 Dodge Street, now cemented over by Highway 20 which runs east to Chicago and west through cities I recognized like Sioux City, Casper, Cody, Boise and stops at the Pacific Ocean in Yaquina Bay, Oregon...not far from Portland. I have a dear friend in Portland, have never been there, might follow Highway 20 in its entirety some day.

Anyway, the Hilvers family was basically impoverished. They didn't see it as a bad thing, but compared to my father's childhood with country clubs and fancy parties, the Hilvers' humble lifestyle with two entire families, grandparents, parents, and three kids, crammed into three bedrooms was substantially lower key. Every gift we received from Grandma and Grandpa Hilvers was endearingly hand-made including the booties I received when I was pregnant with my first daughter, Jennifer. They were so incredibly tiny I couldn't imagine they would ever fit a human, but they did.


And, as often happens with me, I lost track of them after our third daughter's first few months of life when I could no longer squeeze her tiny feet into the soft, cozy footware. I was sure I had packed them away but probably not as carefully as I should have, given their significance. My excuse was that I was a working mom, running my own flower business and raising three daughters, tending a husband, cooking, walking dogs, driving to soccer games and violin lessons, the whole nine yards.

When Jenny was a sophomore in college my husband and I decided expand our house, something we should have done years earlier but couldn't afford. To make a long story shorter many disasters befell us during this project including the wholesale deluge of our basement over our storage shelves in late September. I mean, we needed Noah's Ark just to navigate the waters that went straight from the grey, rain laden skies into our house with a force like Niagra Falls.

The clean-up process was a nightmare and, unfortunately, some of it was put off until after Christmas. The time frame for a florist from October through December 25 is hellacious.
So, in the calm of a dreary January Saturday I began to pull down the boxes of memories that still lay on the storage shelves. With trepidation I opened one, now slightly dusted with mold, to find layer upon layer of baby clothes, laundered, neatly folded and layered with tissue. Most of them were ruined, which broke my heart. But for some strange reason both Grandma Hilvers' baby booties and the christening gown she had hand sewn and embroidered, survived relatively unscathed.

You would have thought, for all the happy tears I shed, that I'd discovered a million dollars tucked away for a rainy day and then forgotten, when in fact it was a rainy day that had spared something that is worth a whole lot more.

If you have a pair of favorite shoes, tell us about them in the comment area of my blog.
I'd love to read about them!