Tag Archive for: Mother

My Mother’s Slippers

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My Mother’s Slippers by Debra H. Goldstein (This is a reprint that I like to run every November – but even after ten years, I still haven’t gone through all the slippers)

At this time of year, I think about my mother. She was a driving force in my life until her unexpected death in 2014. There are still times when I want to pick up the phone and share good news with her or ask for her advice, but I can’t. What I can do is keep a part of her with me – her slippers.

Not the pair she wore, but one of twenty or thirty pairs of the identical slippers that she hoarded. My mother was an atypical hoarder. Everything in her house was always perfectly in place and her kitchen floor was so clean that one could eat off of it. Newspapers and magazines were thrown out once read; finished books, except for ones I wrote, were loaned to friends, or donated; and clothes were stylish but took up no more than a closet.

Her hoarding fetish involved shoes. She loved them. Because she had a hard to fit foot (super narrow and only a six or six and one-half), if she found a pair of shoes to fit, she bought them — in every color. If she found something she loved was going to be discontinued, she stocked up on them. The thing about my mother was that she wore all of those shoes. Each one matched an outfit or a mood and while she kept them carefully boxed on shelves in her closet, she believed in wearing and enjoying them.

After she died, my sister and I relished the memory of her cute outfits and her shoes. I was only saddened by the fact that while we had the same shoe size, our feet were just different enough that the last that fit her didn’t work for me. What did work were her slippers. She had found a pair of step-in flower-patterned slippers that she loved because they were narrow enough to stay on and soft enough not to rub her foot. She wore that particular brand for years and when she discovered they were being discontinued, she bought up every pair she could find. When she passed away, there were twenty plus pairs that had never been worn. I tried one on and they were perfect. Although I didn’t take them all, I brought several pairs home with me. Seven years later, morning or night, I think of my mother as I step into a pair of her slippers. The wonderful thing is that I know she will still be with me for years to come because of the ones I have yet to begin using.

Do you have anything passed down from a parent that reminds you of them regularly or that you have that may give someone continuing memories of you?

What My Mother’s Day Will Be Like

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What My Mother’s
Day Will Be Like by Debra H. Goldstein

With Mother’s Day
only a few days away, I started thinking about what the day will be like for
me.
Usually, there are
flowers and cards from my husband and from two children and one grandchild. All
four children will send cards; the grandchildren are hit and miss in that
department. The four children will probably go in on a gift together, unless, for some reason, the
girls are mad at the boys and they decide to each send something from their
respective families (in the past the tizzy occurred the year after the boys
forgot to pay up or when one, who was responsible for ordering the gift, left it until
last minute and instead simply sent a Venmo message with money from all….not the
emotional gift the girls envisioned).
In the past,
there were telephone or facetime calls from each of the grandchildren with
cameo appearances by their parents. This year, that might be replaced with a
zoom meeting with all the families represented. That’s how we’ve been
celebrating birthdays, Passover, and just getting together for the past month.
All will warm my
heart, but they will be lacking one thing. My mother. Before I was a mother or
a grandmother, I was a daughter. My mother taught me how to be a mother and a grandmother
by example. She was loving, kind, wickedly funny, and somewhat opinionated, but
she doted on her children and grandchildren. Her greatest joy was the time she
spent with us. She’s been gone a little more than five years, but I still want
to pick up the telephone can call her when something good happens or when I
need a bit of cheering up. I miss having her as a sounding board. Most of all,
I miss the joy of her sharing in the life cycle events of our family.
So, this Mother’s
Day, I will joyfully celebrate with my children and grandchildren, but a part
of my heart will be missing my mother.

The Woman Who Danced Down the Grocery Aisle–by T.K. Thorne

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Writer, humanist,
          dog-mom, horse servant and cat-slave,
       Lover of solitude
          and the company of good friends,
        New places, new ideas
           and old wisdom.

The woman—dark hair with hints of auburn, the back scooped up in an invisible comb—dances down the aisle of the grocery store between the boxes of cereals and the baking goods. Pushing her cart, she sways to the store’s muzak, oblivious that the young girl beside her slows her pace and pretends to study the canned soups to put as much distance as possible between them.

I didn’t want anyone to suspect the dancing woman was my mother. It didn’t matter that I knew no one personally at the grocery store. Other than the two of us, the aisle was empty, at least for the moment. I held my breath, praying that the music would change to something less jaunty, and she would lose her enthusiasm for kicking out a leg or bouncing from foot to foot.

Even so, beneath my embarrassment, down in the dark, secret earth of girlhood, a seed now nestled—Would I ever dare to do such a thing—a brazen dance of joy in inappropriate places without thought of who was looking? Though my feet dragged, my heart glimpsed a possibility where one dared to be and to express that being.

In childhood, I dared this. I would sit in the middle of a busy sidewalk to examine a dandelion or an ant or cry in front of company to protest something I didn’t like. As a teen, I lost this freedom, submerging it to a craving to be like others, to be accepted, to be the daughter of someone who walked their cart down the grocery aisle. 

My mother addressed the world with humor (“I like to generalize without specific knowledge.”) and quiet wisdom. She was the fixer, whether it was “kissing better” a scraped knee or advising how to handle a frisky boyfriend. When her father died, she comforted me, not shedding a tear on her own behalf, at least in my presence. I can’t remember her being upset or even angry. How can that be? In my memory she danced through life, beaming light on all those in her path.

Between making meals, making dresses, and shuffling me to ballet classes, horseback riding classes, and the library, she did significant things for the community. Those things earned her posthumous recognition, but from my self-centered perception, they were peripheral to her main job of “mother.”

Now that I am well into adulthood, and she is gone, I realize that she did not have the perfect, carefree life of my assumptions. I can only imagine her pains, but I learned from her that pain does not have to define my life—that I get to do that. I can dance down the grocery aisle.

T.K. is a retired police captain who writes Books, which, like this blog, roam wherever her interest and imagination take her.  Want a heads up on news about her writing and adventures (and receive two free short stories)?–Click on image below. Thanks for stopping by!

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